Into the Woods

One of my sayings is that I can always squeeze one more meal out of an empty kitchen. Today is a squeeze day.

It’s Tuesday morning. Starting Friday evening, snow started falling. By Saturday morning, it looked like a blizzard, with 10 to 12 inches of snow on the ground. That night, the low temperature was about 8 degrees F. On Sunday night, the low was about 5 degrees F. The kitchen was prepared for being snowed in, though fresh food was started to run low. I had not been to Whole Foods in more than two weeks. Nor am I going to Whole Foods today. The Smart car is still very much snowed in and is not going anywhere for a while. Even though the Jeep would get out perfectly well, I’d rather cook from the bottom of the kitchen than clean the snow off the Jeep and drive it on salty roads.

I call this “cooking from the bottom of the kitchen.” In the refrigerator, there are eggs, milk, plenty of wine and ale, lots of butter, and all sorts of sauces and such. In the cabinets, there is no shortage of flour or oil or things that come in cans. It’s fresh food that is always the problem. I just took an inventory. I have half an onion, a lot of celery, and a winter squash. There are lots of sweet potatoes (I had bought a bushel of sweet potatoes a few weeks ago). We are nowhere close to starving. But the objective, of course, is not to avoid starving but to make something good out of a kitchen in which supplies are dwindling. Cooking from the bottom of the kitchen is a good exercise in frugality. It gets you to use up things you’ve been ignoring but that need to be used. The beets that I had been ignoring got eaten last night.

So then, for supper I’m thinking butternut squash soup (with lots of celery), a whole wheat flatbread, and tuna salad (with lots of celery).

After supper, I’ll clean the refrigerator to get it ready to be filled up again. And tomorrow I’ll go grocery shopping.