Eating from the Pantry Challenge - Planned for January 2009

My husband and I (A.) recently reviewed the month of December for our bills - which, incidentally, were way lower than usual. It would appear that nothing puts a damper on casual runs to Target, Giant, and other locales like having a newborn at home!

Soon after our monthly bill review, frugality blogger Crystal Paine of Money Saving Mom posted her Eating from the Pantry challenge for the month of January. The timing for the concept was impeccable. Crystal notes: "We're attempting to avoid grocery shopping as much as possible and will be blogging what we're feeding our families, creative recipes we're concocting, and how we're pulling this whole thing off."

While I'm not planning on precisely following Crystal's parameters set for herself and the Paine family, I'm already in a scenario where my husband is doing nearly all of the grocery shopping from my written lists and a few assigned coupons - and I'm home, dreaming up ways to use my stockpile. Like Crystal, we're going to focus what minimized grocery shopping we do on procuring lots of fresh produce and dairy, with little-to-no processed foods bought. (Bonus - that also de facto reduces coupon-finding and -clipping for the month.) So, doing the challenge is not a huge leap of faith - it's more like rendering what we're already doing in this life season in official blog format. I have a feeling that this is going to involve a LOT of casseroles, pasta dishes, and fruit smoothies.

I'll be posting ways that we are trying to stretch our pantry and fridge/freezer contents over the coming weeks, and at the end of January do a bit of summing up of what I've learned, money saved, recipes invented, my husband's perspective, etc. Follow my Eating from the Pantry Challenge blog posts by clicking our "Eating from the Pantry" label...and follow other bloggers who are doing the challenge by seeing Crystal's Mr. Linky list at her introductory post here.

Are you going to be trying the Eating from the Pantry Challenge? What strategies are you planning?
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