a nut on a can o' tuna*

Last week I was just starting to wonder how I was going to deal with my dangerously stacked canned goods when I remembered that Matt and I had signed up to volunteer at a food bank later in the week. Overly convenient, right? So the night before, we took another another toodle through the pantry looking for items to purge. First, we selected dinner: Tuna Noodle Casserole.

We lacked the suggested potato chips for the crunchy top, but I stumbled upon some French Fried Onions which I thought could fill the role instead. We found not 1, not 2, but 3 bags of egg noodles in the pantry! We only use them in 2 recipes which we clearly do not make all that frequently, but think we should when we're at the store.

While the casserole baked (thanks for the easy recipe, Aunt Nan!), we pulled out the cans and sorted them into types. I had no idea we'd bought stock in the Campbell's Soup company!

We decided to donate most of the duplicate items which thinned the can herd (what should a group of cans be called? How about a topplance?) significantly enough to get them all back on the shelf safely.

We finished packing up our donation grocery bag just in time for dinner. Yumz! I threw a salad together at the last minute to offset the starchy yellowness of the tuna casserole. Plus we found 5 unopened and just expired salad dressings in the pantry so I figured we must not be eating enough salad. (Finished off the bag of croutons from the pantry, too!)

Our task at the Food Gatherers the next day was to package large boxes of apples into family-sized bags. Volunteering never smelled so good!

*I really wanted the title to be a palindrome. I don't know why. This was the best I could do under pressure. It was better than my first one which was "ai po tuna can utopia". :)