Cleaning out the fridge...

After diving in head first into our loosely formed and ill-conceived "real foods" challenge (which is weak, I admit, since we're allowing sugar and white flour :-) ), I started cooking a lot more from scratch. A. LOT.

And, since we were heading out of town for Memorial Day weekend and it was the last week of the grocery budget, suddenly we started eating up the stuff in the fridge. For the first time since we moved in almost 8 years ago, my crisper bins were empty and we were simultaneously without milk OR eggs. And down to one half box of butter. No syrup. No ketchup. It was weird. And, in the process of eating all this stuff up, I noticed some nasty stuff had spilled BEHIND the crisper drawers. I've cleaned the fridge out before, don't misunderstand. But it was super easy to clean it out this time because there were so few things IN the fridge! What you can see in the picture is a quart jar of homemade yogurt (one thing I've made regularly no matter how busy I am), and our red "water tap" that the kids help themselves to regularly. You can't see the very top shelves which house many of our condiments (jelly, yeast, peanut butter, etc.) or the door shelves which also house condiments (soy sauce, mayo, BBQ sauce, etc.), so it's not entirely empty. But pretty close!

I've since gone to the store, but we haven't added too much back in (our CSA pick-ups start soon, and I don't know how much space we'll need for a large share!!). So, the picture above is no longer entirely accurate: add in 1 dozen eggs, 1 gallon of milk, some strawberries, apples, carrots, bell peppers, and cilantro. We should make a serious dent in that before Thursday! But I had to share my fridge pic with my cyber family. I'll try to remember to take a picture later this week when it's nice and full of veggies.