Eat Down the Fridge and Craft Down the Stash

This morning, I ran across an article talking about Kim O'Donnel's (has food blog in The Washington Post) week-long challenge to Eat Down the Fridge. Perfect timing, since that was one of my March goals. Basically, it's an effort to quit buying so much stuff from the grocery store and use what you already have stored in your freezer/refrigerator/pantry.

I'd embarked on this exercise last week after receiving my massive Burger's Smokehouse order and realizing that the amount of food in storage is a bit ridiculous for one person who works outside the home. It would be different if I had a family and/or ate all my meals at home.

There's a lot of good stuff housed in my apartment . . . it just needs some assembling. This winter, I fell into the trap of buying quite a bit of ready-made or near-ready-made meals from the store for no good reason, other than laziness.

After one week, my supplies are down a bit, but there's lots more to go, so I'm continuing on this quest for the near future. One of the reasons this is possible is that I do buy lunch Mon-Fri. Someday, I'd love to get in the habit of bringing my lunch more often -- I even have tons of cute bento supplies to keep it fun! -- but I will have to find a way to wake up earlier before this happens.

In a similar vein, I am also ready to Craft Down the Stash. Over the past year, I've amassed a good supply of craft supplies for tons of different projects. This is the year that those projects need to get made. There's enough variety in the stash that it will be difficult (but not impossible!) for me to make an argument for buying much more stuff this year. I think the exceptions will be for finishing items (buttons, backing, frames) or if there's some new amazing thing that is revealed over the year that I simply can not live without.

I believe we'll see a lot of this type of projects in 2009 because of the horrible economy. In my life, I don't need to make changes because of the economy (yet), but I do like the idea of simplification and using what I have rather than buying more . . . even though this philosophy will not stimulate the economy. Ugh - what a dilemma we've all created over the past 8-10 years.