A ziploc bag of leftover shnitzel found new life once I heated it up with some sliced mushrooms and leftover wine. Lots of other goodies came out of my freezer including assorted hamburger patties, some salmon fillets that I dressed up with Spanish eggplant that had been lurking in my refrigerator and six pint-sized containers of brown rice, farro and quinoa, all of which became lovely side dishes. I did my best to use up assorted produce that had overstayed its welcome in my fruit bin, supplementing our hopefully healthy meals with an assortment of dill pickles, banana peppers and a jar of sauerkraut that was about to celebrate its three-month anniversary at Chez Eller.
Of course, certain things didn’t go as planned. My plans for Mushroom Chumus Soup, an effort to use up chumus which always seems to languish for weeks before it finally gets thrown out, fizzled when I opened up the container only to discover it was nearly empty because someone had actually been eating it. The herring that also seems to exist just to make my fridge look full without ever being eaten? Even I am not psychotic enough to try to repurpose that into something else. And the stash of rock candy that has been sitting in my pantry since Purim 2014 did get thrown out. It’s not that I couldn’t have thrown it into my Shabbos gefilte fish in lieu of sugar, but I couldn’t see my family tolerating green gefilte fish, which is what color the rock candy was.
By the end of the week I found myself avoiding recipes that used eggs because we only had two left, but that’s okay because I can tell you from experience that when it comes to baking, mayonnaise makes a fairly good egg substitute and, for reasons I cannot explain, there seems to be six jars in my pantry. Thankfully, we never had to resort to crumbling up granola bars to use as cereal and, more importantly, we never ran out of staples like chocolate, Oreos or frozen garlic cubes. And the assorted cookies and wafer rolls that seem to multiply mysteriously in the pantry when no one is looking will get used in chocolate cookie bark, cookies and creamy ice cream or find themselves reborn as pie crusts.
The cranberry pie that sparked this whole idea? I served it to my parents when they came to visit, figuring they were the only people in the world who would happily eat vintage cake. Ironically, it turned out to be so delicious that my husband asked me to make it again. I wish I could, but to be perfectly honest, while I remember that I found the recipe online in a desperate effort to use up a Costco-sized bag of cranberries, I can’t for the life of me remember which website the recipe came from and Google isn’t being helpful.
We survived the week so well that no one in my family ever realized they were living through my planned experiment. Of course, now that I can actually see the walls in my fridge and freezer again, it is definitely time to go shopping so I can start stocking up for the yomim tovim!