The Challenge:
For those of you new to my blog, I issued myself a challenge 27 days ago to use up all the ingredients in my freezer. I was in a habit of not bothering to thaw something, and then stopping on my way home from work to buy something to prepare for dinner. This combined with a tendency to freeze things so I would have them when I wanted to make a dish, resulted in a freezer that was beyond full, totally disorganized and downright dangerous when the occasional frozen parcel would fall out of the freezer.
For those of you familiar with the blog, you may have noticed there was a 2 week gap in my chronicling of the challenge. Recently I had a trip for business and one for pleasure, and I got a little behind in chronicling my progress. Never fear! I am still working tirelessly to use up all the ingredients in the freezer.
Just in Time Inventory
This has been an interesting process. I am using an approach called just-in time inventory (based on Toyota Lean principles). The idea is to only stock what you need and not have an excess of inventory. Needless to say my approach to grocery shopping was the antithesis of just-in-time principles. Because I love to cook and read cookbooks constantly, I would see an ingredient I had read about in a recipe and purchase it, but never get around to making the recipe.
This has taken great will power and constantly telling myself : “walk away from the ingredient, Eileen! Are you actually going to use it this week? If not put it back”. It has resulted in significant savings at the grocery store, and improvising in the kitchen to make dinner with what I have on hand. You may also notice that I have been relying on a fair number of purchased sauces. The reason for this is I am also trying to use up canned and bottled goods I have in the pantry.
Accountability
I am grateful to my handful of friends who are reading the blog. It holds me accountable in my quest to deplete inventory in my pantry and freezer. Obviously, many of the posts are not real time, but I am keeping a dinner diary and trying to post day by day of the challenge, until I have an empty freezer. Except for ice cream!
I estimate I have another 60 days to go. The picture below shows my freezer at day 27- unfortunately I did not take a before picture (it would have been too embarassing!). However, I think this photo probably gives you an idea of the magnitude of the problem, or should we say the inventory? Or both?
Freezer- Day 27