I am an obsessive buyer of consumable and the problem with consumable is that they have a "Best Before" Date or even Expiry Date, whether it is meat or dried food or marinating sauces / powder or a fashion that goes out of trend fairly quickly. Of course, for fashion, one could keep them in boxes to give away or to wait one cycle for that particular trend to return. So for food, it is dangerous to keep expired stuff.
I have a freezer full of food and a fridge full of food stuff. I do not know how I accumulated so much and how long but now that I am doing Maid Detox, this is the best time for me to go through these substances one by one. I even set a deadline to finish consuming them or throw them out before end of December. After that, I only stock up things I could eat within 2 weeks or the most a month. I am pretty sure some of the items at the bottom of the freezer will surprise me and that they are from quite a while ago! Due to the frozen nature of the items, I could not recognise what they are or what cut of meat. For a few weeks, I kept buying new meat because I had a dish in mind.
So what is my daily cooking challenge? I would take out from freezer a few items at a time, usually for 5 days cooking, let it defrost and examine what they are, wash them and put them into plastic containers, seasoned with salt and pepper and may be some spices, soya sauce to marinate them and keep them at the bottom of the fridge so that I could plan what to do. On the first day, it is usually very challenging as I would only know what meat are there when I get home from work to cook. I have to decide very quickly what dishes to come up with.
To continue this challenge further, I will do the same with the dry food, canned food cabinet, I try not to buy more things and just use up the items in the cabinet.
I am hoping that I will not waste too much food stuff and learnt the discipline not to over purchase items in the name of stocking up.
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