Sequestration Meal #318

 

You know what's good for clearing out the pantry? Casseroles. You know what's bad for summer cooking? Casseroles. Until you remember that if you make a really small casserole, you can cook it in the toaster oven.

Aha!

So then you can make tiny casseroles, which make you wish they were bigger because of how yummy they are; this is a trade off. Still, at this rate, I will probably still be whittling down my pantry when the seasons change again. (With lots of kindness toward myself, etc., trying not to be annoyed by it all, but rather excited by the creative possibilities of inventing things based on what happens to be around.) I'm not alone; I'm currently following a YouTube channel with a woman trying to eat down her pantry by herself and she's in her fifth month with no clear end in sight!

It's okay. We're getting somewhere, even if it is very slowly.

I had some yellow squash and stuffing mix, so I decided to make one of my favorite childhood casseroles, a squash-and-stuffing casserole. It's not usually vegan friendly, being chock full of dairy, but I found a recipe online to scale way down and veganize. I used this one because you can make the cream of mushroom soup needed yourself, which I did using almond milk. I made the full recipe of the cream of mushroom soup and saved some in a jar in my fridge for some later applications, but I only made 1/4 of the actual casserole recipe so I could put it in my toaster oven sized casserole dish and still have room to bake my last Don't Be Chicken patty.

This would be prettier with a mix of yellow and green squash, but we do what we can. I also think the recipe I used should have had more sour cream in it (I used Tofutti) because I remember the sour cream flavor being stronger in my childhood favorite. Next time I make this (a day will surely come when I do), I can try doubling the sour cream. But stuffing casseroles are kind of universally delicious anyway, so it was still good.

I have no more Don't Be Chicken, but I do have half this casserole left; I'll have to find another main dish protein to accompany it. I have been thinking that I might need to relax the rules a tiny bit with respect to meat substitutes, because I do want to get control of my freezer but at the same time I have a lot of stuff around here that can be easily put together with something like these cutlets, and I'm not always up to making my own seitan or anything. I'll contemplate it for my next grocery visit. It would probably be okay to buy a package if I had a clear-cut plan for using all of the cutlets, and I didn't expect them to just lounge in the freezer for ages. But that is really the rule right now: I have to have a specific plan, and it has to involve using all of a thing, in order for me to buy something non-perishable or frozen.

I sometimes wonder how I will look back on these years of my life, when I was mostly alone, when at first I couldn't get groceries very easily and then found ways and ended up with too many and then spent months on end eating a rotation of shelf-stable and frozen things mixed with produce and such. How will I think about them? What will they be? An anomaly? A disruption? A new beginning?