It’s the day of the Great Pantry Purge. Cover me. I’m goin’ in.

In January last year when I did the pantry purge, I tossed all the decades old canned goods so I didn’t have any interesting ancient food finds this year. I did, however, unearth the stockpile of strawberry energy drink mixes that we couldn’t get the water delivery service to stop bringing.  I’m moving them where John can see them because at the end of a box he always asks “Do we have any more of these?” HA! Silly young man. We have, after a year mind you, worked our way down to seven boxes (30 packets in each box).

Pantry before. No wonder I don’t use canned goods. I can’t SEE them.

The producers at Chopped are hereby invited over to get ideas for how to make their contestants miserable all season long. Visualize a basket with refried beans, taco shells, canned corn and WATER CHESTNUTS. I’m not sure why I have water chestnuts. Hell, I’m not sure why I have 6 cans of refried beans. I haven’t eaten refried beans since before William passed away. There was one lonely can of peaches which I probably kept for sentimental reasons since they were his go-to comfort food when chemo left him without an appetite.

For the love of God please no one allow me to buy any more evaporated milk this summer when the birthdays arrive and I need to cook german chocolate cake icing. I have eight cans! I’m also good on cake mixes (10 boxes) and powdered sugar for frosting (five 2 lb bags). Time to roast some pecans, make some dark chocolate and pecan bark and probably one of those cake mixes with caramel and roasted pecan frosting. Yeah, it’s going to be a while before I permit myself to pick up any more dry or canned foods.

Oh, and I love this. I have cans upon cans of cream of chicken soup. Probably gotten repeatedly for some casserole or another that I thought called for cream of chicken but which actually called for cream of mushroom. I only have 4 cans of cream of mushroom.

Food so special you don’t want to eat it just yet should have it’s own shelf. I have 4 boxes of beignet mix and 12 cans of my favorite New Orleans Style red beans. A friend of mine shipped them to me because we can’t get them out here in the land of salt, pepper, jalopeno and refried beans. I didn’t want to go through them too fast, so I’ve hardly gone through them at all. Guess what lunch is today. On John’s next day off I’m going to have him make beignets. Lots and lots of beignets

I decided to stick my baking mixes, flour, sugars and such in my cake decorating cabinet which means I now have to clear that out too. But it will leave room on the shelf for all that cream of chicken soup.

Pantry after purge. No one is going to want to be my friend for 6 months

with all those beans to eat.