clearing the pantry: Tereza's 2026 cheap meal challenge thread

This thread is to document cheapo meals I make as I clean out my pantry and freezer!!

Every year I look at the pantry and realize things are getting out of control. In January I started to draw down but it's almost Easter and the situation has only barely changed. So I'm taking the next month to Clear the Pantry (erm, 2 pantries actually) and Freezer!  
My general rules are not to buy anything new, unless it's a great deal on sale or fresh produce (also good deals, generally). Extra points for using garden produce.
I'm going to highlight the components I used that motivated that specific meal (something going bad, something that has been loitering in the pantry for years, etc).

Details: I cook for 3 people who bring lunches, and we try to only go out for one meal a week. Two people are lactose intolerant and one is an ovo-vegetarian (but she'll eat around meat if needed). We are all trying to eat less white flour and more fiber, but my family does appreciate a snack cake or something similar each week as motivation.

We started last week....
Friday, March 20: tomato-basil pasta with ground chicken (very loosely based on https://www.savoringitaly.com/sicilian-pasta-with-ground-chicken/ - no peas, no ricotta, no canned tomato paste or tomatoes). No pic, unfortunately, used up a tube of frozen ground chicken I got a great deal on, with 5 fresh tomatoes that were going bad and a packet of weird twisty pasta.

Sunday:

Peach cake (from https://www.christinascucina.com/peach-cake-easy-recipe-no-peeling-necessary/ , a fabulous recipe I will definitely use again with other fruit... used up half a kg of peaches sliced and frozen when they were in season in December
and
lentils with pasta (very loosely based on https://www.theguardian.com/food/2026/mar/18/lentil-recipes-braised-with-pasta-and-spiced-with-cod-stuart-gillies, using onions, squash from my garden, and a packet of tiny shell pasta that had been cluttering up the pantry for years). The pasta is topped with a panko bread crumb business inspired by that recipe (no brioche in my house, lol) that uses garlic and nutritional yeast and oregano, tastes like garlic bread and gives the whole thing a satisfying crunch. This will be lunches and occasionally breakfast for all of us this week, but it's going pretty fast...

Last night I made arepas with a chicken fajita type business, along with avocado sauce, pico de gallo and curtido (cabbage slaw).

Some months ago I saw instant arepa flour in a store and was so excited I bought it. Here in my region they eat a lot of corn but never this type of flavor (and never nixtamalized). Now we have a lot of Venezuelan immigrants and they're bringing their food, and so I grabbed the flour. Then it sat in my cabinet.... It's also avocado season here, so I decided to make some arepas and stuff them. I had some bell peppers that needed using up too, so I made two different recipes together: the avocado sauce and arepas from this recipe https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1024438-arepas and some bell pepper chicken fajitas from here https://www.budgetbytes.com/oven-fajitas/ (made in two frying pans, not putting on the oven for this).
Ah yes and I had a sad cabbage so made some curtido to go with, need to have some kind of veggie on the table.
The kid took the pic, my arepas were too thin (I was only able to cut some of them in half for stuffing). I used half the bag of flour so next time I'll know to make a bigger batch, make them fatter, and send them immediately to the air fryer for a bake til they puff up enough to slice nicely.

Tuesday was my night off (ate those lentils and pasta again for dinner.....)
Last night I decided to use a bag of rice flour I bought for some reason I cannot remember. It's very fine, so I decided to make cheung fun (steamed rice noodles). They were good, but not as good as the noodles I buy, unfortunately. My husband, however, has never tasted the real thing and he thought they were fabulous. Too bad it only used a cup of the flour.....  I also am drowning in long beans, so made them dry fried with sichuan pepper, along with a cucumber salad and air fryer wings with basic Chinese-type seasoning (used the rice flour for that too). And a zucchini that was going bad, cooked up with miso and sake.

Last night I made some Indian food. Again, only a tiny bit of rice and semolina flour were used (sigh) in a dosa-type crepe. I had to prune some of my curry leaf tree back and so made curry leaf dal and chopped a bunch of leaves to go in potato filling for the dosas (also using sweet potato leaves from the garden and some sad potatoes). I also had a kilo of brown Japanese rice, which is something I buy when I am feeling nostalgic but then forget to eat regularly, so I made tomato black pepper rice with that.

