Leftover Awareness Month

So I got this idea when I used to follow the $5 dinner blog.  Every so often I have what I call “Leftover Awareness Month” (she calls it “Pantry Challenge”).  Basically the idea is for a month (although sometimes just a week) I try to eat only what we have in the house and go to the grocery store as little as possible.  I decided to do it again this month for a few reasons:

1. Next month here in Utah we have lots of case lot sales and I want to have some extra space in my budget and my kitchen to take advantage of those sales to  build up our food storage.
2. Our freezer and pantry were getting seriously overloaded with random stuff. I sometimes end up buying random things at the grocery store that never get used so this is a good chance to force myself to use them.
3. I’ve been analyzing our budget and noticing that we were spending more money each month on food than I had expected.  I was trying to figure out where the extra money was going and we noticed that we were throwing away too much food because our leftovers would go bad before getting eaten. So we wanted to focus on making sure we go through all of our leftovers.

So, this month my personal challenge is to make our meals as much as possible from food already in my home.  I’m going to the store for things like milk, bread and produce but the basis of our meals must come from things that we had in our pantry or freezer.  Since I’m finding things in our pantry and freezer that have gone through 6 moves with us I think it was probably time…

Anyone care to join us in cleaning out the pantry?