Eating from the Pantry - A month of tomato paste and beans?

While reading Money Saving Mom's Blog today I came across her plans to dedicate January to eating through their pantry.  Long and short of it, the idea is to eat through what you have on hand, creatively, to use it up and save some money.

Last night, as I was lamenting to Brian that, post-holidays we are, well, probably as broke as many of you are, too.  You combine Christmas with the new business and we're feeling the pinch.  (And thanks, for those of you who have asked, the business is going well.  It's still definitely a new business, but so far so good.)

I actually heard myself saying, "You know as well as I do that at this point, most of our expenses are set -- mortgage, student loans, daycare -- so what do we have left to cut?  Food and heat."


"Food and heat???!!!"  Brian couldn't stop laughing at me.  Now clearly, I didn't mean that we were going to shut off the heat (Minnesota, people, Minnesota) and we will not stop feeding our family.  But we need to do both as responsibly as possible.


The heat, well, we're about as low as we can semi-comfortably (depending on who you ask) go on that one.  60 when we sleep, 64 when we are awake and 58 when we are gone.


But I have often thought about trying this idea and seeing what happened.  We certainly could stand to clean out our freezers.

My pantry is a bit goofier.  Lots of tomato paste and canned beans.  Wow, doesn't that make you want to come for dinner?  But I'll see what I can do there, too.


Now my concern in doing one of these deals is, okay, it's all well and good for a month, but then you are out of everything and go back out on February 1 and stock back up.  So I am going to do it in moderation.  Here are my three goals for January.  I may come up with more as we go along, but so far, here is my plan:


1. Completely eat through the basement freezer.


2. Cut our monthly food/Target spending for the month of January by $200.  (In October 2009 we spent about $450 at grocery stores and Target.  Not all food...these were Target runs after all.)  So the goal is $250.


3. Eat through the canned soup that I used to buy, but don't anymore, to free up a shelf in the pantry.


Let's see how it goes...