While I maintain a decent pantry, I usually grocery shop weekly. But a number of years ago, I got severely depressed and decided to eat stuff from the freezer instead of shopping. And then decided the same thing the following week.

As I sorted through stuff that had been around for a while and ingredients I’d bought for a single dish and never used again, it became a challenge: I was going to eat through my freezer and my pantry without buying more food.

It was fine at first, then increasingly stranger. I ran out of pasta sauce, so I used salad dressing. I ran out of salad dressing and made my own with herbs and oil and vinegar. I made pizza but I’d run out of flour so I used rolled oats for the crust. As the various ingredients got used up, my food became increasingly bizarre. The final two weeks were basically pasta or rice with some other random ingredient(s) to make it palatable. I could definitely see this being one of the dishes I made during that period.

Fwiw, I did finally eat pretty much everything I could find. I remember the day when I opened the fridge and there were only a handful of condiments containers with the dregs of condiments in them. The freezer was empty except for ice cube trays. The pantry shelves were also empty except for an unopened jar of garlic powder. I threw out everything in the fridge and went to the grocery store. It was an incredible relief to eat fresh vegetables again!