Last week I didn’t grocery shop. We were low on fresh ingredients – fruit and veg – in the fridge and fruit bowl, but I wanted to make a challenge and be as resourceful as possible and cook everything I had on hand and not go to the shops (exception is milk from the service station which I couldn’t cook myself!). We are a family of 5, but my son was with his dad for the week, so call it 4 mouths to feed for a week.
My starting point included:
- 3 apples, 2 sweet potatoes and 2 oranges in the fruit bowl
- 8 white potatoes
- herbs, a couple of little cooked beetroot and half a bunch of celery, some spring onions in one crisper drawer
- some carrots, 1 head broccoli and 1/4 ice berg lettuce in 2nd crisper drawer, plus 1/2 red onion needing to be used
- in the freezer – frozen corn, peas, zucchini, bread rolls, steak, berries, bananas and pesto.
- pantry – the usual Jacq-pantry featuring lots of dried ingredients and tinned legumes and fish
So not completely bare by any means, I’m well aware this is still food present. The fresh ingredients were definitely where I was going to have to be creative though as they were minimal, which is why it’s also so great to have a pantry of dry ingredients stocked and a freezer with fruit and vegetables too!
I began by prepping the ingredients that I could so that when I came time to pull together actual meals I wasn’t thinking “raw potatoes, great…”. Prep is important here because that’s how you can be more creative at meal times. This is how the prep unfolded.
Meal prepped items and snacks:
- Sourdough chocolate chip cookies – find the recipe here
- Apple and orange jellies – using the oranges from the fruit bowl and leftover apple juice I found in our garage fridge from my daughter’s birthday party the week prior – if you love jellies then try some of these recipes
- Steamed the corn and peas from the freezer stash
- Steamed the white potatoes ready for salads, or roasting, or mashing – take your pick!
- Baked the sweet potato – so much more versatile – in fact if you like sweet potato brownies or haven’t tried then you should try this recipe!
- Steamed the head of broccoli ready to go
- Cooked quinoa from the pantry for salads, wraps and as a base for other protein and veg
- Opened a tin of butter beans ready for a couple of lunches – did you know legumes count toward your daily intake of vegetables too? Cool huh. Not to mention they are one of the most fibre rich foods you can get your mitts on – read more on fibre intake and how you can get your daily dose here.
- Chopped and refreshed sad saggy celery in water in a bowl ready for snacks and salads
- Washed the herbs and kept them in the spinner to stay fresh ready for anything!
- Pickled the red onion in a 1:1 mix of apple cider vinegar and water – love these in salads, sandwiches, wraps and breakfasts. Delicious.
- Made up popcorn for snacks using the kernels in the pantry
From there I felt so much more inspired to get colourful, flavoursome meals together, which looked like this…
- Lettuce butter bean salad with lots of herbs. Steamed white potato with Mingle seasoning in pantry. Kimchi from fridge. BabyBel cheese my toddler decided not to eat, pickled red onion, olives and boiled egg – lunch 1 done!
2. Dinner – smashed sweet potato with pizza toppings – tomato paste, anchovies, semi dried tomatoes, mozarella in the fridge, plus pesto from the freezer
3. Lunch – peas with tomato passata from pantry and found some of the no-meat meatballs from the IRON RICH PLANT BASED MEAL PLAN (grab this in the shop if you have a menstrual cycle so you can understand iron rich meals and foods better)
4. Pulled steak from the freezer and teamed it with white potatoes, peas with feta pickled onion and herbs. Used some of the pickling liquid as a dressing with extra virgin olive oil in the pantry.
5. Mega finisher by Thursday was this delicious butter bean herb and quinoa salad, sauteed (frozen and defrosted) zucchini in garlic infused extra virgin olive oil with some sesame seeds on top, and no-egg (cos I ate it earlier in week) corn fritters which are probably some of my favourite to date! The “glue” usually created with egg was with besan / chickpea flour and wholemeal self raising flour – they worked so well. Even had some left for lunch the next day – what a win!
Again, whilst I know our fridge and pantry was not bare, there were a lot of staples that were low, so this was a week that this kind of creative challenge really helped to use up what there was before refilling and helped reinforce that wonderful philosophy of “focus on all the things you do have, rather than things you don’t”.
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