Empty the Storecupboard Challenge: Week 12

It’s Week 12 of the Storecupboard Challenge, and we’re still soldiering on through the piles of stored food. Our army of two is definitely marching on its stomach anyway.

This week we’ve had spaghetti with turkey-style bolognese sauce, stuffed marrow, and a prawn and spinach curry. We’ve also enjoyed a tasty brunch of cinnamon raisin scotch pancakes with warm cherries on top, which used up some more of the batter mix. Unfortunately we shoved those so fast into our Sunday morning faces that no pictures were taken.

The pasta dish (see above) finally got rid of the turkey-style soya mix I was so scared of and some of the ancient wholemeal spaghetti. It was surprisingly delicious, even if it didn’t look pretty. It had a tin of chopped tomatoes, half an onion, some garlic, Italian mixed herbs, oregano and leftover red wine added to it, with some hard cheese grated on top.

Yes, I did just write ‘leftover red wine’. Let’s not dwell upon that.

Moving swiftly on, the stuffed marrows (above left) used up the last packet of roasted onion stuffing, and solved the ‘oh no, I took my eye off the courgettes and grew a marrow by mistake’ problem as well. So easy it kind of felt like cheating, this was a dish that was quickly mixed and thrown in the oven with a prep time of about two minutes.

The third dish was a prawn and spinach curry, which got rid of a third of a jar of curry paste and a third of a box of coconut powder. Some prawns, vegetable oil and spinach were added in, and the dish was served with a cucumber salad, some papads and chutney on the side.

This week’s three meals

My rough meal plan for the coming week includes these ideas:

1. Giant cous cous salad. Hopefully it will use up the last of the bag of this, plus anything lurking in the salad drawer or left over from Sunday lunch.

2. Vegetable and prawn curry. The jar of paste is already open, so it has to be used up fairly quickly, and it can have some more coconut powder added to it. I’ll add whatever’s fresh from the kitchen garden, and use up the prawns we had left over from this week’s meal.

3. Penne and roasted vegetables. Something quick and easy while things are busy at work. Just add fresh basil from the garden and plenty of cheese.

I’m hoping these meals will be a bit more colourful than this week’s offerings. Shame you can’t taste food through blogs because the dishes were very tasty even if the presentation was somewhat underwhelming.

Over to you

What are you cooking up this week, and have you found any weird or forgotten ingredients in your own food stockpile?

Let us know in the comments, or tweet me your pictures with the #EmptyTheSc hashtag.