Okay, so I admit that the title of this post is mostly there for the play-on-words factor. But I really did use some greens to cook with tonight. It was frozen spinach with barley, rice, and tomato juice, cooked into a soup with chopped leftover beef. I'd have put in some carrot but the ground was frozen again.
So what do a broke locavore's pantry shelves look like at the end of January? Not too bad, yet. We still have some pickles (both cucumber and asparagus), peaches, assorted jams and jellies, green beans, a little canned tomato juice, frozen spinach, frozen asparagus, frozen beef and chicken, and two or three squashes and mini pumpkins. And then there's all those dried beans, rice, and barley. We still have whole spelt grain that we bought a big bag of several years ago, and it was in a bucket tightly sealed enough that it didn't go rancid, so we are still able to grind it and use it. We're still able to buy local potatoes, winter squashes and onions, and I don't think the local apples have run out, either. We're just having to get creative as to what we make, how often, and with what supplies. But it does make me extremely grateful that we preserved food last year. I'm not sure what we'd do without it--unless the answer is to eat yet more dried beans.
Now I need to start soaking more seeds for sprouts. If I can do enough varieties at once, we can make sprout salad later this week.
