It's Time To Cook Out the Pantry Again
I was exhausted yesterday because I got brain-bombed by a strangely fascinating if overly long movie last night. (I think it would be a pretty good movie if the creator could kill a few darlings and take out at least 45 minutes... as it was I have no idea why I watched the full thing. It mind controlled me, I tell you.)
Anyhow in a fit of attempted virtue, or perhaps to avoid proper meal planning on this short week before Thanksgiving, we have cleaned out a pantry shelf. This shelf had a lot of oddball foods: Indian "simmer" sauces, a pho mix that I optimistically bought without reading the label to discover that it would be a pain to make, "snack" packs of almond butter that seemed like a good idea until I found out that I could not open them without a tool and then that they leaked oil everywhere -- not a win for a snack pack, insane amounts of pasta, rice cous cous which was also not as good an idea as it seems as it takes forever to cook, vegan raspberry jello, etc.
We ruthlessly threw out everything that had hit its "best by" that we didn't like, saved a few things that were only a little over and that we liked and still looked good, and planned our meals around that. It's going to be kind of strange.
The simmer sauces are good in concept but in practice we batch cook and end up making our own sauces, perhaps because it feels weird to buy four of them at a time? Anyhow if we get a hankering for something simmered in a sauce, we can buy it when we buy the tofu/meat/veggies/whatever.
Keepers:
Brown rice cereal (I like hot cereal some days, and it's relatively easy to make though I can't manage it on a bad fibro day. The packages claims that it can be made in the microwave are dirty dirty lies, but I'll forgive it.) Quinoa flake cereal (ingredient, cereal; actually I gave my box to my mom to use in a Thanksgiving recipe, but I'll probably get the rest back.) Buckwheat groats (another hot cereal item; I am sensing a theme here.) So, whole-grain foods seem to actually get used, usually once or twice a week when I cycle around to wanting them. Rice bran on the theory that it's a baking ingredient, though I should check the date on the box, and probably won't restock it unless I get a recipe that specifically calls for it.
So far Brad has made:
Vegan raspberry jello -- Not bad; it doesn't set up as firm as the animal-based product but it has a pleasant texture and it's not too sweet.
"Peanut" noodles -- frozen broccoli (we want to cycle our frozen veggies and I usually like to cook with fresh veggies), the pho kit, the annoying almond butter in tool-requiring packets, the tail end of a pretty darn old, though still good, tub of red miso, and a package of kelp noodles which are actually quite nice but I never seem to use so they just use up fridge space. Plus some store-bought chicken, since protein doesn't last long around here. This hodgepodge came out delicious and made four meals worth of food.
I will restock the red miso; it is a pantry ingredient. (I am finding that chickpea miso is very mild and makes a decent sub for white miso.) We had two bags of broccoli so we won't restock it.
Last week we used up some sweet red chile sauce by cooking some pastured pork ribs up with it. Yummy! I am going to try to use this approach for other condiments that are getting old; I have a tendency to like condiments too much, but only small amounts of them, so they pretty much have to be vinegar-based or otherwise inedible to mold for us to get through a full container. I'd like to start cycling things more aggressively.
Planned:
Macaroni tikka masala -- Macaroni cheese made from some quinoa/rice elbow noodles that I got to try and never tried, plus a tikka masala simmer sauce. We have some fresh cilantro in the crisper that should go well with this, and frozen spinach. We thought a combination of Jack and gouda would be reasonable melting cheeses to go with the sauce, since paneer isn't exactly a melting cheese. This will probably get a little chicken added to it to boost the protein to starch ratio.
We will restock the frozen spinach.
Rogan Josh Fettucine -- Rogan josh simmer sauce with ground lamb over spinach fettucine and frozen green beans and sauteed onions. We'll restock the green beans as they seem to be pretty useful. (They can be used for an emergency salad if we run out of lettuce.)
Tasty Bite Lentils -- Will get simply heated and eaten as a side. I really like Tasty Bite as travel food because it isn't too heavy and it can be heated very easily and it's decently made as processed food goes, but we just do not eat it when we're not traveling, and it has a much shorter shelf life than food in cans.
