pantry challenge

awhile back, i read on one of the many blogs i follow about the concept of a “pantry challenge” and was intrigued.  the basic idea is to try to go for a week (or two weeks or three days or whatever) without buying any groceries.  the point is partially to motivate you to use up some food that may have been sitting in your house for awhile and that you always overlook and also partially to save money and also partially (at least for me) to get me out of the “we don’t have anything in the house to eat!” mindset.  so anyway, we were walking around the farmer’s market one saturday morning earlier in august when i decided that this was the week for a pantry challenge.  after we got home from the market, no more food buying for a week!  (except for the milk that gets delivered every other wednesday–have i mentioned that i love living in a dairy state?)

we got all the way to saturday night (yes, the same saturday that i’d decided to begin this challenge) before i wailed in despair that we couldn’t even go one day without getting groceries!  we were out of hamburger buns.  we’d just grilled up a bunch of beautiful hamburgers and some yummy portabella mushrooms and we had no buns.  we morosely ate them on slices of bread (so smooshy and leaky) thinking of all of the leftovers we’d have to eat on plain bread* when suddenly, i remembered a recipe i’d marked in google reader recently for… hamburger buns!  it was too late to make them for that supper, of course, and i didn’t have any of the “bread flour” the recipe called for, but pantry challenge weeks call for drastic measures, so i just used all-purpose flour and look at the beauties i baked (see photo at top)!  they were so incredibly yummy and not really all that difficult to make (especially with my friend, the kitchenaid stand mixer) and the only thing that i would change is to make them smaller next time.  splitting the dough into only a dozen pieces made for some really huge “buns.”

they also fared quite well as the basis for leftover “scandanavian sandwich” later in the week.**

oh, and i ended up stretching the challenge to slightly over two weeks with only two eating-out cheats (one was a lunch date–how could i refuse my dear sweet hubby’s invitation?–and the other was on the night of the library carnival, which is probably the most exhausting day i have all year long).  interestingly, when we finally went for groceries i found myself feeling less like i needed to “stock up” on things than i normally do.  who cares if we run out of one particular ingredient?  there’s other food we can cook.

i had meant to make a farmer’s market exception between the two weeks, but got completely rained out so i had to make the produce stretch too.  i was intrigued by which foods i missed the most–cucumbers and lemons (and no, i can’t get lemons at the farmer’s market) were near the top of the list.  who knew?

and hooray for mr. happy stuff who even participated in the pantry challenge for his work lunches!

*we have a charcoal grill, so whenever we fire up the coals, we tend to grill up about a week’s worth of food.

**if you actually follow that link (or if you’re related to me) you’ll find that normally the recipe i’m referring to is called a scandanavian sandwich wheel.  i think it’s from some magazine from when i was a kid and when we were little we also used to slice a hard-boiled egg and fan it out prettily in the middle of the “wheel” and we also added a “celery tree” in the middle of the egg fan, but since mr. happy stuff is not a big fan of pretty much all of the ingredients of said wheel, i’m realizing that it’s more convenient to just make an actual sandwich (no flat, pizza-shaped wheel)–bonus points if you have a croissant or brioche-type bun to eat it on.