I often keep a running list on a dry erase board leading to the basement of the food in the freezer (big stand alone freezer in the basement), but the random scratch pads listing food in the basement pantry-extension and the "stuff" in my pantry in the kitchen itself are getting booted off the kitchen counter in my efforts to declutter. So, this seems like an ideal place to store that info and update it when I get a chance. After all, half the reason I have this blog is to get my favorite recipes into a format that won't be chewed up, drooled on, thrown away, etc. (And I have gotten rid of a few cookbooks which only ever contributed a few great recipes to my life... those great ones are now on this blog and will be published someday if they haven't been already!).
Every few months, I go on a grocery store fast, vowing to eat from the pantry/freezer because we have so much food. That helps tremendously because it forces us to eat up stuff in the freezer in particular before adding more food to it. I shop on sale and keep some things on hand nearly all the time. If I have a coupon and there's a sale, even better!
So, I'll update this list before each grocery store fast and include the meals I've made from the random ingredients. I do allow myself to run to the produce market on grocery store fasts, so it's amazing how long we can last on the ingredients I've stockpiled and the produce market.
I should also mention that I inherited a bunch of nuts from someone who was moving, have lots of random stuff that I got on sale, and am coming off of a 2-year period where it was mighty hard to "run out" to the grocery store if I ran low on something. My kids are all much easier to cart around--an errand is still never quick, but their schedules are much more flexible and so we actually can run to the grocery each week. So, I need to prune!
(There are, of course, things we always keep on hand that we continually use up and buy afresh: oats, flour, some meat, canned tomatoes, pasta, etc.).
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