Cardamom Custard Filled Kabocha -- this is actually a test run of a dessert we want to bring to my mother's for Thanksgiving. This would have used a pantry item but our condensed milk expired in 1998. Uh. All righty then. So we bought two cans more, one for the test run and one for the real run. We will not keep condensed milk in stock. (I recently used up a pretty old can of evaporated milk, too. We don't use these unless we have a rare recipe that calls for them, so they aren't good pantry staples for us.)
Roasted tomato and garlic soup -- to use up the two pounds of tomatoes I ambitiously got at the farmers market. Garden rosemary, onions, garlic. (The last two are pantry staples.) Maybe a little port since we have a bottle open.
Steamed artichokes -- I don't do anything fancy with these except maybe a little bit of olive oil or mayo.
Dino kale -- not sure what to do with this. There's always kale chips.
Medium and spicy red chilis -- seems like they'd be ideal for a chili paste or sauce. I like how fruity red peppers taste and I used up the sambal oelek I made in various dishes, so I know I'll go through it... just slowly as I go through the others. Perhaps I should lacto-ferment them?
Port poached quince -- this came out on the savory side because I didn't taste the poaching liquid. It's good but it's hard to figure out what to do with it. I will probably eat it with roast beef as snacks, and use the poaching liquid in something else.
Pears -- I got a bunch of end-of-season boscs that I want to put up in some way, freezing or in brandy.
Later:
Idli mix -- We can only go through so much starch in a week! This is on the old side but still good; I made another box of it earlier. I don't have an idli steamer so I do it three at a time in my egg poacher that doesn't work for eggs anyway (I have learned how to use the swirl method to poach eggs.) I really like it with sambar but don't have sambar mix or some of the herbs necessary to create the distinctive taste; I may try a tamarind lentil soup or something instead.
Pasta shells -- We don't need to keep pasta on hand when we have rice and quinoa. We never make pasta on fill-in meals.
I want to do something similar with the canned goods, which also don't rotate as well as I'd think. We should probably just keep only a few of fruits (good for snacks or days when I come up short on fresh fruit for the bento) and meal-like emergency food (canned chili tastes so salty now but it's probably a good idea to keep a can or two of soup or chili around). The applesauce might count as an emergency "fruit." (Brad really likes applesauce so I got a jar for him, though we've had plenty of fresh fruit to put into his bento.)
Sauerkraut, especially as I succumbed to the dill pickle kraut at the farmers market. We do not really need three different kinds of kraut at once.
Get rid of:
Fiber supplements. It turns out that a diet rich in legumes and vegetables gives you plenty of dietary fiber without having to supplement. I measured my fiber intake when I was monitoring my food for a few months and it turned out to be very easy to get tons of fiber if you eat as many veggies as we do, especially since we also eat lots of beans and lentils. So what do I do with the fiber supplements I got when I was worried I wasn't getting enough dietary fiber? Uhh... I have no idea. My mom might be able to use some. I can keep the chia for recipes, I guess. (It can be used like flax as an egg substitute, which is conceivably useful, and as it's a whole seed will probably store pretty well.)
Wrapup:
We have pretty clearly adjusted to a way of eating that focuses on fresh, seasonal produce and a light emphasis on grains and seeds. Frozen and canned foods tend to languish in favor of fresh unless we consciously include them into our rotation. I think we want to keep a certain amount on hand because they let us prepare meals without shopping, but we are no longer as dependant on them. This will be our first winter with a stock of frozen and preserved fruit on hand, so that should be an interesting test. Last winter we got bored of the fruits available. (Yes, I know, we're spoiled by winter fruit.) This winter we have a freezer stuffed with frozen berries, so I just need to figure out how best to include those into our meals.