I did some serious freezer and fridge cleanout this week too- used up green mango pickle, some condiments, some frozen stuff. I'm realizing now that most of my pantry problem now lies in caramelized onions (I have so much frozen....) but especially flours. I have a bunch that I really just don't know what to do with, or use in such small quantities that it seems like they're endless (amaranth, semolina, rye, cassava, rice, brown rice....). We used to eat a lot more bread/pancakes/baked goods, I suppose.
Today I am going to make some rye bread, I think, and this weekend maybe make some pudding or something with the rice flour or semolina. Next week, I have some ideas for the onions (and the store has some meat specials today that will fit in well).

Today I forgot the picture!!! But I used another package of ground chicken  to make with Thai basil from the garden and some jasmine rice. I also made Korean pumpkin salad with a garden pumpkin that had a rotten spot. Not much progress on the pantry, but made space in the freezer and fridge....
Tomorrow, rye bread and maybe more.....

So Saturday I whipped up a quick pork stir fry with winged beans from the garden with some fun steamed buns, Filipino style. They're called puto and they use white rice flour!! I still have plenty left and so there we are. We used a fifth of the sugar so we could use it to sop up the sauce.

I also made sourdough rye bread today--- nothing beautiful but it was delicious. I've not had rye bread since I was last in the US a few years ago so it was a treat.

Your meals look great!

I was thinking the same thing - colourful, healthy and full of variety - I wish I was eating at your's Tereza! Using up the store cupboard landmarks never looked so appetising.

Thank you!!! We are really big on eating all the colors and getting our fiber and of course, with all these beans in the garden it's either eat fresh or drown in garden produce!!!

Last night I made chicken yassa and used up ALL THE FROZEN CARAMELIZED ONIONS!!! (Pardon the all caps but this is a big deal, those onions took up so much space for so long....) threw in the obligatory long beans (garden is still producing though fall is here) and we ate the last of the cabbage curtido from last week.

I love seeing your meals and, as others have said, they look so wonderful!

We also have that abundance of long beans every summer and besides eating everyday I cut into 1" pieces and blanch for a minute or two and then dehydrate....we just ran out of our last pint out of several that we used freely all winter and I'm missing them!

Thank you Judith!
Long beans are such a great crop, aren't they?  I don't know how I lived without them!! They are so hardy and resist the pests that take out my pole beans, they produce huge yields, the season is loooooong and they stand up really well to pickling and long simmering too. Plus they have that tiny taste of asparagus, I think, which is pleasant.

Tereza you're smart.  When things sit around for too long they expire or freezer burn.  I try to stay on top of it by making sure we eat all that we have in as timely a manner as I can.  I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks about this.  There are a few things of my husband's that have sat around, but other than that anything we both eat gets eaten quickly most of the time.

This week has been a wild ride!!
Last night I made a pork and long bean stirfry, along with cabbage soy noodles and my huge harvest of 5 (yes! 5!) bitter melons and a few okra. They were delish, but I wish I had better production of both. We did not eat the butterfly in the bowl to the right of the picture, by the way... I found this gorgeous creature in one of my seed trays and put it aside for my daughter the entomologist, and it was there to make sure it didn't get lost in the shuffle!!

Today was so nuts that I forgot to take a pic, but we have a long weekend so I made a big dinner for extra meals. I used up more pantry stocks making turkish chickpeas and rice-- the rice is cooked with a bit of small pasta and that meant getting rid of some alphabet pasta!!! I also used up some nasty eggplant (with tomato and garlic sauce) and made flatbread with a cup of amaranth flour (another pantry hoodlum). My husband made a batch of yogurt the other day that seemed a bit off so I drained it to make yogurt cheese to eat with the bread (and on our toast tomorrow morning) and used the drained whey as the liquid in the flatbread, which gave it a nice flavor.  

I'm finally seeing progress in the freezer, not so much in the pantry but little by little. Easter means baking and food projects so I'm hoping to keep on chipping away.

So this weekend our cooking focused on hot cross buns (i make them to give to people on Easter) and brownies. Lots of holiday baking!!!

