During a recent bout of house cleaning, I took a good, hard look at my pantry and saw a bunch of stuff in there I’ve been ignoring.  I have some perfectly fine foodstuffs, bought on a whim many moons ago, but never used in any recipe.

Some food was salvageable, but some, including a boxes of cake mix, corn starch, and potato pancakes, were old enough to have a college education.  They promptly hit the trash, wasting my money (in 2005 dollars) and adding a tiny speck to my footprint on the earth.

I don’t want to make it a habit of wasting food anymore, so I took twenty minutes and made an inventory of my pantry, refrigerator, and freezer.  My resolution is to start my grocery shopping from my pantry, not from impulses in the grocery store.  For instance, that box of falafel that’s been in there since I moved into the apartment, making it the oldest non-expired food item will be dinner tomorrow night, and it’s the anchor of my shopping list.  Plus, I’m going to pick out one other item in house to accompany it.  I wonder if it goes well with pizza sauce?

The day of the inventory I took the Udon noodles I bought months ago when I decided to give up pasta (PS, that lasted a week…) and combined them with the water chestnuts I bought on a whim last spring and the tofu I purchased last month and never used and made this recipe from Vegan Dad: http://vegandad.blogspot.com/2009/06/udon-noodles-with-sesame-crusted-tofu.html.  It was delicious, easy, and vegan, plus it refrigerated well into leftovers.  My goal now is to do a monthly pantry audit to save money and to prevent all that unnecessary waste.