Leftover Week

This is Leftover Week. Leftover Week occurs a couple of times a year at my place, usually:

• after a weekend down at my parents', when I can't be bothered doing my big weekly cook-up when I return on Sunday night
• when the freezer is so full of plastic containers (many unlabelled) that I can't fit any more in.

It's a good feeling to clean everything out and see some empty shelf space again. Having Leftover Week is even better because it's not chipping away at the containers here and there, a little bit at a time. It's a focussed attack on the freezer! It's eating with a mission!

Even if that mission is at times a journey into the frozen unknown. It's those unlabelled containers I mentioned - the ones that, at the time, I thought 'Oh, I'll remember what that is - it's so obvious!'. No, once thawed they never turn out to be what you expect. Pumpkin soup is curried chicken casserole. Note to self: label. Yes it's uptight, but seven months down the track, you'll thank me.

My challenge this week is to get through:

1. a couple of serves of puttanesca sauce; all that's needed is some pasta (either casarecce or pantacce, my current favourite types)
2. some roasted pumpkin. Not enough for a full meal, but sufficient to moosh onto toast for a light snack after my Tuesday night yoga class
3. corn soup, made with some starchy old corn kernels. Lovely sweet flavour (made with the last of my homemade chicken stock, garlic and celery) - but those tough old Grandpa kernels made it more like creamed corn! That's okay, I like creamed corn
4. a pumpkin soup of mum's. I can't even remember when she gave it to me. This year?
5. what I call 'kitchen sink pasta' - made at the end of last week with all the last odds and sods in the vegie crisper - everything, that is, but the kitchen sink (so I think this means I'm having leftovers actually made from leftovers)
6. one solitary cherry pudding
7. a slice of raspberry cake?
8. two portions of orange self-saucing pudding
9. hacky end bits of what is possibly chocolate cake. I don't remember... when did I last make chocolate cake? Oh, yes, Nigella's!
10. two unknown cupcakes. It's good to have surpises in life.

Wish me luck! If, by chance, I finish all these before the week is out, then I will not buy more groceries. No! That defeats the purpose of Leftover Week. I shall, perversely, just eat toast - with eggs for dinner or with jam for desserts.

Do you have your own version of Leftover Week?