"Eating It Down" — The New Phrase In Our House

Over the weekend my husband coined a new phrase. Whenever he wants us to make do with the food in our house he tells me we have to ‘eat it down.’ So for example, if he thinks we have too much chicken in the freezer, he’ll say we have to ‘eat down the chicken.’ This is his special way of telling me have plenty of food in the house and that I should avoid going to the grocery store until we eat everything we’ve already purchased.

For the most part we’ve been trying our best to eat lunch and dinner at home as often as possible. I’ve also managed to spread out trips to the grocery store. Although I still stop in for milk and produce every week I’m trying not to visit any of the inner isles of the grocery store more than twice a month. February is a short month, but so far I must admit this plan is working.

Today I bought deli meat, chicken, milk and produce, I also snuck into the condiment isle for ranch dressing and ketchup, but otherwise I managed to avoid all of the inner isles. I’m giddy to find out how much money we’ve saved on food by eating at home this month. It’s not that we’re trying to deprive ourselves, I’m just interested in how low our grocery and food bills can go.

4 thoughts on “"Eating It Down" — The New Phrase In Our House”

  1. We don’t use that phrase, but we do this a lot. In fact, given the amount of garden produce in the chest freezer, this is pretty much our default mode when it comes to meal preparation. It was an adjustment, but I’ve gotten used to it and even enjoy it now.

    -Kate

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  2. We do this too, and it saves us money in the end. We have an “eat-down” challenge every month or so, where we get bits that have been stashed in the freezer, the random jar of chickpeas, or something we don’t use very often and build a menu around the excess cupboard stuff. An “eat-down” is a lot of fun and creative, and rotates the stashed food. Watching my daughter learn to make hummus rather than buying it was priceless.

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  3. Generally, I “eat down” the item that’s taking the most room up in the freezer šŸ˜‰ Last week, it was a full chicken and milk. I have a 3/4 freezer, so I’m REALLY tight on space. I pulled out one of the half-gals of milk (there’s five in there) and one of the chickens (there’s two) and cooked the beastie up, drank milk all week, and suddenly found myself with room!

    Also, I like to do Random Acts of Kindness. I live in an apartment building and every now and again, the items I get for “free” don’t taste good for me – case in point, some halloween candy that I’ve had in my freezer since …well, halloween… As I live in an apartment building, I just took them down to the main lobby and set them on a table with a note, “Free for me, free for you! Happy Random Act of Kindness Day.”

    Since I didn’t really want to eat them anyway, and since they were free, I passed them on to someone who would eat them and thus, freed space up in the freezer.

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  4. That’s hysterical! That phrase is great!

    My husband hates it when I say “Well, let’s have lasagna – we can eat off that for days” He said it’s like a lion feasting on a corpse or something and it grosses him out.

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