Eating From the Pantry Challenge

  This is a challenge that has been brought to us by many in the blogsphere and I have decided to take it on but with some modifications.  The Eating From the Pantry Challenge is a challenge to see how many days you can provide food for yourself and your family using what you already have in your stock pile.  The idea is to use up the stockpile before hitting the store.  For some this will mean cooking from the pantry stash and for some it will be the freezer while still others will do a mix of both.  The pure and original version of this challenge is to include all meals and curtail all shopping and see how far you can go with the intent on going the full month.

How much do you think you can save?  I can't wait to see what my numbers look like.  We eat fairly organically and are a family of four in New England.  My typical budget for all grocery and household items including cleaning and health beauty is $200 every two weeks.  I am hoping to cut that back to $125.00 every two weeks in January.  Let's see how I do.

  For my part I have decided to limit the challenge to dinners for the month and breakfast, lunches and snacks until the 15th. I am still going to allow myself to pick up milk, yogurt and produce through out the month as well as and free or nearly free items I can score with deals I find.

  It's funny that this challenge should come about when it did as I was thinking of doing something similar about a week ago when I decided to go through my freezer and take inventory.  It killed me but I had to throw out a beef loin due to freezer burn.  I hate the idea of wasting.  It had been in the back of the freezer for a while. That spurred me into thinking of about how many meals I could make using just what I had on hand in my freezers.  If a grocery store rotates stock why shouldn't we?  Any how I was able to come up with 23 dinners.  That will get me well into Feb. as I know some meals will make leftovers.
  I'm excited so wish me luck.  For more about the challenge read one of my favorite sites redemptionunlimited.