Two weeks without the grocery store

Lessons from my mommies.

There was a pregnant pause when my friend Eric asked what I thought of Worry, the debut novel by Alexandra Tanner and my May book club pick, before we both started laughing. 

It’s no secret that I, too, have a questionable preoccupation with my internet  “mommies”—what Jules, the protagonist in Worry, calls the mommy blog Instagram influencers she obsessively follows from a finsta account. 

Jules’ mommies are micro-celebrity conspiracy theorists—hawking essential oils and fear-mongering rhetoric. My mommies are Midwestern homeschooling mothers of eight, nine, 10 kids on Youtube who grow, preserve, and cook most of their family’s food. 

Brought up on Focus on the Family and conservative political radio, I am rather immune to the pseudoscientific and archaic beliefs subliminally espoused on these accounts—the carnivore diets and gender essentialism. (This same personality quirk made me tell my very-not-Christian husband that I thought the 2006 documentary film Jesus Camp was “not that crazy.”) I understand and am equally unfazed by the dog whistles—on paper I should be a Christian homeschooling mother of five-plus “littles.” I was homeschooled and raised Evangelical Christian, but instead, for whatever reason, I ended up agnostic (I guess? I don’t really care enough to describe myself as atheist), vegetarian, a woman with a career, living in the big, scary city, in my 30s without children or a deep freezer full of homegrown beef. 

Unlike Jules’, my mommies are less disturbing. They are inspiringly efficient, creative, and ironically, with their small media empires, career women, too. (I also think they may be doing more for the local food movement than self-described locavores.)

Every January, one of my mommies hosts a “pantry challenge” on YouTube. It’s sold as a response to Christmas spending and a mandate to eat through prepper-style basement larders of canned, cured, dehydrated, and freeze-dried food. One of the mommies goes one month, one goes two, and one goes three without going to the grocery store. 

Some of it is a little bit silly, showing off a grocery store haul with hundreds of dollars of food to last them the month (which I, of course, tap and watch immediately). But outside of its strange entertainment factor, I like the merits of the pantry challenge. The pantry challenge creator’s one rule is you get to make your own rules, which I can’t help but appreciate. 

I like the pantry challenge most when the mommies begin to run out of things—cleverly replacing flour with home-milled wheat, canned applesauce for eggs, or sourdough starter for instant yeast. The mommies would probably describe this austerity as cultivating an admirable Depression-era resilience, but I appreciate the reminder that the grocery store, in its modern incarnation, is not normal. Eggs are seasonal and February asparagus doesn’t magically appear in Northern grocery stores. With the ever-rising cost of food, too, there is practicality and necessity in creative, pantry-focused cooking. 

In April, I decided to do my own two-week pantry challenge. Unlike the mommies, we don’t have the space in our Brooklyn apartment to store significant canned or cured food, nor do we have a deep freezer. I don’t eat meat and my husband eats meat rarely, so we really need fresh fruit and vegetables. But I do have a pantry and freezer full of my own staling, buried food. 

For week one, I ordered a veggie box, a dozen eggs, and a half-gallon of milk (for yogurt) from Farm To People (cost: $58) and the same the second week, sans milk (cost: $53), but for everything else we relied on the pantry and what was in the refrigerator/freezer — grains, legumes, condiments, some dairy, odds-and-ends, and a well-stocked spice cabinet.

For the most part we tried to eat at home—a few exceptions were a post-work party run to Sweet Chick (necessary), an office Sweetgreen, and a pre-class Sweetgreen for Skylar (God help us). 

During non-CSA months, we get a weekly CSA-style box of produce from Farm to People. I usually add on extras: onions, garlic, lemons, limes, and whatever seasonal produce is interesting (seasonal in the non-local sense—FTP sources mindfully and usually regionally, but we don’t grow lemons in Northeast). I also add on proteins (tempeh, eggs, tofu) and usually a fun snack or treat (tortilla chips, cheddar cheese). We put in a delivery order to Precycle about every 10 days for things like granola, nuts, rice, soy sauce, rice vinegar, snacks, feta, tofu, or milk. 

