The Eating Down the Fridge (and pantry and cupboard) experiment ended Sunday, but not without many a participant learning many a lesson. There were some nice insights in this wrap-up post. I particularly enjoyed these:
I love that this exercise is encouraging me to use up my leftovers in new meals instead of letting them go bad. — Kari, DC
I also learned that I need to …monitor the produce pantry better – I lost a few winter squashes because I did not check on them, and found a box of sweet potatoes (from the garden) that I forgot we had! — rowandk
…It has been gratifying to see just how well we can eat just based on what we have on hand…I have certainly figured out which pantry items I replenish because I use them all the time, and which are there from lack of use/interest. — holdenfoodie
While I didn’t quite last the entire week without grocery shopping, my freezer and pantry are much more manageable. We must have eaten a lot of quesadillas, as we discovered last night that we’d exhausted our stockpile of salsa. We found out the hard way–with salsa-less burritos.
EDF also prompted an appreciation for a well-planned week of meals with the corresponding grocery purchases. Not to say that I execute these plans flawlessly. After all, I’m the one who’s about to bike to the store for mas salsa (Herdez, of course) to dress our leftover burritos.
Anyway, kudos to A Mighty Appetite‘s Kim O’Donnel for getting us all to think a bit. She summed it up well:
Last week, we gave ourselves the time and space to watch — how we spend our money, how we cook and eat and how we appreciate what we have in our collective midst. That’s a pretty amazing accomplishment.
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