Spring cleaning: The pantry

[I wrote this post back in early April. Totally forgot to finish it. As well as many of the projects I'd planned. It was going to be a once-a-week month-long series. Hah. Did you know it kept snowing until early May?! It totally did. I just about lost my s*&^. I did start menu planning, though, after the snow melted!]

So I decided to start some "spring cleaning" projects to help get things organized around the house. The first one I tackled was cleaning out my pantry, which is basically just a big wooden closet in my kitchen. Six shelves, the tallest one too high for me to reach without a stool. I forgot to take a "before" picture, but here are the "after" shots. Just imagine that before, I was afraid things would fall out on me when I opened the doors. Not so, now:

The only two shelves that are remotely full now are the top shelf (spices, seasonings, oils, and general baking and grilling supplies) and the bottom shelf (pastas, rice, condiments, and some overflow for sugar and flour. I threw out two huge black bags of stale or expired food. My knee-jerk reaction seeing the semi-empty shelves was "I need to refill this pantry!" After hauling the trash downstairs, though, I am feeling that if I do that, I'll just be back doing this same thing six months or a year from now, because if I can't see the food because there is too much in there, I don't use it up in time. I have a bad habit of buying too much staple food when it's on a good sale because "it keeps for such a long time." No, it actually doesn't, if you never use it! So. My new goal is to not buy any staples unless we've run out of them. No new soups, no new barbecue sauces, no more pastas, unless we're all out. And I'm hoping to get back into dinner menu planning, because I always do much better with cooking at home when I have a written plan.

Zucchini or yellow summer squash pasta

I finally got "on it" and made a two-week menu plan. The plan is to alternate weeks but have basically the same meal once every other week. For Mondays, I planned to do a Meatless Monday theme, alternating my linguini with mushrooms with my zucchini pasta. Anyone who's asked for dinner recipes from me in the last decade has probably gotten this recipe. I love it, Dan loves it, and Sam will eat parts of it, so that's a win in my book.

Part of how I can manage to chase two kids all day and still get dinner on the table (confession: since I started watching Maggie, I mostly haven't,) is that I prep as much as possible during nap time or while the kids are eating. Monday morning I baked two loaves of deli rye while Maggie ate and played, before Sam was really up. Then in the afternoon, after our walk to the park and lunch, I put Maggie down for a nap, sat Sam in front of Super Why, and got to prepping veggies.

My beautiful loaf of deli rye with caraway

A tool I find to be indispensable for this recipe, or for any recipe that calls for thinly sliced vegetables, is the mandolin slicer. I kept the box to store mine in--the blades are pretty sharp. Plus, it has enough extra pieces to keep track of that it's just easier to keep in the box. So. First I washed my yellow squashes and sliced off any blemishes. Then I got to work slicing.

Top view, irresponsibly not using the blade guard thingy

Under the slicer

Finished slicing all three squashes!

It is good to use small-ish squashes, since they have better flavor. Same applies to the zucchini if you are using that. If they'd been a little larger I might have only needed two. Anyhow, I like to use a reusable plastic container for these, so I can just toss them in the fridge until I'm ready to cook.

Next, I peeled and cut off the stem end of my onion. Then I sliced it in half from the stem end through the middle of the root end, so I had this:

Then I made narrow slices down the length of one of the onion halves, not quite to the root. I spread it out a little this time just so you can see where the cuts are.

Then I chopped the other direction, like this.

This is what you end up with on your knife. 

By the way, this is one of my favorite knives for chopping small-ish vegetables. It's sort of half paring knife, half santoku, so the company that makes it calls it a partoku. (My other favorite knife is my larger santoku.)

Here's my finished cup of chopped onion.

Confession time again: I used to buy fresh garlic to mince. Really, I did. But over the years I have thrown out so many half-heads of dried out garlic that I figured there had to be another way. There totally is. Half a teaspoon of this stuff is equivalent to one clove minced garlic. I do still buy fresh heads of garlic for roasting, but I am so done mincing the stuff. Done. No more stinky fingernails.

Lazy, lazy Mel

Anyhow, then everything went back in the fridge for a few hours. After Dan came home, I started some water for the linguini and when it was close to boiling, I heated up my large skillet and stir-fried a teaspoon of the garlic and the cup of onion. When they were soft, I added the sliced yellow squash. Unfortunately my camera was in another room until I was mostly finished cooking. Here is what it looked like when the squash had cooked down most of the way:

The thinness of the slices meant that it cooked fast, and started to break down a bit. That's how I like it, but if you prefer firmer veggies you might use thicker slices so that they hold their shape. When the pasta was finished cooking, I drained it and tossed it with the squash mixture:

And that's about it. I added a little salt and pepper, and topped it with shredded Parmesan cheese. Add a slice of the bread and that's it. Yum.

So that's the plan for every-other-Monday. Dan says this is his favorite of all the pastas I make, and he is a reasonably picky eater. So, yay! Also, I swore I'd already written a post about the linguini with mushrooms, but it doesn't look like I did. Just took a few pictures and promptly forgot about it. So another week I'll write that one. I'll also write about my rotisserie chicken that I plan to make on Sunday, because that is yummy and fun to watch cooking. There may be video. You've been warned. I may get to the other meals we're making for the rest of the week, too. You know, eventually.