Day 43 - True Confession

I have a confession. And this, dear readers, is why I haven't updated in a while. I feel I've betrayed you and betrayed the project.

I have changed the terms of this challenge because the original terms were just too hard. There. I said it.

I hang my head in shame.

I have decided that the goal of using every single pantry item is just really not possible. I mean, what AM I going to do when I get down to strawberry jam, coffee and coconut milk? Make a coconut strawberry latte?? (Actually, not a bad thought...!)

I have discovered that one cannot have a pantry void of certain items, even while using others. Just this week, I found myself in the quandry of having almost nothing to make as a side starch for a particular chicken dish. I was out of of fresh potatoes and boxed stuffing mix. The dish didn't "go" with rice, of which I still have a little. I settled on buttered noodles, and I only had those because I had scored a FREE coupon for a bag of No Yolks and decided that I wasn't going to pass up FREE on something I A) use anyway and B) was out of.

So, growth experience because once again I was serving what I had rather than what I necessarily wanted to serve. But what if I didn't have the noodles? MIL doesn't like rice and doesn't eat most vegetables, so her meal would have been, um, chicken. Period. I try to have at least 2 items that everyone at the table will enjoy. I figure that's reasonable, right?

So, here's the deal. I'm still "cooking my way through my pantry." But my goal is now to reduce the size of my pantry by about 60-70 percent. I want all of my pantry items to fit on the two shelves and the 6' tall lazy susan in the kitchen pantry. No more storing food in the otherwise unused bedroom closet. This goal still requires the same drastic shift in thinking from "just in case" to "just in time."

You're familiar with those philosophies, right? I'm trying to adopt this thinking across the board in life - it results in a lot less physical and emotional clutter.

Basically, "just in case" aquisition leads to excess and also waste. If I buy 5 bottles of salad dressing, I can tell myself it's because it was a great deal. But in reality, it's also subscribing to JIC thinking: having it "just in case" in need it.

Subscribing to JIT aquisition, I'll buy just what I really need, knowing that I'll replenish the supply "just in time" before I need it again. And you know what? If I run out, that's okay. I can roll with that.

So, the project still stands, just in a modified form. I've worked through probably half of the bedroom closet pantry and will continue to get creative to plow through the rest. My biggest obstacle at this point is the top shelf in that closet: it's all cake mixes, brownie mixes and a bunch of stuff that our family no longer really eats on a regular basis. Guess I'll just have to whip up a couple batches of something and send them in to work with Craig.