This is completely pathetic!
I am not going to set foot in a grocery store until this sh*t is gone. I mean it. Of course, my plans never seem to stick and the reality is I will be gone for 5 weeks starting next month. I guess we better start cooking!
Sr comes home Saturday and I plan to cook a large turkey his employer gave him in November. It is taking up a lot of room. We actually have 5 more giant turkeys, but they are still running around outside and are not taking up room in the freezer. We'll eat what we can and I will can the rest. At least canned meat takes up less room and is shelf stable for a couple of years (we are still eating beef canned late in '06-I am now down to only 6 jars of that meat). I guess I could can the hamburger too.
Truth be told, I have seriously been contemplating a return to a vegetarian diet. I was a vegetarian for over 13 years (starting as a teenager and ending in my early thirties). I have been cooking a lot of meatless meals lately and the whole family seems okay with the changes (even meat and potato lovin' hubby). However, even if I decide to make the switch back to that sort of diet, I cannot let the meat go to waste. I respect the lives of the animals we or someone else raised too much to do that (in theory), yet, this is exactly what is happening in the chambers of my three freezers!
I am trying. I made a great Crockpot oatmeal for this morning. I put steet cut oats in the slow cooker with the proper water amount and cooked it on low all night. In the morning I added bananas and a little brown sugar to the pot and let it continue simmering. Oh, it is good! I may try it with dried fruit next time and add the fruit when I add the oats. I could also add frozen fruit (and need too) in the later cycle as we have cherries, black- and raspberries, peaches, blueberries, and applesauce taking up room in the freezers too. I highly recommend this concoction.
For dinner tonight I used the Crockpot again. This time I browned garlic and onions and chicken thighs (bought on sale a while back) in the cast iron skillet. I then added it to the Crockpot along with a commercial simmering sauce (coconut curry) bought at the grocery liquidator. After the chicken was well done, I added some of my home-canned green beans (the '08 stock I am wanting to use up). I rank it as 'OK' (the sauce smelled great right out of the bottle, but did not do well in the Crockpot. If I had made my own sauce it probably would have been better for the long term cooking). I served it over long grain brown rice (I am finally making a dent in the rice, but I did donate several bags to the Food Bank as well). I have a lot of leftovers and no one will be around to eat them next week (as I am traveling for work, Sr is gone, and the boys will be at the grandparents house). I will freeze them and see how they are later this week. As I already said, we will have turkey this weekend.
So, even though the official hosts of The Eating from the Pantry are ending their challenge at the end of the month, I plan to go forward with this challenge 9the best I can with the long time away from home). I still have mounds of
One more interesting tidbit (at least to me;), I get my tendency to "stock up" honestly. My mother has always kept a well-stocked pantry and I remember never having to wonder if we had anything to eat (we probably had a dozen boxes of cereal at any one time). Even as a retired widow, she had maintained a packed pantry that included outdated foods. Well, today I found out she cleaned it up and purged all the older foods or the ones she figured she would never eat. She said she was no longer shopping for lots of food and was trying to use up what she has stored and then plans to buy in smaller quantities in the future. You have no idea how weird this is to me!!