We just did a freezer audit and our freezer is in pretty good shape. There are a few things that are old and need to get used up, but nothing is too old to use, and for the most part everything is well within its "best used by" period. We make ample amounts of soup which can then get rotated back in to our normal meal cycles. We don't make as much in the way of extra mains; my goal is to keep a week on hand at any given time but we are usually short of that. The way to fix that is probably to consciously freeze some mains rather than eating them right away, and fill in with a frittata or something at the end of the week.
The cycle of eating vegetarian one week out of three is working fine. Our breakfasts are vegetarian so we're eating meat as part of about half of our meals. This seems like a reasonable compromise since I can't eat much soy or any wheat, two major vegetarian protein sources. (And much as I like cheese, I am not sure I should base my diet entirely around it.)
The major canned foods we use are tomatoes and beans. Tomatoes are highly seasonal and it's often simply easier to use canned beans than to spend the extra time to cook dry beans. Working dry beans into the cooking cycle and freezing the excess might help there, especially as garbanzo beans can be cooked in the rice cooker (and garbanzo beans are probably the most common beans we eat, followed closely by black and cannellini.) Since we use so many tomatoes I bought a case of Happy Girl crushed heirloom tomatoes at wholesale prices, which should see us through the winter.
A major experiment this year is the booze preserved fruits. I've opened the jar of cherry plums in slivovitz and they're quite good; dropping one plum into a cup of hot chocolate is a nice treat. I don't really like eating these plums when fresh, but they preserve nicely.
I've had good luck with lacto-ferments this year, making kvass, sauerkraut, and preserved lemons. The first batch of preserved lemons got entirely used up so we made a new batch. The kvass gets used up slowly but steadily, and keeps well. Sprouting legumes also works well but I'm usually not organized enough to keep it in the rotation. They freeze and I will use the frozen sprouts in dishes later, so I'll keep doing a moderate amount.
I'd like to eat more small oily fish like sardines, though it's harder to organize this as Brad doesn't like fish. Other than that I think we're getting a diverse diet. I like that our food is mostly local; our remaining imported staples include most of the beans we eat, quinoa, and oils other than olive oil and nut oils.
After we've finished getting our pantry up to date, I want to think about making a travel kit, so we don't have to shop for food as a step in packing. We'll want to rotate that through our general meals periodically to keep it fresh, though.
Anyhow in a fit of attempted virtue, or perhaps to avoid proper meal planning on this short week before Thanksgiving, we have cleaned out a pantry shelf. This shelf had a lot of oddball foods: Indian "simmer" sauces, a pho mix that I optimistically bought without reading the label to discover that it would be a pain to make, "snack" packs of almond butter that seemed like a good idea until I found out that I could not open them without a tool and then that they leaked oil everywhere -- not a win for a snack pack, insane amounts of pasta, rice cous cous which was also not as good an idea as it seems as it takes forever to cook, vegan raspberry jello, etc.
We ruthlessly threw out everything that had hit its "best by" that we didn't like, saved a few things that were only a little over and that we liked and still looked good, and planned our meals around that. It's going to be kind of strange.
The simmer sauces are good in concept but in practice we batch cook and end up making our own sauces, perhaps because it feels weird to buy four of them at a time? Anyhow if we get a hankering for something simmered in a sauce, we can buy it when we buy the tofu/meat/veggies/whatever.
Keepers:
Brown rice cereal (I like hot cereal some days, and it's relatively easy to make though I can't manage it on a bad fibro day. The packages claims that it can be made in the microwave are dirty dirty lies, but I'll forgive it.) Quinoa flake cereal (ingredient, cereal; actually I gave my box to my mom to use in a Thanksgiving recipe, but I'll probably get the rest back.) Buckwheat groats (another hot cereal item; I am sensing a theme here.) So, whole-grain foods seem to actually get used, usually once or twice a week when I cycle around to wanting them. Rice bran on the theory that it's a baking ingredient, though I should check the date on the box, and probably won't restock it unless I get a recipe that specifically calls for it.
So far Brad has made:
Vegan raspberry jello -- Not bad; it doesn't set up as firm as the animal-based product but it has a pleasant texture and it's not too sweet.
