I think I invented this, or at least gave something that already exists a new name. Before we left for Melbourne, we were furiously penny pinching and had heaps of food in the cupboards. So about two weeks before we left, we stopped buying food in an effort to run down our supplies, as well as save money.
To do this needed a little bit of planning.
1. I wrote a list of everything we had in the cupboard (pantry), fridge and freezer.
What’s in the cupboard?
2. I started thinking about what would go together. If you think about food as proteins and carbs, this makes it a bit easier to work out a meal. With the help of google, I would put a couple of ingredients in and see what it came up with. As you can see at the bottom of the list, I did need to buy a few things – tomatoes, ricotta and potatoes. But overall, I used what we had.
Recipes for the week
3. I then wrote down all the days of the week I had to cook for, and started slotting meals in. If you are cooking for two people, but the meal serves 4, make sure to put down the leftovers for your lunch the next day.
This was incredibly successful! It is best if you have an idea of how much of an ingredient you will use (for example, a 400g bag of spinach will probably be enough for a dinner sized meal for four).
Some of the meals we made were hideously awful, I’ll be honest. Mushroom and cabbage lasagne was probably the worst thing I’ve ever made. It doesn’t even sound nice! Others were a big hit – lobster risotto was surprisingly luxurious for a risotto made from soup and tinned lobster.
Overall though, it was a great experience and made me bit more inventive. I can be a bit lazy and resort to going to the shops, when I could think of something delicious for dinner from what we have. I had friends over a couple of days before we left, and they were impressed with the dips I served up from what we had in the cupboard, as well as home made breads.
The Glasgow Food Blog 
I’m doing this very thing right now because I’m a skint student! What you already have looks a lot more exciting than mine though. Brown rice, peas, sweetcorn and pesto is today’s dinner!
Mushroom and cabbage lasagna!! I often find cabbage tricky as you have to buy so much of it, enough for say 3 dinners and who wants 3 cabbage dinners in a week.
I should do this with my freezer, it is way too full.
I hate having loads of food in the cupboards but my worst by far is the fridge…I often have veg that’s getting to the end of it’s life or cream that’s about to spoil etc. I tend to boil up all my veg with a tin or two of tomatoes then blend it and split it into plastic tubs for the freezer for a quick pasta/chilli etc. I’m also experiementing with bulk cooking just now and in the space of a Sunday afternoon I made 40 meals for the freezer based on this tomato sauce base – very, very cheap meals and quick to chuck together just when I will need them the most. Yes, we’ll be eating a lot of the same food for a while but I’m happy with that for the time saved 🙂