Eating Down the Freezer | Spiced Skirt Steak for Tacos

I’ve admitted it before: I have a food storage problem. I have too many places to store food and I love to fill those places to the max, sometimes to overflowing. And I’m not being figurative here.

Some of you may remember my efforts two years ago, when I made a resolution to stop stocking it up, and start using it up. This has made a partial reform on my food storage habits – I can at least boast that most of the food I have stored over the winter comes from only the previous year’s growing season (and not from several years, as in the past).

But some changes in our family arrangements late last year has left me with more over-stock right now than I had anticipated. So, I’m on a reprisal of Operation Use it Up this month. An intense, month-long Eating-From-The-Larder experiment. Inspired by this post from Erica at Northwest Edible Life, I am endeavoring to use up as much stuff from my freezer and pantry as I can before the new growing season gets me hooked into the next round of storing the season’s bounty.

Erica has made the impressive resolution to not buy a single food item, from either store or eatery, for the entire month of April. I have not gotten quite that carried away. Living without fresh vegetables or WildFire bread for a month is beyond my current resolution capacity, but I can make sure that the bulk of our calories come from my existing food stores. I have made every effort to resist the easy run to the store, and instead to adjust the menu or to make something from scratch.

Using it up: frozen chicken, wild rice, frozen applesauce and frozen corn.

This has been easier than I thought it would be, and makes me ashamed to realize how frequently I pad my meals with extras from the store when I have such a pantry of plenty right at home. A resolution like this has forced me to use my imagination a little more in meal planning, and to let go of the idea that I *must* have a certain specialty ingredient to make a certain recipe work. Of course, I knew this already, and I have been pretty good about using my freezer stores the last couple of years, but I see now where I can run a tighter ship.

So, what have we been eating? Mostly, the usual: meats and veggies for dinner, oatmeal and eggs for breakfast. But my frozen corn and applesauce have made it into the dinner menu frequently, the frozen berries have been making a steady appearance at breakfast, homemade almond milk production has stepped up, and we’ve been eating more nuts and dried fruit and fewer granola bars. I’ve been using the weirder cuts of meat I have stored away: I ground a cross-rib roast to make meatballs (using some frozen breadcrumbs up in the process), and I made my skirt steak into delicious tacos. I even made rice pudding twice. The kids are very impressed.

It feels good: a kind of spring clean for locavores. I think I’ll make this a regular practice. Yes, I’ll continue to regularly use foods from my freezer through the year (successfully done for the last two years! YES!), but I’ll add a month-long intensive larder use-up every March or April to really clean things out before the opening of the farmer’s markets.

Now, I just need this kind of clean-up practice on my office, and I’ll be really refreshed :/