"Peanut" noodles -- frozen broccoli (we want to cycle our frozen veggies and I usually like to cook with fresh veggies), the pho kit, the annoying almond butter in tool-requiring packets, the tail end of a pretty darn old, though still good, tub of red miso, and a package of kelp noodles which are actually quite nice but I never seem to use so they just use up fridge space. Plus some store-bought chicken, since protein doesn't last long around here. This hodgepodge came out delicious and made four meals worth of food.
I will restock the red miso; it is a pantry ingredient. (I am finding that chickpea miso is very mild and makes a decent sub for white miso.) We had two bags of broccoli so we won't restock it.
Last week we used up some sweet red chile sauce by cooking some pastured pork ribs up with it. Yummy! I am going to try to use this approach for other condiments that are getting old; I have a tendency to like condiments too much, but only small amounts of them, so they pretty much have to be vinegar-based or otherwise inedible to mold for us to get through a full container. I'd like to start cycling things more aggressively.
Planned:
Macaroni tikka masala -- Macaroni cheese made from some quinoa/rice elbow noodles that I got to try and never tried, plus a tikka masala simmer sauce. We have some fresh cilantro in the crisper that should go well with this, and frozen spinach. We thought a combination of Jack and gouda would be reasonable melting cheeses to go with the sauce, since paneer isn't exactly a melting cheese. This will probably get a little chicken added to it to boost the protein to starch ratio.
We will restock the frozen spinach.
Rogan Josh Fettucine -- Rogan josh simmer sauce with ground lamb over spinach fettucine and frozen green beans and sauteed onions. We'll restock the green beans as they seem to be pretty useful. (They can be used for an emergency salad if we run out of lettuce.)
Tasty Bite Lentils -- Will get simply heated and eaten as a side. I really like Tasty Bite as travel food because it isn't too heavy and it can be heated very easily and it's decently made as processed food goes, but we just do not eat it when we're not traveling, and it has a much shorter shelf life than food in cans.
Cardamom Custard Filled Kabocha -- this is actually a test run of a dessert we want to bring to my mother's for Thanksgiving. This would have used a pantry item but our condensed milk expired in 1998. Uh. All righty then. So we bought two cans more, one for the test run and one for the real run. We will not keep condensed milk in stock. (I recently used up a pretty old can of evaporated milk, too. We don't use these unless we have a rare recipe that calls for them, so they aren't good pantry staples for us.)
Roasted tomato and garlic soup -- to use up the two pounds of tomatoes I ambitiously got at the farmers market. Garden rosemary, onions, garlic. (The last two are pantry staples.) Maybe a little port since we have a bottle open.
Steamed artichokes -- I don't do anything fancy with these except maybe a little bit of olive oil or mayo.
Dino kale -- not sure what to do with this. There's always kale chips.
Medium and spicy red chilis -- seems like they'd be ideal for a chili paste or sauce. I like how fruity red peppers taste and I used up the sambal oelek I made in various dishes, so I know I'll go through it... just slowly as I go through the others. Perhaps I should lacto-ferment them?
Port poached quince -- this came out on the savory side because I didn't taste the poaching liquid. It's good but it's hard to figure out what to do with it. I will probably eat it with roast beef as snacks, and use the poaching liquid in something else.
Pears -- I got a bunch of end-of-season boscs that I want to put up in some way, freezing or in brandy.
Later:
Idli mix -- We can only go through so much starch in a week! This is on the old side but still good; I made another box of it earlier. I don't have an idli steamer so I do it three at a time in my egg poacher that doesn't work for eggs anyway (I have learned how to use the swirl method to poach eggs.) I really like it with sambar but don't have sambar mix or some of the herbs necessary to create the distinctive taste; I may try a tamarind lentil soup or something instead.
Pasta shells -- We don't need to keep pasta on hand when we have rice and quinoa. We never make pasta on fill-in meals.
