My mother-in-law, in addition to showering us (and particularly Baby B) with gifts, also filled our refrigerator and freezer to the point of bursting. I think, at a casual estimate, that we won't have to shop for two weeks, giving our bank account time to recover a bit from Christmas and a larger-than-usual number of bills (health insurance, non-optional home repairs, etc).
The old Mr. and Mrs. B would have shrugged and said "Yeah, whatever," and gone shopping anyway, buying whatever struck our fancy, and wasting half of what was in there. Not any more! The new, thrifty, frugal Mr. and Mrs. B decided to set themselves a challenge: absolutely no grocery shopping at all until our Christmas haul is used up.
The only exceptions to this rule are:
- Milk (can't really get along without that when you have a toddler: doctor's orders)
- Essential bathroom supplies (you know what I'm talking about)
- If we run out of vegetables, I'm allowed to go and buy raw broccoli
The food we have includes:
- Stew beef
- Chicken thighs
- 2 lbs shrimp
- 1 pork tenderloin
- Lots of frozen vegetables
- Lots of frozen berries
- 1 package frozen dumplings, Chinese restaurant-style
- Enough frozen tomato soup for two meals
- Enough spaghetti with shredded chicken and cream sauce for three meals
- Fresh vegetables: mushrooms, arugula, carrots, celery, onions, potatoes, some fresh herbs
- Dairy: milk, cream, lots of cheese, sour cream, yogurt
- Fresh fruits: apples, grapes, oranges
- Baking supplies: flour etc
- Pantry staples: spaghetti, other pasta, brown rice, steel cut oats
- Etc.: nuts, dates, crackers upon crackers upon crackers, pretzels
- Odd things: lard. Ye gods, lard. 1 lb of my mother-in-law's homemade sugar cookie dough, plus a bag full of jars of frosting and decorations and cookie cutters, evidently to be a fun project for us to do with Baby B. (I admit, we have scandalously neglected her education in the art of cookie-baking. Is it un-American that we don't terribly love cookies?)
- Cans: chicken broth, beef broth, cream of something soup
In other words, not necessarily all the things we'd personally buy, but we're immensely grateful for them, and will use them all up.
Honestly, the thing that scares me the most is the canned cream soup. Cream of celery, I think. I've never cared for cream of anything soup in a can, because it seems salty, bland, and chemical-tasting to me. I know a lot of American casseroles start with a can of creamy soup, so there must be some way of making it better. One of the meals my sainted mother-in-law left was the aforementioned spaghetti with shredded chicken in a cream of mushroom soup-based sauce, which at first seemed like it wasn't really our sort of thing, but then we discovered that we had an ancient, almost-empty bottle of sriracha lurking in the back of the refrigerator, and that livened it up considerably.
Tomorrow night's dinner is going to be a recipe she left for us, which is called a pie but really looks as if it's more of a cobbler. You're supposed to make a beef and mushroom stew, and then bake it with biscuits on top. The biscuits are what the lard is for.
Speaking of which. Lard! I've never used or knowingly eaten lard in my life, but the recipe calls for it, and my mother-in-law bought it for us, so I'm going to overcome my trepidation and try it out. I didn't know my mother-in-law ever cooked with it herself--I thought she was more of a Crisco fan--but she told me that Crisco is getting phased out because it has trans fats, and she thinks lard might work for her pie crusts and so on. I've also heard good things about coconut fat. I seldom make pie crusts, and when I do, I use butter, so I expect we'll probably consign the leftover lard to a murky corner until I can think up another use for it. (The old Mrs. B would have thrown it out; the new Mrs. B is determined to waste not, want not.)
So I'll keep you posted on all the things we're going to eat, as we plan them out.
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