Eat Up the Food in My House Challenge

Tomorrow I’m starting my first ever eat up the food in my house challenge. 

It’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like: I only eat food I already have at home. I have a lot of frozen food and random odds and ends I’d like to use up.

Rules I made for myself: 

Any day I eat other food doesn’t count toward the 7 days. If I buy food Saturday (Halloween) while out with friends, for example, I have to tack on another day at the end. 

I can buy fresh produce if I run out of vegetables. Not trying to make myself sick here. 

I can buy eggs if I run out. I just love eggs, plus they’re a really cheap protein. 

I started the challenge with a produce box from Misfits Market (see below). I thought about saying I though this fit well with the them, but really I just forgot to cancel the delivery after I decided to do this. 

Goals:

Use up as much food as possible in my house. I’m going to try to feed myself just from that for 7 days. If there’s more food at the end, I might keep going, but I’m not going to stuff myself with food just to get through it.

Clean out the freezer and cabinets of stock items I bought during quarantine when there was some legitimate fear of not being able to get food (either due to short supplies or lockdown).

Have as little food as possible left in my apartment when I rent out the whole place this winter. (More on that later.) 

Mostly this is food I’ve bought and not eaten or made too much of and frozen. But some of it is odds and ends from former roommates (pre-Covid, I had a lot of very short term renters), and other stuff I have randomly collected. I hate food waste, so I will often take things left at the end of group trips. 

Misfits Market is a company that collects unwanted fresh produce and provides boxes of it inexpensively (compared to the grocery store) so it doesn’t get thrown out. Food waste sucks. 

I’m not promoting this specific product, but I do believe strongly in recapturing food that will otherwise be wasted.

I’m going to start tonight with an assessment of what I have, make a general meal plan and start tomorrow on this adventure.

Check out how it’s going starting from day 1.