Let the fun begin!

Anyone who has known me any length of time knows that November is like a game for me. It is the month I set aside to eat only what I have in the house. With all of the stocking up I do throughout the year, I have found that I usually have enough to last us about 6 weeks without doing a major grocery trip. My only exceptions are to buy two turkeys around Thanksgiving when they can be had for around 50 to 60 cents per pound. I also usually head back one time for milk and possibly fresh fruit.

I started taking stock of our fridge, freezer, pantry, and deep freeze last week and realized that we have enough to start tomorrow, so that's what I'll be doing. I'm amped!
I would also like to challenge you guys to do the same. It takes some planning, though. Take these next few weeks to first, take stock of what foods you have in your house. The next thing you'll need to do is to plan a menu. Think of meals you can make with what you have and make a list of these meals. If you need to make a small trip to the store for a couple of key ingredients, that's ok, but doing a full-blown monthly shopping trip just before next month is cheating.

This next step is totally optional, but I find that it saves my neck toward the end of our 'Eat From Your Pantry' month. Put the list into some sort of order. What I mean is this - if you have enough chicken to make 6 meals, plan a meal with chicken about every 5 days. Plan in a vegetarian meal about every 5-6 days. Plan in a leftover day around every 5 days. I list these out on a menu board in order, so I know what we will be having every day. If I skip this step, I tend to skip over the meals of say, beans more often than beef. In doing so, I doom my family to rice and beans for 5 days straight at the end of the month, because that is what we have left on the menu. That, my friends, is a recipe for mutiny!

This really can be fun. It is also a great way to clear out some older items in your stock. And it allows the monthly grocery budget to be $0. I usually use the  money for Christmas gifts. I would suggest that if you have any debt, you apply this "bonus" money straight toward that. You could also divide it by 11 (since you'll be eating from your pantry one month a year) and apply that to your monthly grocery budget to further reduce your food costs for next year. Keep me posted from time to time on how you're doing with the challenge.