The Merest Idea: Operation Pantry Purge Part III: Be Our Guest

As the pantry purge continues, we invited our friends Nick and Yuri over for an adventurous dinner of whatever could be made from pantry ingredients.

This isn't much different from what I usually do for dinner, but when we have company, I try to plan ahead so it isn't as risky/random. This time, we not only didn't plan ahead, but we invited our guests to participate in the tv-cooking-competition-style experience.

When they arrived, they each took a turn sifting through the pantry items looking for options. Yuri selected a can of black beans, and left it to Nick to come up with the rest. He only made fun of a few of the items he encountered as he dug around and fished out a box of dried hashbrown potatoes, a bag of quinoa, and two cans of mushrooms. Matt and I surveyed the selections and found that the back of the quinoa bag had a recipe for black bean burgers that would work nicely with many of the ingredients in the house.

Black bean burger ingredients

As I set to work heating up the chicken broth for the quinoa, I invited Yuri to pick out a dessert from among the brownie and cake mix boxes still crowding the top shelf. She selected the“Chocolate Ugly Cake Mix” and spearheaded that effort, managing to bake the dessert and get it on the cooling rack long before the rest of us finished our parts of the main meal.

Yumz

Understandably concerned about our protein options in the pantry but appropriately engaged with the spirit of the event, Nick had brought over 4 hotdogs, as well as some beer, Russian-style vinegar-less pickles, and sauerkraut that looked like coleslaw. Nick fried up the hashbrowns, mushrooms, and the hotdogs cut into thin strips while Matt and I fumbled through the slightly complicated black bean burger recipe.

Matt contemplates what he's done while Nick forges ahead with the skillet items.

“'Patty' is a loose term...” Yuri said as we tried to form the black bean slop into burger shaped patties for frying purposes, and 'loose' really was the best way to describe it. The recipe called for 3 cups of cooked quinoa, and while I only had 2 left in the bag, we had far more than the '7 to 8' patty yield suggested. But we persevered, and even if the texture didn't end up burger-like, it did taste pretty good.

Plated

Despite being almost 9pm when we finally sat down to eat, the meal was a success. In total, we removed 10 items from the pantry: 1 box of hashbrowns, 2 cans mushrooms, a bag of quinoa, a can of black beans, a carton of chicken broth, and a box of cake mix, as well as two boxes of pudding and 1 canister of protein drink mix that were well well beyond their suggested “best by” date.