I seem to have bounced back from my kitchen blues – and now the freezer is filling up again. The cupboards are restocked, and the tops of the cupboards are restocked…you get the picture.
I like buying food (mostly). Today, the supermarket I like the best decided to have a major increase in its world foods range. New ingredients from other countries (affordable sushi rice?), even some of my regular ingredients from world foods stockers (yes please, butter beans).
So having put it all away (in cupboards etc, you understand, I didn’t eat it all), I’m trying to decide why what I thought would be a medium shop turned out to be…rather larger than expected.
Back in my eco month, at the height of the building work, I started looking at what it would be like to reduce the things around us. That process is happening, little by little.
(Clue: if you really want to do this, take a sizeable proportion of your possessions. Pack them into a room very tightly, so you can’t access them. Leave them for six months. Remove and ask yourself, ‘Why did I keep this?’ Then decide whether it really needs to stay.)
However, that process of simplifying doesn’t yet seem to have happened to my kitchen. Or at least, it did a bit. I turned out some of what I hadn’t been using in the cupboards, started using it up. (I even photographed some of that using up process, so it might appear on here some day.)
But it’s easy to fill it up again. This doesn’t mean it gets wasted (I hate wasting food) – it does get used. But I wonder which alternative ‘stomach’ I am filling when I feel the need to buy in more food.
I guess that when you are cooking quite a lot of gluten-free and dairy-free food, whilst also reading some vegan recipes on blogs, it’s easy to get pulled in different directions, ingredient-wise.
At the same time, I’m thinking about learning to preserve a few foods that currently end up in the freezer (tomato-based sauce, at least). So I might save some freezer space – and add to some cupboard space instead. Hmm.
Meanwhile, there’s plenty to be cooking with. So maybe it’s back to being grateful for access to a wide range of foods – and perhaps also for a small kitchen that limits my inner quartermaster.