I want to do something similar with the canned goods, which also don't rotate as well as I'd think. We should probably just keep only a few of fruits (good for snacks or days when I come up short on fresh fruit for the bento) and meal-like emergency food (canned chili tastes so salty now but it's probably a good idea to keep a can or two of soup or chili around). The applesauce might count as an emergency "fruit." (Brad really likes applesauce so I got a jar for him, though we've had plenty of fresh fruit to put into his bento.)
Sauerkraut, especially as I succumbed to the dill pickle kraut at the farmers market. We do not really need three different kinds of kraut at once.
Get rid of:
Fiber supplements. It turns out that a diet rich in legumes and vegetables gives you plenty of dietary fiber without having to supplement. I measured my fiber intake when I was monitoring my food for a few months and it turned out to be very easy to get tons of fiber if you eat as many veggies as we do, especially since we also eat lots of beans and lentils. So what do I do with the fiber supplements I got when I was worried I wasn't getting enough dietary fiber? Uhh... I have no idea. My mom might be able to use some. I can keep the chia for recipes, I guess. (It can be used like flax as an egg substitute, which is conceivably useful, and as it's a whole seed will probably store pretty well.)
Wrapup:
We have pretty clearly adjusted to a way of eating that focuses on fresh, seasonal produce and a light emphasis on grains and seeds. Frozen and canned foods tend to languish in favor of fresh unless we consciously include them into our rotation. I think we want to keep a certain amount on hand because they let us prepare meals without shopping, but we are no longer as dependant on them. This will be our first winter with a stock of frozen and preserved fruit on hand, so that should be an interesting test. Last winter we got bored of the fruits available. (Yes, I know, we're spoiled by winter fruit.) This winter we have a freezer stuffed with frozen berries, so I just need to figure out how best to include those into our meals.
We just did a freezer audit and our freezer is in pretty good shape. There are a few things that are old and need to get used up, but nothing is too old to use, and for the most part everything is well within its "best used by" period. We make ample amounts of soup which can then get rotated back in to our normal meal cycles. We don't make as much in the way of extra mains; my goal is to keep a week on hand at any given time but we are usually short of that. The way to fix that is probably to consciously freeze some mains rather than eating them right away, and fill in with a frittata or something at the end of the week.
The cycle of eating vegetarian one week out of three is working fine. Our breakfasts are vegetarian so we're eating meat as part of about half of our meals. This seems like a reasonable compromise since I can't eat much soy or any wheat, two major vegetarian protein sources. (And much as I like cheese, I am not sure I should base my diet entirely around it.)
The major canned foods we use are tomatoes and beans. Tomatoes are highly seasonal and it's often simply easier to use canned beans than to spend the extra time to cook dry beans. Working dry beans into the cooking cycle and freezing the excess might help there, especially as garbanzo beans can be cooked in the rice cooker (and garbanzo beans are probably the most common beans we eat, followed closely by black and cannellini.) Since we use so many tomatoes I bought a case of Happy Girl crushed heirloom tomatoes at wholesale prices, which should see us through the winter.
A major experiment this year is the booze preserved fruits. I've opened the jar of cherry plums in slivovitz and they're quite good; dropping one plum into a cup of hot chocolate is a nice treat. I don't really like eating these plums when fresh, but they preserve nicely.
I've had good luck with lacto-ferments this year, making kvass, sauerkraut, and preserved lemons. The first batch of preserved lemons got entirely used up so we made a new batch. The kvass gets used up slowly but steadily, and keeps well. Sprouting legumes also works well but I'm usually not organized enough to keep it in the rotation. They freeze and I will use the frozen sprouts in dishes later, so I'll keep doing a moderate amount.
I'd like to eat more small oily fish like sardines, though it's harder to organize this as Brad doesn't like fish. Other than that I think we're getting a diverse diet. I like that our food is mostly local; our remaining imported staples include most of the beans we eat, quinoa, and oils other than olive oil and nut oils.
After we've finished getting our pantry up to date, I want to think about making a travel kit, so we don't have to shop for food as a step in packing. We'll want to rotate that through our general meals periodically to keep it fresh, though.