My Pantry-Turned-Recipe Project

A few weeks ago I started a bit of a rash project. The project was to not buy any groceries until we had used all of the food items we already had in the pantry, fridge, and freezer. Surprisingly, the project didn't stall half-way through.

This is what our pantry looked like at the end of that project. No joke.

We had some rice, some ancient quinoa, a box of mac-n-cheese, a very old can of
sweetened condensed milk, seaweed for sushi, pecans, mixed nuts, and snacky things like Goldfish, granola bars, etc. And I think all that was left in the fridge was milk, eggs, and the random collection of sauces/condiments.

I'm not sure exactly what all factors made me decide that I wasn't buying anymore groceries until I used up every possible thing out of our pantry and refrigerator, but I think I accomplished it. (We did have to buy milk for Little Pumpkin twice, I think, during that time.) We dined on some less than stellar meals, but we all survived, and I was very strategic in planning my meals so that Pumpkin always had good, healthy, filling foods to eat.

With having to use only what I had on hand, I had to do some digging to find recipes that took those ingredients. And it is at this point that a new project began to take form: Organizing My Recipes.

The deceptive, organized look of my recipe collection

While looking for recipes, I was reminded how convoluted my collection really is: multiple copies of the same recipe in different places; small pieces of paper with ingredients and amounts listed on them, but no recipe title; recipes written on the back of receipts; recipes written out in non-legible-to-anyone-but-me chicken scratch because I was in a hurry when copying it down; and hundreds of recipes saved, but never tried.

And they were all stuffed into a manila folder. (This is actually after I sorted them into two stacks: tried and not tried, so it looks neater than it previously was.)

The real deal with my recipes.

Chicken scratched recipes that previously had no title.

I do have actual cookbooks that have been given to me, such as Better Homes & Gardens, Betty Crocker, Taste of Home, etc., along with a couple very important cookbooks.

For Jason's birthday last year, his mom put together a cookbook of all her recipes.

And 12 years ago, I was given these two works of art: all the recipes we had when I was growing up, plus new recipes added by my family.

My sister, Rachel, instigated the creation of this cookbook. I would just like to say, Miss Rachel is one of the wisest people I know; I tend to think of her as a wise, old, owl. But, she is anything but old!

Each of my siblings created two of the tabbed dividers needed for the cookbook.

I'm giving away some of the embarrassing parts of my childhood here...

Even my brothers each created two dividers.

To say that this cookbook is special would be a bit of an understatement. However, it is full of recipes I have never tried, or haven't had in years.

But, back to my new recipe project-stemmed from my pantry project:

Since I was basically starting from scratch with our groceries, I decided to be much more intentional about making all of these recipes for us to try. And, to intentionally throw out any of the recipe's we didn't like, make notes on the ones we do like, and write in any alterations we prefer. And, to integrate the manila folder recipes into my hand-made, gifted, recipe books.

To make this recipe trying/organization project work, which it will be a very long-term project I believe, I needed to start being very intentional in meal planning and grocery shopping. (I've never really meal planned before, so this is kind of new territory for me.) So, before I went grocery shopping to fill our pantry back up, I picked out five recipes to make meals, two dessert recipes, and made my grocery list based off the needed ingredients. And those recipes are what we ate, and evaluated, that week. (You can actually read about our Recipe Reviews, as I started a series of posts specifically for this! The link for the first week is here.)

Then came the next week. I took inventory of what all ingredients we still had, searched through the recipes, and picked out four that would use what was leftover. My grocery list for week two was very minimal. And we tried, and evaluated those recipes. Those Recipe Reviews will be posted on Wednesday, Feb. 28.

We are starting week three of this "try every recipe and organize the recipe mess" project. And I'm happy to say the project hasn't stalled, or ended up in project purgatory, at this time. (I seem to have a problem with starting and finishing projects lately.) Even though the continuation of this project is still very young, I am really hoping to keep it going.