Apricot Tart from the Pantry

What's hiding in your pantry?

I was talking with some on-line friends the other day about how much food we have in our freezers and pantries. Among us there were those that couldn’t last a week without shopping to a few that have copious quantities of food and grocery items stashed away in various locations around the house.

How much is enough and how much is too much I wondered? Do we stock pile food because it makes us feel safe, does it make us feel wealthy or good about ourselves that we can buy all these items? Are we preparing for that unknown disaster that we feel is imminent? Is it a type of genetic trait that carries through from our parents or do we just shop regularly out of habit, with little or no thought to what we have at home? Have you ever really looked in your pantry, counted the packets of casserole mix or tins of tomatoes? And here is the scary bit, have you ever tried putting a dollar value on the items gathering dust on your shelf? So are you saving money or wasting money?

At the end of this discussion, various challenges were thrown down. One lady decided she would not shop for the entire month of August. So far she is still going strong and planning on staying away from the shops until Christmas.

A friend and I have challenged each other to a $0 grocery spend for the next four weeks, and we are coming to the end of the first week. For me, I haven’t shopped for nearly a fortnight. Our challenge excludes fruit and vegetables as neither of us grows our own and allows one essential item, for my friend it is milk, for me it is eggs.

To begin our challenge I did a stock-take of all the items in the kitchen.
We have recently moved towns and into an older house and what seemed like copious amounts of cupboard space quickly disappeared as the pantry was restocked. In fact I have two pantries; one I use for ingredients that tend to make the evening meal and the other for my baking supplies. This pantry also has room to store all my useful and useless gadgets and the biscuit jars so the boys don’t starve. I have a large fridge with a two drawer freezer below and a free standing freezer.

This stock take took quite a while and when I had finish I was horrified to have taken up nine pages. I deleted all regularly used items and now have a list of 189 items that are to be used up and not replaced. So while I will have to restock with meat, fish and baking supplies, there is not much else I’ll need for quite a while.

I choose to buy my meat in bulk, and fruit and vegetables fortnightly from a local market. I then menu plan in rather a loose way by selecting a piece of meat or fish and then going ‘shopping’ in my own fridge and pantry. Perishable vegetables and fruits are eaten first, so by the time the fortnight is up the evening meal can become quite inventive – so far no one has complained.

So my task now is to use up all 189 items. The first thing I made was an apricot tart; a girl needs her sugar when confronted with a mountain like this to climb. I used a purchased pastry case and sprinkled the base with almond meal, but bread crumbs or biscuit crumbs would do fine. Tinned apricots were then laid over the almond meal and a couple of spoonful of juice from the can was poured over. This ran through to the almond meal and when cook produced a sweet cakey layer. A sprinkle of brown sugar and into the oven for 25 minutes; delicious, and two things off my list.

How much is in your pantry?


These are the fish stock cubes I mentioned in the fish pie recipe a little while ago. Worth getting if you can find them or something similar.