The Pantry Challenge - Take Two

Last spring, in an attempt to reduce our grocery expenses and use up stuff we already had, we did a pantry challenge. The rules of the challenge were:

1) You may purchase a limited number of staples. For this challenge, these staples are defined as:

Fruits and vegetables (fresh, frozen or canned - whatever your preference)
100% fruit or vegetable juices
Milk
Eggs
Butter, margarine or oil
Cheese (any kind you like)
Flour
Sugar (any form-brown, powdered, white)

2) You may also purchase anything necessary for family members with special needs, or a medically-prescribed diet.

3) Everything else served must come from your pantry, freezer, or refrigerator.

4) No dining out!

5) You must blog about your experience.

We stuck with this challenge until we absolutely could not make a balanced meal with what we had left in our cupboards and freezer. During this time, I made all of our bread, and refrained from soda drinking as much as I possibly could (until I thought I would die from caffeine deprivation headaches). We lasted 7 weeks.

Last night I defrosted, wiped out, and organized our garage freezer, and cleaned and organized our basement pantry and kitchen cabinets. We always buy in bulk when we see terrific sales, so we have a lot of stuff to use up. Starting tomorrow, we're going to embark on another pantry challenge. During the last challenge, I found that I needed to plan menus weekly, instead of daily, so that I could figure out creative ways to use things, and insure that we still had a reasonable amount of variety. This time around, I think I'll participate in Menu Plan Monday, just for fun. I'll also post our weekly food expenditures, so that I can see how much the challenge positively affects our food budget.

Here are my current basement pantry and freezer inventory sheets:



This doesn't even include all the stuff we have in our kitchen cabinets. How long do you think we'll be able to go?