How to plan a pantry for a solo person

[iris lilies]

You could stop eating processed foods like pasta.

Dude. What if she makes her own noodles, is it then processed?

I like the word “expiry” and will be using it in the future. It is so British English.

Ok, now on to the real topic: I doNt know about an overall system, but I have been successful this year in attacking items that have been in our freezer, and in our pantry for years. You all have heard me go on and on about the squirrel-like nature of my DH. He likes to grow, preserve, and store foods. We have applesauce in the freezer that is a decade old, probably older, and corn from his family farm that is three years old and etc.

That applesauce is at the deep diving level and I may never be able to use it up, but I AM reaching mid level fruits.
I do not gravitate to fruits much, so I dont know what to do with them. I need to make cobbler type desserts with them, DH will eat them then. Any cobbler I make is not very good, sadly.

Last week I used up a can of homemade cherries. They are brown and unappetizing looking, and they have seeds. But because I love sour cherries I ate them as did DH. Just plain, unembellished from the can and they taste good just look “bad” or uncommercial.

But back to bigger pantry successes: I used up all pasta, all purchased beans, misc rice or else threw it out. I am left with many lbs of beans that were grown and shelled last year here in our gardens. Am making bean soup regularly. I theow in homegrown okra from our freezer, onions we grew, sometimes canned tomates although I had read that keeps beans feom cooking.

I will say that pantry management for one person, managing only that which you buy yourself, seems like a cakewalk! Still I will confess to buying wrong things and having them hang around. For this it is handy to have dogs. One of our dogs expects”topping” on her dry food, so I can often get rid of unappetizing thngs via the dogs.