Still, I made some Moroccan semolina pancakes for breakfast (used up 2 cups of semolina flour) and for lunch Vietnamese rice flour crepes (another cup down).... little by little the pantry is getting there. Today I cleaned it out and reassessed...
This week my targets are:
Oat flour
Amaranth flour
Rice flour
Glutinous rice flour

I also have a full (big) jar of peach jam that opened accidentally and has to be used. I'd make muffins but frankly I think we're all tired of baked goods right now!!!

What an inspiring thread! Your pictures are making me hungry.

Do you have any tasty ideas for polenta? Or sesame seeds? I too many of both of these.

The last couple days have been just getting dinner on the table, so no progress on pantry. Today is my day off so I'll be eating odds and ends of what's in the fridge. Tomorrow I will be making something with a big thing of pork bones I need to get out of the fridge so stay tuned.....

Kate, we eat a lot of sesame seeds, like I buy them by the kg! I really enjoy roasting them and throwing them on everything (roasted and then coursely ground in the mortar and pestle, they make something basic like rice into a luxury. we eat a lot of Korean and Japanese food and they are constantly present in both).

If you have burdock root, one of my favorite things is to take the fat and lumpy parts (not the slim pretty ones that everyone wants to eat), peel them and pressure cook them in a bit of dashi til they yield to a fork. Then I squash them with a roller and mix with that nice ground sesame (maybe 3T) and a bit of sugar and soy sauce and a drip of sesame oil. (gobo tataki, a slightly different take is here https://www.justonecookbook.com/pounded-burdock-root-with-sesame-sauce/ -- I would use at  least twice the sesame and also I cook the crap out of the gobo, which is how my family likes it. It's not baby food, but if we want firm gobo I'll make kimpira.

I also really like making smoothies with sesame. Frozen banana with sesame makes a hell of a drink (use water or milk, both are great). I also have tried making my own halva, you need a really potent blender but it's good stuff. Sesame is also high in calcium, and when I was vegan I used to make sesame milk (soak over night, blend, strain or don't if you're using it in a smoothie). It's a really nice drink and a good ingredient for nondairy baking.

As for polenta, if you're not making your fabulous polenta sourdough (!!) I am a big fan of "serve on a bed of polenta". I didn't grow up eating polenta but I do like it in the winter as a carb, to go with a ragu or a chicken cacciatore.... if you can throw some arugula between the polenta and the stew, even better.... Where I live there are a lot of Italian immigrants and everyone grew up eating polenta as a staple food, so on buffets you can usually find some instead of rice or bread. Beans on polenta is delightful.

Oh boy. So last week was wild again, so we ate a lot of quick staples that didn't affect my pantry problem. The things that did help, in no particular order....

[no pic] Korean pork bone stew (gamjatang)-- I buy pork in volume and then break it down, usually a piece of shoulder or leg. It sometimes comes presliced, but always with bones and skin. I save the bones and fat for later use-- this was a few months worth of the bones, cooked up with some garden veggies. Cooks in the crockpot all day, and now that the weather is turning cold it's a nice treat.

Sausage slop (an unfair name for what turned out to be excellent) with Brazilian cuzcuz- here we steam a kind of precooked cornmeal to make a couscous type carb side dish.  I learned recently that different types of cornmeal can be used for this, and so this was made with half of the "right" kind and half of a bag of another meal I had laying around (I buy it to put on the bottom of pizza and sourdough when I bake it and then it sits around and gets buggy forever. I've decided to use this up and then stop buying this "wrong" kind).  This also used up all the stragglers in the veggie drawer on a Sunday when I really didn't want to go out and spend money on food (and we needed lunches for Monday). I bought a few sausages, squeezed them out of their casings, and fried it up with onions and the sad onions, green beans, and peppers that needed using. Also half a cubed pumpkin that was in the freezer (other half going into pumpkin muffins tomorrow). Then added some broth, some dried tomatoes and fresh herbs that also needed to go, and made a gravy.  

Finally, I made a big honking donut-- from https://theviewfromgreatisland.com/glazed-old-fashioned-buttermilk-doughnut-bundt-cake-recipe/ . It used oat flour and I put in half a cup of amaranth flour, so it is cake but it also keeps you full for days-- we ate two pieces and then took the dog out to walk 8km and weren't hungry for 6 hours afterward, it was remarkable. Anyway, the amaranth flour is gone, wooooot!!