Cleaning out the food stores is critical to making a meal plan. Many times I would rely on items that I didn’t know had gone bad. I would buy everything else just to discover that the item I planned around was unusable. Or worse yet, I would use it and get sick.
1. Remove Spoiled Foods from Fridge/Freezer
Prior to leaving on vacation, in my pre-vacation cleanout, I had left a package of broccoli. While the broccoli appeared to be fine in the packaging, I’ve learned from my mistakes and I opened it up to discover mold all over but just beneath the visible surface.
The most important tip is to have a reality check. I used to hold onto foods because I should use what I have. What I discovered, though, was I would avoid cooking at home because “I should…eat what I have before I make more food”. All this meant was that I wouldn’t cook at home. The trend isn’t obvious at first, but when I made this connection it makes perfect sense why the food in my house was dangerously old.
I’m not a wonderful cook. It still seems that many of my best meals are complete accidents when I’m improvising in a panic. This makes it very difficult to replicate. Unfortunately, I frequently forget to check whether my oils have gone rancid, flours stale, or chicken freezer burnt.
There have been some genuinely terrible results from cooking with bad ingredients, but then I’d keep them because they weren’t unsafe necessarily…just terrible! So now, I pitch it….before storing ideally.
2. Look for foods that need to be used
Prior to doing the fridge cleanout. I paired up with a buddy to do a 21 item toss. So I hit the pantry up looking for foods that I suspect of causing allergic reactions or items that are far too old to pretend they are okay.
I focused on the canned goods, baking goods, and items that we just tend to trust for long times. There were many frozen specialty flours, stale open snack foods, noodles older than I recall even buying, specialty items I don’t know how to use or don’t like, items bought when I went on a specific diet, and broken items.
Like I said before…reality check. I had plenty of time to have learned how to cook with the items or even try them.
I found the 21-Item-Toss game by Cas from Clutterbug to make this process easy. The goal, of course, would be to never have to toss anything but I’m not there yet.
3. Determine meals that would use these items
I struggle to build the full meal plan in one day, though I would expect that it will eventually be easy to go from this point straight to the meal plan. The entire point of these repeating series, for me, is building the meal plan of safe foods.
This is about foods I won’t have allergic reactions to and can trust even in a flare-up. It can change and it’s been very difficult to accomplish because it’s been changing a lot over the last 10 years.
Anyway….since I can’t just jump into the full meal plan, all I do is decide the meals to use the ingredients expiring or getting old. Right now there aren’t many. This time I have 3 items that are needing to be used, technically past their Best By dates but not Expired.
Pantry Items To Use Up 
Lasagna Noodle Expiration Date 
Wild Rice Expiration Date
The meals chosen for these items are:
- Chicken and Spinach Lasagna
- Chicken and Wild Rice
- Tilapia (from 1st prep) and Rice Pilaf
In the next blog, I’ll review the other meals I filled in with.