Found Ingredients

Tuesday: Spent $145 at Whole Foods. Friday: Spent $135 at Holiday Market.

Saturday: Head spinning. How did I spend so much money on food in such a short span of time?

Better yet, what did I buy?

“Let’s not go grocery shopping again for at least a week,” I said to my fiancé, Dan.

“Agreed,” he said.

And so we set out on a quest to cook using “found ingredients” from the pantry, freezer or fridge.

Put the sub rolls from Holiday in the freezer to hold until we were ready to make fish sandwiches for dinner. Fish was flash-frozen, from Whole Foods. Already in the freezer.

Roasted the cauliflower I bought a week earlier at Eastern Market on a sunny cool Saturday. Olive oil, curry powder, a bit of salt. Yum.

Saturday night, made lentil soup from the bag of red lentils I found in the cupboard, a cup of barley to thicken it, a can of stewed tomatoes, vegetable broth from the pantry plus sautéed kale, celery, carrots and onion, all from one of the shopping trips. A sprinkling of Parmesan cheese on top and the soup was satisfying, filling, delish.

Baked ziti for one night became three days of lunches, too. Made two versions: one with sautéed crumbled sausage, a jar of Newman’s Own vodka sauce and shredded cheese and another with just Asher’s favorite Don Pepino pizza sauce and shredded cheese. Even my picky-9-year-old loved it and was happy to pack it for school lunch.

Not surprisingly, the vegetables I’d bought a week prior at Eastern Market had staying power. Yellow and orange peppers lasted nearly two weeks (cut up in lunches) and the cauliflower didn’t turn brown before I could cook it.

For salad – no greens left, but I was not going to the store! – I combined a can of corn, two tomatoes diced, the last half of the cucumber, one chopped scallion and a jar of hearts of palm, sliced into pieces. Tossed with our favorite creamy Caesar dressing and it was a fantastic salad that I could actually save in a Tupperware because there was no lettuce wilting away.

We finished the bread before it became moldy. Dipped into our frozen fruit for smoothies. Sent oatmeal in thermoses for two lunches. The bacon I bought and fried up over the weekend became sandwich enhancements and a quick crispy snack.

It is possible to slow down and eat the items we fill our houses with. It is possible to cut corners when grocery shopping without cutting quality.

I still won’t buy products with high fructose corn syrup or damaging food dyes but I don’t have to break the bank. A little ingenuity, a couple of cookbooks, and a willingness to reinvent the dinner wheel is all it takes.