2023 Pantry Challenge

It’s the beginning of a new year, and that means it’s time for the annual pantry challenge. Last year we participated in the Three Rivers Pantry Challenge for the first time ever, and I was hooked! We started January of 2022 with a $500 overspend in our annual food budget. At the end of the two month challenge we ended with a $400 surplus in our food budget. Needless to say, we decided we’d repeat the success again this year.

Why a pantry challenge?

Instead of asking why you should participate in a pantry challenge, a better question would be why not participate? Unless of course you are one of those lucky individuals who manage to always balance what you buy with what you eat (if you are one of those people, please let me know how you do it!). Don’t get me wrong, I meal plan on a weekly basis (ok…I’ve now moved to every other week, but you get the point) and we are good at sticking to our menu. Unless we decide to eat out, get sick, have guests over…you know the drill. Then all that food I had purchased just piles up, or rots in the fridge. And let’s not even talk about all the food from the garden!

So how do you make sure that you finish all those condiments before they go bad? Or that ground beef that’s fallen into the dark corners of the freezer? Not to mention that can of chickpeas you bought to make hummus for that vegetarian friend.

After last year’s pantry challenge, I learned that it’s a lot easier to plan meals when you don’t have a ton of food in the freezer and on the pantry shelves. There will always be a seasonal ebb and flow in our house, but overall I am looking to reduce the amount of food we store regularly, and to be better about using what is on hand.

When I meal plan, I have typically focused more on what we want to eat as opposed to using what we have in the house to eat. I also can a lot of our garden produce which we never seem to eat our way through. Part of that is due to recently becoming empty nesters, so I’m still figuring out how much and what to preserve. In addition, as much as I hate to say it, I’ve also not done a great job managing our food inventory in the past. This has all meant that my food inventory regularly got out of hand.

With the skyrocketing cost of food the past couple of years, this has had to change. The Three Rivers Pantry Challenge is part of the answer. 

What is the Three Rivers Pantry Challenge?

The challenge is a way to help us learn to use up all those odds and ends cluttering our fridge, pantry shelves, and freezers. By being forced to eat what we have on hand, we get creative with using the food we have in the house, try new recipes, and reduce the amount of food we waste. This of course has the added benefit of helping out our wallets in the process. And who wouldn’t like to save a few dollars on groceries?

The pantry challenge kicks off on January 1 each year, and runs for two months (or as long as you like!). What a better time than right after the holidays when we’re often dealing with all the leftovers? 

Jessica at Three Rivers Homestead has one simple rule for the pantry challenge. There are no rules! Or said differently, you make the rules that best suit you and your family. Many homesteaders who participate in the challenge have chickens and cows, so they have a relatively consistent supply of eggs and milk. Depending on what they put away in their freezers and on their canning shelf, this means that they can possibly get by with no trips to the grocery store for the duration of the challenge.

Here at the Suburban Farmhouse, we live on a large city lot and are unable to raise animals due to our Homeowner’s Association Covenants. Sadly, this means no fresh eggs or milk products for us. Since we enjoy bacon and eggs for our weekend breakfast, and yogurt during the week, these are things that we will continue to purchase. Coffee is another thing that we cannot grow, or live without, so this will also be on the list of allowable items to buy along with a few other items that we cannot grow ourselves.

Because we will be going grocery shopping, we decided that we also need to set a maximum spend limit. This way we can’t go crazy in the grocery store and buy more than we need. In 2022 I was grocery shopping weekly, and we set a spending limit of $25 per week. This year, we will keep the same limit, but I will be grocery shopping every other week. 

As we start the challenge this year, we have a grocery budget deficit carry over of $340 for 2022. This means we overspent our grocery budget again. For some reason the end of the year always seems to hit hard. The good news is that this year’s deficit is smaller than last year’s, and with some of the changes we implemented, my hope is to have no deficit at the end of this year. 

Our Rules

• Dairy
  • Milk for yogurt
  • Cheese
  • oat milk for cooking and cereal
• Eggs
• Coffee – without it we can’t wake up!
• Hygiene products – we don’t want to stink
• Maximum spend – $50 every other week
• Try to extend our challenge to three months

Once you’ve agreed on the rules that you’ll follow during the pantry challenge it’s time to take inventory and do some planning.

Getting Started

As we prepare for the challenge, I like to take a thorough inventory of our freezers, fridge, and pantry shelves. This means emptying out our chest freezer and making a complete list of everything hiding deep inside. It’s amazing how much can hide inside our freezer, and what ends up hiding at the bottom by the end of the year. Emptying, sorting, and writing everything down can be a big job so I often enlist the help of my husband. He digs everything out and lets me know what we have (and how much). Meanwhile I’m armed with a pen and notepad to write everything down. And should he fall into the abyss, I stand ready to grab ahold of him!

