Spring cleaning of my pantry & refrigerator

My pantry is usually very well stocked with different types of grains, flours, beans, legumes, nuts, spices, noodles, pastas, sauces, oils etc. I keep a running shopping list on my phone for items that run out or running low as a reminder to buy it when I am at the store next time.

I don't like to waste food so I am on the lookout for things that might go stale or bad. But periodically or sometimes a month or two before a long vacation, I go through a more formal cleaning approach where I stop buying ingredients for stocking and start planning meals with the intention of clearing out ingredients in my pantry and freezer. Since ingredients that linger longer in the pantry are typically the ones I don't use a lot of to start with, it takes some effort to plan meals around it.









For this spring cleaning, I have moved all items that need to be consumed completely to an eye level shelf in the pantry. Having these items in front of me will serve as a reminder and my goal is to plan meals around these ingredients as much as possible.

Look at all the flours, 3 almost done baking powder boxes, papadam in the plastic bag.





And this one is from my freezer. last year's blueberries, frozen vegetables all need to go.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Soup

Image
If ever I were to plan whole week's menu, I always add making soup to the list. But by the time I am done making the dinner, making soup feels too much work and there is no time left to execute the multiple steps required. Mummy had broken down the steps and simplified the process so in winter months, we could have soup every day. She prepared a big batch of concentrated concoction for the soup, boiled vegetables blended and strained, ready to be served by just adding water and spices. One batch lasted her couple of days and next batch was prepared when the previous one got over. The soup was almost always tomato based and was referred to as simply "Soup". Mummy added vegetables like Lauki, carrots, spinach, depending on what was available. She took delight in secretly feeding these vegetables in soup, especially to kids. Sometimes she served fried bread croutons along with the soup. In the evening, an hour or so before dinner, the soup was served in small tea cups or sma
Read more

Birthday Cake

Image
Mummy's cake is one of those dishes that most of us will remember for a long time. She owned a oven for as long as I can remember. The older oven, once it stopped working, was painted and mounted on the wall and was used as an airtight little cupboard to store special snack/food items. She baked cake for the birthdays for anybody that mattered to her. If it was my birthday, no matter where I was, I knew she must have baked a cake for me. She had improvised her cake recipe over time. In the beginning, she used condensed milk but then when she visited us in 2000, she once showed me how to make the cake with ingredients almost always available in my kitchen. Lately she had been using yogurt in her cake recipe which I never learnt. I will ask didi (my sister) or my aunts for the recipe with yogurt. Then we had to also experiment with the temperature at which to bake. Her oven in India only had one setting and we dont know what it was. Last week was my son's birthday, first birthday
Read more