Pantry project days 3 to 6 i guess

ETA i found this in the drafts pile today, thought i should just publish it for posterity.

This pantry project has definitely been a challenge, mostly because i am at the most extreme level of lazy i almost didn't think was possible.  It has been a hot, stressful mess the last week and i don't see it letting up anytime soon.  I've been so lazy that for four days i've wanted to make cookies but discovered that i was out of butter on the first day, so i waited until i encountered the store in the most passive way possible: david was driving us around to look at houses on saturday and we stopped off for david to get a smoothie and next door was a grocery store. i decided fate had brought me here so i got off my butt and out of the car and got some butter and champagne, drank the champagne later that evening, and let the butter melt all over the countertop the next day (it was THAT hot).  i still want to make cookies but now that seems like too much work so i will continue the cycle of setting butter out on the counter to soften, letting that melt until i for sure decide i'm not going to bake anything that night, putting it back in the fridge, and repeat the next day.

We haven't been eating regular meals lately, not just due to laziness but also because we both haven't been home every night.  It's mostly david not being home and then i just resort to scrounging around the fridge for whatever less than two-weeks old leftovers still look appealing to eat (hey i have standards).  But it really does have a lot to do with laziness.  The kind of laziness that stops me from searching under the kitchen sink when we run out of hand soap and instead i just sort of rinse my hands off and then wipe them off on the hand towel until it occurs to me that might not be the best/cleanest way or actually to tell the truth it's because  at one point the butter wasn't wiping off my hands on the towel anymore and i wasn't wearing any pants to wipe my hands on either.

okay less embarrassing david by publicly admitting what a slob he married and more embarrassing him by publicly admitting what a lazy slob he married.

so i know the next night after the Pork of Doom, which by the way i survived, fyi, however david insisted i throw away the other piece from the same batch that was still in the freezer because he thought it smelled funny, i made some salmon.  It was totally fresh, frozen in march of this year so yeah it was great.  I sliced a lemon and put it on top of the filets and baked it like that and ate it with leftover israeli couscous and green beans.

Pantry Project - day 1 and 2

this thing has been going pretty easy since i only had to make breakfast yesterday and today i only had to make dinner, plus i've got some pretty normal ingredients to work with right now.  i guess if you call frozen avocado halves and two-year-old frozen pork normal ingredients.

Yesterday was our one-year anniversary so we went out for dinner, which i don't consider cheating this project because you do what you gotta do.  I did make breakfast though, a copycat of what david likes to get at Rooster Cafe, and david even said it was better than the original but probably because i used quality cheddar jack cheese or he was just being nice because it was our anniversary.  He was even brave enough to try the best by august 2010 frozen avocado halves from trader joes which i totally gave him an out for but he chinned up and ate it anyway.  I mean they looked fine to me and obviously i bought them before i discovered i liked guacamole (which my definition is garlic flavored green mush. i eat it only for the garlic).

breakfast tacos: scrambled eggs with a few dashes of tapatio, medium chunky salsa, cheddar-jack cheese, defrosted avocado, all in some warmed corn tortillas

first course and appetizer at Scott's bar and restaurant for our anniversary dinner.  David ordered the new england clam chowder, we split an order of lemon garlic calamari, and i ordered lobster bisque.  They were the best soups of their kind i think we've ever had, fyi.  I forgot to take pictures of our main courses but david got a ribeye and i got the branzini.  We were both kind of meh about the main courses because david compared his ribeye to ones he could eat at Mastros just up the street and my fish was a little too briny, it sort of overpowered any other flavors.

You are probably more interested in the pork loin stilltasty.com says i should have thrown out 15 months ago.  Well david had the rest of his ribeye with dinner and considering i think stilltasty is a little on the conservative side and also because i pretty much have a stomach of steel (and current health insurance), i decided to eat the pork chop for myself.  I paired it with the israeli couscous you may have seen in the purple box in the previous post, which i toasted in garlic olive oil and then added some frozen chopped bell pepper medley i found in the freezer and some fresh chopped onion found in the fridge and chicken broth, and served it with some steamed fresh green beans that have a surprisingly long fridge life.

I had to cut it several times to check if it was done because it was like the great uncookable pork chop or else i was just too impatient to start my food poisoning adventure.

If you want to know what 40$ champagne looks like it looks like this.  Sort of like regular champagne, only you know it is much tastier.  If i had 40 dollars to drop on champagne every time i drank champagne i could probably also afford to hire someone to write this for me so i could drink more expensive champagne.

here is the bottle of fancy champagne and also a sneak peek of my fridge, which looks a lot like my fridge regularly does only with slightly more bacon-wrapped hot dogs (courtesy of david).  We each picked out a bottle of champagne for our anniversary and then a third, backup bottle in case both of the ones we chose were unpalatable.  Yesterday we drank david's choice and tonight we are drinking mine, and you can see the third bottle poking out from between chinese food takeout containers and those bacon-wrapped hot dogs on the middle shelf.  I think we just wanted an excuse to buy more champagne.

Pantry Project

I had all the best intentions of posting the past few months and I took a ton of pictures but no.  I blame it on the heat.

I even planned to post this a couple of days ago but it was just so darn hot i ended up just ordering chinese food delivery.  Twice.

But for now i plan to be back because i have a little challenge for myself.  We are in the process of buying a house and when we finalize it i want in there asap.  So i'm packing up what i can right now and decided that instead of bringing along goodness-knows-what is in the pantry and freezer, i will try to feed us with it over the next month so i can start with shiny new food in a shiny new home.  You guys haven't seen my pantry yet.  I am also simultaneously trying to drink up all the liquor in the wine cabinet so forgive me if this stops making sense halfway through the post.

I tried to come up with some rules to make it interesting but that became too complicated too quickly.  Basically, until everything in stock is eaten up the only things i can buy are staples such as butter, eggs, cheese, and vegetables (since i primarily use fresh vegetables i don't have much frozen or canned, but what i do have needs to be eaten before i can buy other veggies).  I also won't make us eat something that is ridiculously freezerburned or five years expired or anything.  It looks like we are going to inadvertently be primarily vegetarian for this project because technically all the lentils and beans and fifty million morningstar farms burgers we have are the majority of the protein sources to utilize, and we can't buy more stuff until this stuff is eaten.

Behold, the pantry:

Above is some of the "savory ingredient collection."  Two kinds of lentils, a bag and a half of barley, tempura batter mix, falafel mix, cheddar cheese powder, capellini noodles, etc.

And here is part of the "baking ingredients collection."  Both above and below photos.  Twenty bags of coconut flour (exaggeration), ten bags of almond flour (not exaggeration), five different kinds of shredded coconut, several various nut flours, two bags of chia seeds, etc.

I see a lot of desserts in our future.  Dessert for dinner, even.

I still have to take inventory of the other three shelves in the pantry, the "baking cupboard," and the shelf in the home office room that holds a few obscure food items plus two hundred cans of campbell's soup that david bought once that didn't fit (obviously) in the pantry.  I single-handedly consumed all the mac and cheese boxes we had over the past two weeks so i think we are off to a good start.