Food For Thought: Good Intentions

How to conquer pantry clutter, save money, and become a better cook

I’ve peeked into a lot of cupboards and pantries over the years. And forget the medicine cabinet, there’s nothing more revealing about person or a household than what’s in the kitchen.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, an 18th century writer of gastronomy, famously said “Tell me what you eat: I will tell you what you are.” He wasn’t wrong, but it’s the stuff you have in your pantry that you don’t use is the real tell about who you are.

The things we buy that get left on the shelf speak to our dreams as cooks, to our aspirations. The bag of sesame seeds. The curry paste. The can of artichokes. All these things speak to of a place we’ve been, a recipe we’ve read, or a impulse we had one day. And that’s totally okay, except when it sits on our shelf to the point it’s no longer useful or edible.

When a restaurant goes shopping for food it goes a little like this: there is a list of things that are needed day in and day out - the salt, the sugar, the tomato paste. These often come from the big suppliers whose trucks you see on the highways. Depending on where you live there will be various agreements with local suppliers and the Chef will most certainly know when the good strawberries are in season and plan accordingly. But in general restaurants shop strictly for what they need to fulfill their menu and have a system to deal with odds and ends by making specials, soups, stock, and staff meals that can absorb leftovers and miscellaneous as a matter of course. The Chef is not going to the grocery store hangry and impulsive.

Home cooking sometimes lacks in that practical skill, particularly when we we cook with glossy recipe books and for unpredictable and occasionally fussy family members. What to do with that last half a cup of a very particular kind of rice? The three tablespoons of beans? The second can of something or other that was part of the two-for-the-price-of-one, when we didn’t like the recipe we made with the first can? It’s one of the reasons that meal kit subscriptions are so successful - who wants to deal with leftover ingredients?

You can’t really donate these odds and ends to the local food bank, can you? Shouldn’t they go to someone in need? If you haven’t figured out how to use something, the odds are that no one else is going to appreciate it either. It might make us feel virtuous, but I assure you the food bank does not want your three year old can of escargot.

The price of groceries is something I’ve spoken of here before, and having a pantry full of odds and ends, whether they be half-finished boxes and bags or expiring cans isn’t a good use of anyone’s space or money.

The cheapest food is stuff that’s free and the miscellaneous things in your kitchen are one of the next best things: a sunk cost. You’ve long since written off the cost of the can of baby corn on your budget, so any value you get is a bonus. But if they just sit on the shelf they take up space, not only physical, but mental.

But unlike the minimalist organizational types who would have you toss anything that doesn’t bring you joy, you can make your problem go away in another way: you can eat it.

Gather up your odds and ends and put them in a box. Look at your problem in a holistic sense. How many impulse purchases? How many unrealized recipes? How many comfort food and guilty pleasures? It’s actually rather sobering to put it all in front of you.

Learning to cook with odds and ends is one of the marks of a truly good cook. Making something out of “nothing” or pulling a meal together on a shoestring is a skill often born of necessity, and while we might not like to consider ourselves in quite the bad shape of the Great Depression or the other hard times we’ve heard our grandparents and great-grandparents discuss, we’re entering a period where the average household is going to get far more conscious of costs if they haven’t already.

Think of it as free food, and a challenge for your creativity.

Make it a challenge to use a few items a week in your cooking. Blend vegetables into soup to make them disappear, and throw in that strange can of sauce too. Dump fruit cocktail into a crumble or crisp. Toss a few different types of grains and beans together (it can be done!) to use them up. Ask yourself, what would your grandmother make with this stuff?

Over time, and rather quickly, you’ll see your pile go down. Do your best to not refill your box, and endeavour to shop mindfully for the things you do use. Not every dish will be a winner, but each time you’ll use up something that would otherwise be clutter (and eventually waste) you might just discover some new favourites or long-forgotten treats.

You’ll also be far more cognizant what drives your more impulsive purchases and have greater empathy for those who have fewer choices than you do. What’s more, you’ll be flexing your cookings skills without spending a dime, and these days a dime saved is far more than one earned.