Week two of my ‘Eat Through the Kitchen’ challenge went fantastically well.

We now have a completely empty freezer, having had a delicious roast today, a veggie bowl with only lemons and garlic in and the fridge has only those items that never seem to go off. You know the ones. Jams, mustard, butter, and the remaining, enough for a coffee in the morning, milk.

I’m pleased to announce that the only thing from the freezer that went in the bin was a rather sad looking frozen soup I vaguely recall thinking we could have for dinner another night back in 2008.

Now the only area that still needs attention is the grocery cupboard. I think that the most important step to eating your way through the kitchen, is actually knowing what you have in the kitchen. Over the last two weeks of concerted effort we’ve massively reduced the amount of food in this cupboard, but as it’s the final remaining obstacle in my food-clutter free kitchen, it had to be dealt with.

Please notice the strategic lack of before photo here. I couldn’t bare the shame of sharing it.

I unpacked all the teas, coffees, chocolate drinks and other hot drink mixes first and discovered that we have a staggering thirty different variations.

drinks
I worked my way through the cupboard, putting like things together, and taking duplicates and adding them together. Things like two almost empty containers of baking soda, three bags of icing sugar now reside happily in the previously empty icing sugar container. And my favourite: the empty peanut butter has found a new home in the recycle bin.

My next task with these is to make a list of what they are good for. So, Nam Phla, for example, is good with meats, so use it. Red wine vinegar makes a lovely gravy, so use it when we have a roast, Mirin adds delicious flavour to rice, so use it when we have sushi. That way we can work our way through the 4 types of vinegar, 6 different oils, and various other condiments, without any of it needing to go to waste.

tinned

After sorting through everything, and throwing out the two overdue items, I repacked the cupboard.

tidied cupboard

Doesn’t that look better?  And once we’ve worked our way through the drinks at the top right, we’ll be able to replace those that we actually like best, and the list on the inside of the cupboard doors helps me see just what is lurking in the back corners.

Two successful weeks, and although we’ll be hitting the shops for fridge/freezer food today, I’m really pleased that we managed to ‘eat through (the cold part of ) the kitchen’.

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Eat Through the Kitchen – Week 2

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