The Great Spring Freezer Clean-Out: Dark Days report

I had decided that part of my Lenten discipline would be to work on using up food in the freezer and tackle some of the overfull closet/storage areas. So, Friday I headed to the basement freezer and wasted a bit of energy with the door open examining what was available. Recently our smaller freezer that is part of the fridge got itself into trouble and had to be evacuated. I was out of town and Grady's solution was to haul everything down to the basement. Consequently, that one downstairs really got full and was not at all organized. He was in a bit of a hurry since first priority was to deal with the water leaking upstairs.

Well, long story short, I moved things around and got an idea of what all we have. Here is how my reasoning started - I knew that I had unintentionally ended up with two bunches of cilantro, so I wanted to make something that could use some of that. I pulled out beef stew meat, a small leftover package of chorizo, some of the frozen jalapenos out of our garden, and decided to make chili.

Given that this is the last week of the 2009 Dark Days Challenge, if I'd planned ahead better, I would have tried to come up with something more interesting and with a higher % of local items. But I didn't. So, I kind of feel like I'm closing out with sort of a fizzle. But, hey, the chili was very good and the beef share in the freezer has shrunk, cans of beans and tomatoes were used out of the cupboard, and half the cilantro is gone! The only thing I got at the grocery store were non-local bell peppers.

I did find that I was in good company when I read Anita's post (40 Days with my freezer) on Married with Dinner. They have gone into freezer clean-out mode, as have several of the folks who wrote comments to her. I felt lucky, though, not to have had any heavy packages of meet fall out and nearly hit my toe, although I can easily see how that can happen.