Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Clean the cupboards challenge!

So. Several students are out of town this month and my rent is past due and I'm broke. So I thought what better time to try something I have always thought about? We're all always saying "there's nothing to eat" when, in fact, there is plenty of stuff in the cabinets which could be combined to make... well, something, I'm sure. So I'm going to see how long I can go without buying any groceries and just living off what's in my cabinet/fridge. I don't expect this will last more than a few days, lest I wind up malnourished and yet somehow ten pounds heavier from eating nothing but rice all day, but I'm up for the challenge. I did a video inventory of what I have:


 In addition to this, I forgot I have a can of tuna, a can of chickpeas, a very old can of lychees, and a bag of horrible-tasting chicken-flavored soy protein (I have no idea what made me buy it other than it was $1.99 for a huge bag, and I'm a cheap bastard so big bags of anything for $1.99 seem like a good idea to me fairly often). I'm hoping I run out of everything else before I get to this and just surrender and go to the store. Just a note that all of those containers in my freezer that I didn't mention are vegetable broth. Lots of vegetable broth. Maybe I'll make some soup.  I also have tomato plants in a pot on the stoop, as well as jalapeno, orange bell peppers, and various herbs. The jalapenos are ready to go (thought that's not terrible practical, I guess), and there are a couple of tomatoes which will be ripe in a couple of days. So there's that.

Stay tuned. I'll post whatever I come up with. I actually have no idea what to expect. I'm pretty creative, but that's not a lot to work with.

2 comments:

  1. My sister does this. She calls it "pantry week" (or sometimes "pantry month"). She gives herself an extremely small budget to shop with (because she has kids to feed and they won't always eat random experiments) and I suspect her ingredients run more to the frito pie type solutions rather than the dal and tofu concoctions I expect from you, but the idea is the same. I find this so inspiring. I try to do this sometimes. I decide to eat up all of the on-sale meat in the freezer, or stuff in my pantry, but I still buy fresh produce. Which, as it happens, is like half of my grocery budget. So it's not really that economical...

    How long are you going for? Seems to me you could eat for a week on what you just said pretty easily except for breakfast. Definitely gonna have to do some baking to make breakfast happen, or buy a carton of eggs...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yeah, I might need to buy eggs.I could even jimmy up some pancakes that way. I definitely need a packet of yeast to make bread, but I'm totally ok eating leftover lentils for breakfast.

    ReplyDelete