Tuesday, May 1, 2012

"Meatless" May, day one

Turns out that I'm a total a-hole! Remember how I was all like, "it's not like we have a chest freezer full of beef" or whatever? Yeah, I inventoried one freezer and came up with 16 meat items. And one of those items was a bag of eight salmon fillets. There is enough meat in this house for us to eat meat three meals a day, all month. Which begs the question, what the hell have I been doing spending a hundred dollars at the grocery store every week? I guess the only explanation is that I am actually a food hoarder. Well, and maybe a little bit that I suck at meal planning and often go running out to the store for the chicken I didn't defrost the night before.

Since I'm so meat rich, the plan has morphed again slightly. Now it is more of a "clean out the freezer and the pantry" sort of event. I'm aiming for bare cupboards and desolate arctic tundra in the freezers. It's the same spirit as the meatless thing, though - I am trying to be more aware of what we're eating and where it comes from, and I am reducing our carbon footprint by not requiring as much new food be generated. It just seems silly to call it "meatless" when we're probably going to end up eating more meat than we would usually.

I did go ahead and make a meatless dinner for night one of my so-called Meatless May. Nothing exotic, nothing that will convert the masses to vegetarianism, but it did use up things that needed using.

Food photography is not my forte
There you have it. Broccoli cheddar soup, adapted from this recipe from Eating Well magazine. I thickened it with a can of navy beans that had been in my cupboard for probably three years instead of a potato, which I would have had to buy.  It wasn't exactly sexy, but it got the job done. The bread was a Boudin bakery sourdough boule that Husband brought home from one of his trips to San Francisco, but not the last one or the one before that I don't think. Regardless of how long it had been in the freezer, it made an excellent butter delivery system.

1 comment:

Ei said...

I'm doing the same, trying to eat through the contents of my freezer/pantry, because I'm moving soon, and it would be a sin to waste grass fed ground beef and free range chickens. It is shocking to realize how much food I have stockpiled. You can tell how devoted I am to this mission by the fact that I'm currently forcing myself to eat leftover Nutrisystem meals that have been sitting around for 2 years. They're vile.