One of my projects for 2009 is to take up Bob del Grosso’s challenge — the Fanatic’s Proposal. I’m going to see how little food I can buy, how much of that food I can buy locally, and how much I can live out of my own garden, pantry, and freezers. So here’s the roundup of what I bought and ate this first week of the project.

Bought:

• 1 3lb. bag navel oranges
• 1 doz farm eggs
• 8 lbs organic potatoes (trade for 2 gal. milk paid for but not received)
• 4 bottles cheap red wine (>6 bucks each), 1 bottle white
• dog food ($38)
• 2 5lb bags flour, one all-purpose, one bread
• 1 bunch scallions
• 1 bunch cilantro

Cooked/Ate:

• breakfast: toast with melted cheese, or breakfast of champions
• last week’s ham and bean, and escarole-potato soup (lunches)
• ramen noodles with peanut sauce and winter salad
• ham with peas and cream, once over baked potato, once over rice
• potatoes with chorizo and turnip greens, later turned into a fritatta
• baked chicken breast with greens and rice
• stewed chicken thighs with orange and olives leftover from the freezer
• spaghetti with bacon and breadcrumbs

I did re-organize the upstairs freezer so I can find things more easily, which has made eating a variety of my own frozen vegetables much easier. I also finished my second batch of sauerkraut (the first batch was ruined by the plastic bucket which retained a faint scent of the cleaning stuff I used to scrub it out with before making kraut). This time I bought a real crock, and now I have 3 quarts of nice, crunchy, homemade kraut. I think there’s a choucroute in my weekend future — I have lots of random leftover sausages, my homemade pancetta, and some pork chops in the freezer. My grandmother and aunt also sent me some lovely old family linens, so perhaps a little dinner party is in the works.

Going into this week I don’t really have much on my shopping list. Some more scallions and cilantro, another couple of bottles of wine, maybe a chicken. Because I like to make bigg-ish dishes like meatloaf or mousakka or stews and wind up freezing most of it, there’s so much food in my freezers still that I don’t have to do much shopping for a while. The stewed chicken thighs with orange and olives for example — it’s a Mario Batali recipe for lamb shanks, but I had some chicken thighs, so I made a batch back in the fall. There was a lot of this, and it was good, but I didn’t want to eat it for a week straight. So I froze most of it in ziploc bags, and on a weekday night, when I don’t feel like thinking up something new, it’s nice to find something delicious in the freezer.