Brett and I have started the process of using up food items that have been hanging out in our pantry as well as many of Japanese ingredients I brought back from Tokyo last summer.

We have five and a half months remaining to use everything up. That feels like plenty of time, but experience has taught me we may end up cutting it closer than we’d like.

Some things I made this month and what they used up: the gingerbread used up molasses; Chinese 3-color salad used up rice noodles; fluffy pancakes finished a box of Japanese pancake mix; and pasta with Alfredo sauce & ham used up a jar of Alfredo sauce and some leftover ham. I also made a loaf of apricot nut bread with the last of some dried apricots, coconut flakes, and walnuts.

Things like pasta and sauces will be easy to use, but five cans of tuna? For some that might be easy, but for us . . . not so much. Twenty packages of CookDo sauces . . . we might get through half to two-thirds of those but thankfully they’re light and travel well. Bread and eggs . . a piece of cake. But four boxes of pancake mix? I don’t know. , , , ,

The key, I think, is going to be narrowing our monthly food budget even more between now and when we move out of the apartment and concentrating more instead on using what we already have. Time seems to finally be picking up speed, and this small dilemma of emptying our pantry and fridge is one more thing that will hopefully make our remaining time go more quickly. Other tasks will soon be popping up, so this is one thing I want to have a good handle on before everything else starts getting crazy.