A desire to eat well — well here meaning both healthfully and elevated — inspires me to buy certain ingredients to keep in my pantry. However, when I moved to Berlin I did not know how long I would stay, and so I was reluctant to buy pantry items that I might never use up. Plus I had myself on a no-added-sugar regime. At home, I extended this to no cream. In grocery stores, I shied away from jams and most condiments other than mustard. I did not eliminate cheese (as if I would ever do that!). My cooking at home became sort of dull as I found myself eating raw vegetables for breakfast and tuna with capers on pasta for dinner. I had lost inspiration when I removed my freedom.
Eventually I got beyond my commitment fear and my calorie obsession and started into the buying. Lentils, rices, tins of beans, and the group of things I collectively refer to as Kitchen Liquids. Now it is all starting to feel like clutter. Wasteful clutter.
The Goods
There are a lot of things beyond hunger that motivate me to eat. Inspiration, invitation, accommodation, socialization, boredom. I am choosing to make conservation and utilisation two new motivating factors.
I declare that I will plough through my pantry. Until I have cycled through everything I currently have, I vow that each meal I make at home will use my current stock in some significant way. From this challenge I have excluded things I always cycle through without effort, like tuna and capers and pasta. I didn’t bother dragging things from my fridge to be photographed, but I have some tandoori paste and sweet chilli sauce that I should eat before they need to be tossed.
Brace yourself.
VIVRE POUR MANGER 
The applesauce is totally my fault.
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Not really. I bought the apple-mango one before you visited, and bought too much of the apple-apricot since I expected to eat more apple sauce. I later bought this to eat with it but found the combination to be too glue-like.
http://www.rezeptewiki.org/wiki/Zutat:Haferflocken
(seen in the dry goods photo)
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Also, that apricot applesauce was on sale super cheap.
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I decided to throw away the soy beans. (Top left of dry goods photo) I bought them thinking they were black beans. I have NO idea what to do with dried soy beans except sprout them, and considering how poorly I digest unprocessed soy, I figured I should just unload them.
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Crap. I did a quick google search and now I feel bad:
http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Black-Soybean-Hummus-15323
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can you come plow through my pantry and use it up for me… I have no inspiration to dig in and use it….. Let’s Cook!!!!
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Tonight I ate a bowl of rice with some soy sauce, sesame oil and sweet chilli sauce. It barely put a dent in my rice supply. I was going to heat the can of red Thai curry to pour on the rice, but decided I was not hungry enough. Getting through this food is not just going to be long; it’s going to be boring …
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On the plus side, dinner must have cost at most 50 cents, which is what I spent on a peach to eat on my way to tae kwon do.
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