Eating Down The Pantry

The HH went to Standard Baking bright and early on February 1st and bought me my all time favorite pastry, the pear frangipane tart. It was glorious!!! 🙂 Tea and pastries, they’re my favorite things to eat and drink on the planet earth. 

As I was lounging and enjoying my breakfast, I had an idea. 

Why not keep the one hundred dollar a month grocery budget thing going? But this time have it be more of an “eating down the pantry challenge”. 

With two caveats: I have $100 to buy groceries and eating out {not excessively} is allowed.

If it was just me, I’d have no problem with just eating from our pantry for the entire month. 

But I wanted the HH to play along because we both missed sitting down and eating together and going on our date days and well. This version just makes life less complicated. 

Also, it appears that my husband, without someone to put a plate in front of him everyday, or someone to give him a grocery list, had fun grocery shopping for himself while I was rendering lard and drinking apple peel tea last month. 

He bought creatine!? And sacks of chips, a bucket of pickles {!!}, a case of candy bars, Cocoa Puffs, Nilla wafers, salsa and weenies too. 

I also found a head of broccoli {I’ve never seen him even cook broccoli before!} HA HA HA. Husbands. They’re interesting, that’s for sure. 

My Plan Is Simple

• Use anything from the fridge, freezer and pantry
• $100 to spend on groceries in February
• Show you what meals we made/ate

If you ask me, this seems like a pretty easy challenge. Especially since last month I only had one hundred dollars to spend on groceries for the entire month and started with an empty pantry. 

This month, the end goal isn’t so much to spend as little as possible on groceries as it is to whittle down and use up what we already have in the cupboards/fridge/freezer. 

While I was walking around the kitchen snapping pictures on Sunday morning of what was in the cupboards, I found an expired sack of coconut. Whoops!

I wonder if there are any other foodstuffs in our midst that have expired? 

We have a tiny pantry {and store the overflow in the cupboard under the stairs} but still some things get missed.

Also, I’m sure you can tell from the pictures that I DO NOT organize anything before taking my pictures.

Real life! Imagine that. 😉

Below Are The Main Meals We Ate This Past Week 

Day 1 – I slept in, drank REAL TEA with milk and sugar and it was glorious!

Linner – Mel’s Drunken Beans with Cornbread

Side note: I’m not taking pictures of breakfast {toast/oatmeal or eggs} because we typically don’t eat breakfast together {unless it’s something exciting}.

Nor am I stopping to snap the HH’s snacks {ie: CHIPS, nuts, fruit, whatever because I am not the snack police.

Day 2 – Tuna Salad / Sandwich

The way I see it, why waste your calories on bread when you can eat a cookie instead? 

Day 3 – Leftover Drunken Beans

Day 4 – Grilled cheese and tomato soup {from the freezer section}.

Day 5 –  Chicken curry and rice {from the freezer}. 

So there you have it. What we’ve been eating this past week on our eating down the pantry challenge. 🙂 

We went to Costco and spent $56.13

And Market Basket. $11.97

This means we only have $31.90 left for the month. Yikes! I guess I better start cooking. 😉

So that’s what I’ll be doing this month, eating down the pantry. 

I hope you have a great weekend, I plan on making a loaf of Dutch oven cinnamon raisin bread and a batch of my favorite cookies. 

Peace Out.

~Mavis

P.S. We are down one sleeve of crackers thanks to Lucy. That will teach me to leave a box of crackers on the ground and go upstairs to fold laundry!!