Over the summer I implemented a new system in the freezer that has helped to keep things more organized. Using some hard side totes we’ve been able to separate the meat products which makes taking inventory easier and means that we don’t need to do it as often to keep track of everything. No system is perfect however, so a quarterly inventory and reorganization is a great way to keep on top of things. 

Once the chest freezer is done, I take inventory of the pantry, canning shelves and fridge. I try to take note of anything that is nearing its expiration date so we can use that up first. This includes any fresh produce that we have on hand, whether from our garden or from the grocery store. Now I’m armed with all the information I need to begin meal planning.

What do meals look like?

Initially meal planning is easy. There are plenty of things to use up, and ideas for meals are easy. As the challenge progresses, it becomes more of a challenge. You suddenly realize that maybe you should have saved your bacon fat for frying your eggs in because you just used the last of the oil yesterday and now you need it for the muffin recipe you wanted to make. Thinking ahead, and using all of your food options is key to a successful challenge.

There are some basic guidelines (or rules if you will) that can help get you through the challenge. When menu planning, 

• Eat your oldest food first, and anything fresh before anything canned or frozen
• Eat what you have on hand
• Pick a food item, find a recipe to use it, and make substitutions for what you don’t have in the house. Food items can include:
  • Canned goods
  • Herbs & spices
  • Veggies lurking in the bottom of the freezer
  • Meats
  • Frozen leftovers 
  • Weird, mystery foods in the pantry or freezer
• Always make a weekly menu
  • Print a meal planning calendar
  • Plan out 3-4 weeks at a time so you can better use what you have on hand
  • Plan breakfast, lunch, and dinner so you’ll have enough ingredients
  • Get creative with leftovers

Menu Planning

We eat primarily the same thing for breakfasts week to week. Our biggest challenge is to ensure we have enough bacon on hand prior to our challenge starting since this is not something we will be allowed to buy. That said, I may be picking up some pork belly before the 3 months is up since I cure and smoke all our bacon, which is best done while it’s cold outside.

Lunches are typically dinner leftovers or sandwiches. Cold cuts can begin to be an issue toward the end of the challenge, so in order to stretch what we have on hand, I freeze our cold cuts and thaw in small portions so they don’t go bad in the fridge. I also take any leftover breast meat from the Christmas turkey, along with any duck or chicken we eat during the challenge, and slice it up as cold cuts. 

Bread can also be a challenge since we eat it for lunches and for breakfasts on the weekend. Buying enough bread to last three months would defeat the purpose of the challenge, so we bake our bread instead. We’re avid bakers, and buy our flour in bulk during the year. The pantry challenge gives us a great excuse to use up some of the flour we keep on hand, which in turn helps us to flip our inventory and keep the flour from going rancid.

Are there items that you know you will need on hand? If so, can you make them yourself or do you need to add them to your approved purchases list?

Menus for January 1-15 (week 1 and 2)

• Weekday breakfasts
  • Yogurt and homemade granola
  • Cereal that was purchased for the holiday guests
• Weekend breakfasts
  • Bacon and eggs
  • Breads, toast, and jams
• Lunches
  • Dinner leftovers
  • Sandwiches with cold cuts 
• Dinners – Week 1:
  • Monday
    • Roasted chicken thighs (freezer)
    • Potato pancakes (made with mashed potato leftovers from Christmas)
    • Roasted broccoli (from the fridge)
  • Tuesday
    • Potato leek soup
      • Canned potatoes (pantry)
      • Leeks (root cellar)
  • Wednesday
    • Leftovers
  • Thursday – guests over to dinner
    • Chicken thighs (freezer)
    • Peach BBQ sauce (home canned, pantry)
    • Roasted veggies (from root cellar)
    • Cheesy polenta (frozen leftovers from holiday)
    • Wine (wine rack)
  • Friday
    • Homemade pizza (all ingredients in the house)
  • Saturday
    • Ham soup (ham bones saved in freezer)
    • Veggies (root cellar)
    • Dinner roll or baguette (freezer)
  • Sunday
    • Leftovers
• Dinners – week 2
  • Monday
    • Chicken pot pie (crust, veggies, and meat in freezer)
  • Tuesday
    • Squash lasagne (freezer)
  • Wednesday
    • Leftovers
  • Thursday
    • Homemade pizza 
  • Friday – Sunday
    • Weekend plans

Moving Forward

When we completed the 2022 pantry challenge, we realized that we could easily have gone on for a third month but decided not to at that time. We also discussed the possibility of doing a second pantry challenge mid-way through the year. However life got away from us and we did not do the second challenge. 

In 2023, my plan is to continue the challenge through March, or as long into March as we can. We may have to make some modifications to our rules as we move into March, but my hope is to continue as long as we can. I also plan on doing a shorter mid-year challenge in order to clean out the pantry and freezer before the fall harvest.

We’ll be posting updates as we move through the next couple of months with the pantry challenge. We hope you’ll join us, and share your journey in the comments below.