About once a month I put in an order to Thrive Market, where we get pantry staples like organic flour, canned tuna and salmon for Skylar, organic avocado oil, et cetera. We also have a small but mighty grocery store in the neighborhood, where we pick up fresh ingredients for recipes and things like cheese, butter, half-and-half, and other mainstream products not sold by FTP or Precyle. We buy a lot of food.   

I took away a few lessons from this challenge:

1. Constraint is where interesting things happen. I realized we don’t need so many extras on our Farm to People produce boxes, and that just because we can easily walk to the grocery store, maybe we don’t have to. Limited options create more interesting and diverse meals. There were several dishes we made during this challenge that we wouldn’t have made if we weren’t forced to stick to what was in the house. 

2. We should use our pantry more. It’s easy to rely on staples like white rice or soy sauce and not further explore other grains, flavor boosters, and proteins that we already have. I was shocked by how much I loved things like brown rice and how simple it was to use ingredients like ghee, coconut oil, or vinegars instead of grabbing what was easiest and closest (olive oil, fresh lemons). 

This is how we ate.

Bolded items indicate food from the pantry or freezer.

Breakfasts

The first morning I made oatmeal with rolled oats, dried cranberries, chia seeds, and Panela sugar. Like many women, I am anemic. I take an iron and B12  supplement every day, but I’ve been trying to get more whole food iron in my regular diet. I’ve been sneaking chia seeds into things like oatmeal, cottage cheese, and rice bowls.  

Throughout the challenge, I made smoothies for breakfast, typically with the mango Farm to People mix, of which I had two bags in the freezer; frostbitten peaches from last summer, hemp seeds, honey, and a “sea moss beverage” I picked up in a fugue state at the fancy grocery store Happier Grocery after a massage a week prior. I had heard people talking about sea moss in context of the infamous LA grocery store Erewhon and was intrigued—Skylar and I determined it tastes like a wooden popsicle stick. For other smoothies I added yogurt whey and flax meal. 

Another recurring breakfast was egg tacos. I soft-scrambled three eggs that I split between two Caramelo flour tortillas (in the fridge, with a half a dozen or so extras in the freezer) and sprinkled hot sauce on top. 

A few days into the challenge I made sourdough bread and used the sliced bread as a base for a variety of toasts: peanut butter (with homemade peanut butter) and a sprinkling of chia seeds; a ricotta toast made with homemade “ricotta” (made with milk in the fridge that I hadn’t gotten around to using for yogurt) with everything bagel seasoning; and buttered toast with a za’atar fried egg (I used up all the aging za’atar in my cabinet!). I would usually fry or boil an egg to add some protein to my morning toast. 

Lunches

Mostly lunch was dinner leftovers—rajma, pasta, and noodle and tofu dishes described below. I would usually scrounge up some raw fruit like apples, oranges, or a banana from the Wednesday breakfast spread at work to add some variety and fiber.  

Before we ran out of white rice, I made Tofu Rice Bowl to pack for office lunches. I added chopped tomatoes, chia seeds, and cilantro.  We had already started to run out of soy sauce at this point, so I subbed in coconut aminos that had been languishing in the fridge for far too long. 

At the beginning of the challenge, Skylar cooked up some leftover bean burgers I had made the night before. I used the Basic Bean Burger recipe, using Rancho Gordo beans I’ve already forgotten, from

Lukas Volger

’s Veggie Burgers Every Which Way. I followed Volger’s basic bean burger recipe, though I swapped the fresh parsley for some dill in the fridge. 

The buns I’d made the week prior with this recipe (fine, but I’ll try something different next time) that I had cut in half and frozen; I popped them directly into the toaster from the freezer. I used these buns for bean burgers throughout the challenge. Lukas’ bean burger recipes are becoming a staple for me! 

Skylar also made me a salad with leftover lettuce from the night before and added red onion, olives, and feta.  

On the Saturday of the first week, I decided to use up two containers of dried chickpeas from the pantry. Both containers were in small, stupid amounts, maybe around 1 cup, and two different sizes, so I couldn’t cook them together. 

