20 Days, 3 Ways, __Bags: Kitchen Pantry

What’s for dinner?
That is the million dollar question, is it not?

The thing is, you often find your grocery list getting longer and longer, your cupboards getting fuller and fuller, yet the ideas of what to make getting fewer and fewer.

Do you ever wonder where all of the food comes from?
Here’s to the beginning of CLEANING OUT your pantry and “starting over.”

Again, I am not suggesting that you spend over half of your time ORGANIZING your pantry. You can check out my blog post called Cleaning Out Your Canned Food if you would like to spend some time cleaning and organizing. Here though, I want to encourage just eating the food that you currently have in your home.

Here are a few ideas on how to lessen the amount of food you have in your pantry, while helping out others in the process.

1. We ALL have canned food or boxes of something that just sits in the back of our cupboards. Consider donating it to your local food bank or church/school food drive. While looking through your cupboards, simply start by:

• Digging to the back of the cupboard
• Take out anything you may question whether you will ever use it.
• Put it in a bag so it is ready to donate.

2. Take a mental inventory (or even write it down) of what you have left (not just canned food). This includes cereals, baking supplies, pastas, etc.

3. This is where your creativity comes in: look at your list or mental list of what you have in your cupboards and try to make your meals based solely on what you have in your house. You would be surprised on what you can come up with! Need some help? You can also Google the ingredients that you want to use together and often the internet will find a recipe FOR YOU! Imagine that? Type in the ingredients and ta-da!

4. Consider making some frozen meals as well. Then if you know of someone who needs a meal, you can pull that frozen meal out and have one prepared in no time.

5. So in cleaning out your pantry, you will not only help those in need, but also clear out your overflowing cupboards.

I hope that in this process, you are reducing your stockpile of food, using what you have, and “recycling” by giving to others in the meantime. The next time you go to the grocery store and drop how many bags on your counter full of food, you will hopefully have some more room in your cupboards to actually store it!