Storecupboard challenge

I had a conversation with the boyfriend last night that turned on a couple lightbulbs in my brain. Given, we were pretty knackered, and sometimes I get crazy notions when tired.

We have a lot of food in the house. I don’t just mean fresh or frozen, though we have a ready supply of both of these as well. What we have in abundance is of the non-perishable variety. This idea came into conversation when we had to chuck out a jar of marmalade that had been languishing in the back of the cupboard for at least six months. It takes a long time for preserves to go mouldy, even opened, and he mentioned his gran would have his head on a stick if she ever found out about his chucking food out. Basically, food wastage is bad. We all know that.

We’ve had a few incidents recently which set the wheels moving. We have fair-sized separate freezer that sits in the hall, and which was pretty full of leftovers. Unfortunately, the whole thing went and broke down, so we had to throw out loads of perfectly good food because we couldn’t guarantee it was safe to eat – quite a lot of meat and fish based food was quite frankly not worth the risk. It had iced over to the point the run off damaged some of the floorboards underneath. Not a pretty sight.

Then a friend of ours came to visit, and whilst I was away on a field trip in the Highlands all last week, she and my boyfriend decided to eat their way through the contents of the freezer that could be salvaged. They just chucked in whatever they could find, mixed it with whatever was in the cupboards, and basically lived on meat + veg + condiment stews all week.

It’s led me to have a good long think about what we throw out, and even what we don’t throw out but that never sees the light of day in our cupboards.

I think now is the time to do something about it. I may not be a woman on a mission to change the world just yet, but I can be a woman on a mission to reduce her own damned waste!

So my challenge to myself is to use up all the jars, spices, tins, bottles etc that have sat in the kitchen for almost as I can remember living in that flat. Fresh food is fair game, some things of course can be replaced when needed (redcurrant jelly is a big one, as I put it in almost everything), but new and interesting uses will be found for the olives, jams, jellies, marmalades, marinades, oils, vinegars and sauces we have been up until this moment “saving for best”.

Challenge: To use up our non-perishables, basically we need to stop buying so much food. I plan to do one weekly food shop which will be mostly fresh fruit, vegetables, meats and some perishable items such as cheeses, but we will make use of what we have in our pantry until it is ALL GONE.

Why do we want to do this? To reduce waste and to prove we don’t need to buy all the time to make tasty food.

I haven’t been cooking as much as I’d like recently, and I think this may give me the inspiration I need to do something in the kitchen other than grill a steak or boil some noodles.

Weird and random recipes will surely follow.