On Friday night I soaked both batches separately with tablespoons of apple cider vinegar (to aid in digestion). For one of the containers, I used the Instant Pot to cook them with half an onion, garlic, thyme from the garden, and a bay leaf. I made hummus with half the cooked chickpeas, and kept the rest in the fridge—we eventually added those to rice bowls. 

With the uncooked, soaked chickpeas I made another Lukas Volger burger—this one the Baked Falafel burgers from the same book. I used the burgers for a few meals and Skylar broke up the patties to use as a topping in a green salad. 

Dinners

Right out of the gate, a failure—a bag of Einkorn flour, clearly in the pantry too long, had gone rancid. I noticed the curious scent of playdough during the first rise of a focaccia dough, but chalked it up to a quirk of the new-to-me flour. The next day, the first day of the challenge, the scent was stronger but I baked it regardless. Afterward, I googled “dough smells like playdough,” and, sure enough, rancid flour. I put the focaccia in the freezer to drop off at a city compost bin later in the week.  

Dinner still needed to be made that night and the crisis had me in need of comfort food. I made

Alison Roman

’s Lemon Pepper Pasta with Browned Butter, with some gorgeous fusilli col buco pasta (I think from Saraghina bakery?) and sliced up two pears from a past produce box that had seen better days. 

The night I prepped Tofu Rice Bowl for work lunches, I made a double batch and used some of the extra tofu to make tofu tacos with Rancho Gordo beans I had cooked a few days prior. Skylar used the tofu to make a taco salad (a typical pairing for the two of us). We topped with cilantro and hot sauce. 

I was happy Skylar was able to get through some cups of polenta from the pantry, served with sauteed mushrooms, broccoli, roasted garlic, and feta. He delivered this dinner to me while I laid in bed looking at my phone. Perfect.  

For another dinner, I made Tejal Rao’s Baked Rajma, but instead of canned kidney beans I used freshly cooked Rancho Gordo Varejo beans. There was also a frostbitten container of half-used, canned fire roasted tomatoes in the freezer, ghee instead of oil, along with a small knob of fresh turmeric left in the fridge. We had run out of white rice by this time so I cooked few cups of Rancho Gordo California brown rice. The nutty chew paired so well with the rich acidity of the rajma. I’ve made this recipe a handful of times, but these adjustments made the recipe significantly better. I topped the rajma with mozzarella, a squeeze of lime, and cilantro. (Also, do not be tempted to use a cast iron like the recipe photo illustrates—it’s much too acidic. An oven-safe Dutch Oven is perfect). 

Another night for dinner I made roasted potatoes with sumac, naan (using an Erin McDowell Savory Baking recipe), and dipped it all in freshly made yogurt. 

I’ve had this Lucas Sin tofu method in the back of my head for a while now, so I decided to use frozen tofu to give it a try. I cook with tofu on a weekly basis, I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to try the freezer method (freezing and thawing tofu creates a different, more sponge-like texture). Also in the freezer was a bag of fresh Shanxi pulled noodles that I had picked up at H Mart who-knows-when, and in the fridge, about a cup of souring kimchi I made last October. I loosely followed this recipe, using the pulled noodles instead of udon and leaving out the bacon, or course. This meal, next to the rajma, was one of my favorites of the challenge. 

At the end of the challenge I made up for my focaccia failure. This time I baked with 75% Organic King Arthur Bread Flour, 25% Maiorca Flour (determined to not save this flour and use it before it went off!), and, in place of water, I used up all two cups of yogurt whey in the fridge; I followed Erin McDowells’s Savory Baking focaccia recipe otherwise.   

Using the focaccia, I made grilled tempeh sandwiches with a spread made with Calabrian chilis, dried garlic, and mayo. I also used up a pruning green pepper that I roasted while the focaccia baked and steamed an artichoke on the stove while I cleaned up the kitchen. 

The tempeh was wonderful—I marinated it in dijon mustard, coconut aminos, rice vinegar, and Crystal hot sauce. The sandwich was delicious (I may have to make this into a Home Food recipe). I also made a lazy salad with the last of the lettuce as a side, a dash of olive oil and a Meyer lemon vinegar.