Celebrating My Freezer and Pantry

I'm continuing to look for little things to celebrate each day through the month of February and as I was making dinner last night I realized that one thing I can celebrate is my freezer and pantry. I went grocery shopping ten days ago and we all of the kids home through the weekend so my refrigerator is bare. Dan doesn't get paid until the middle of the week so I have to make things stretch.

So I'm very thankful for all the canning and freezing I did this past summer.  I also generally have a good supply of items in my pantry to choose from though that's going down too but I love a challenge and decided to rise to it. The reason my pantry is fairly well stocked is that I purchase the same type of items each month and then make my meals around them rather than the other way around.  I find that it's much less expensive to do it that way than picking meals and shopping for the ingredients.  So I always have a certain amount of pasta, tomato items, starches, meats, etc.

Last night I pulled 3 cans of tuna from the pantry and put together a dinner of tuna patties, Asian style rice noodles and peas (from the freezer).

I'm making jam for the local market on March 10th and the blueberries I used yesterday were from this past summer's crop and were in the freezer.  I also have blackberries, raspberries, apples and peaches in their as well as rhubarb.

The other night I found sausage in my freezer so pulled together a creamy Alfredo dish with sausage, farfalle, zucchini, mushrooms, spinach and parmesan cheese with fresh nutmeg grated on top. Tomorrow's dinner will be barbecued short ribs (from the freezer) with rice (the only starch I have left in the pantry) and green beans (from the freezer). The beef stock that I'm using in the ribs will be leftover from French dip I made a few weeks ago and froze.

I love trying to make things stretch and yet, come up with palatable meals that my family will eat. So today I am celebrating the fact that all that hard work throughout the summer is paying off now.