Eat From The Pantry Challenge: My Plan

For the month of January, I'm joining in with Life as Mom and Money Saving Mom for their Eat From The Pantry Challenge.

Today Money Saving Mom is asking those of us participating to link up with our goals and plans.

I've never done this before, at least not to this extent, so I'm really not sure what to expect. I would like to do this for the whole month, but am definitely shooting for 2 weeks and then seeing where I stand food-wise.

My "Eat From The Pantry Challenge" plan will go something like this:

• Plan meals from my freezer, pantry and refrigerator with very few new purchases. I still have around 10 meals left from my Freezer Cooking Day in November as well as a good amount of meat, veggies and grains so I will focus on using those things up. 
• Spend no more than $50 on groceries for the whole month. This will be mainly fresh veggies and fruit, eggs and dairy products. I'm not sure if I'll be able to reach this goal but I'm aiming high. 
• Save the remaining money and put it aside for bulk grocery purchases throughout the year. I was already planning to set aside $50 each month during 2010 to enable me to purchase more items in bulk such as grain, grass-fed beef,  local in-season fruits and veggies to can and freeze, coconut oil and other hard-to-find items that I cannot find at good prices locally, and maybe even help with some of the costs of garden plants and seeds.  We want to order a 1/4 beef this spring so that is a large sum of money coming up rather quickly. Saving  more money this month would surely help towards that purchase! A 1/4 cow would last us for about a year!
• Be creative and stretch what we have to feed us for a month. I thrive on creating dishes out of what I have on hand and I love to try new recipes so this is the part of the challenge that I'm looking forward to the most!
• I'll be posting each week on how it's going, what we're eating along with some recipes, and how much I've spent that week on groceries.

 Edited to Add: I went through and listed all the food in my house to help me with the challenge. If interested, you can see my pantry inventory list here. 

Want to join me? Read all about it here!