In my opinion, moving is one of the most stressful situations we mature adults have to deal with (y’know, aside from things like illness and losing your job and, um, important stuff). First you need to shove everything you own into countless boxes, then you have to load all of those boxes into a truck or your car or lots of people’s cars, and then you have to remove all of those boxes that you JUST LOADED and put them in your new place. There’s lots of heavy lifting and strained arms and realizations of your sad state of strength. And when your finally get all those boxes into your new place, you’re exhausted and sweaty and sore and irritated and all you want to do is kick your feet up, mix yourself up a big-girl drink, and watch a stupid, mindless movie. BUT YOU CAN’T, because everything you own is IN THE DAMN BOXES, and you have to unpack them all first! It’s the worst. I hate it. It stresses me out.

…in case you’re abnormally slow to infer things, I’m moving.

I briefly mentioned my moving plans a few weeks ago, but now it’s a month away and I’m entering into moving!panic mode. See, I’ve moved before, but this is the first time I’m moving when I own real furniture, like a couch and a bed and crap like that. I’m only moving one town over, but it might as well be a state over – the amount of work involved is pretty much the same.

It doesn’t help that I will essentially be homeless for 24 hours during the move. I need to be out of my current place by noon on a Saturday, but I can’t move into my new place until noon Sunday. Our new place, I should say – S and I are becoming grown-ups and moving in together. Hooray! Not hooray that he’s in the exact same situation and will also be homeless for a day. Alas. At least we will be homeless together.

I think we’ve got our homeless plans mostly figured out (yay for friends), but I don’t have a good solution for storing our perishable foodstuffs during that homeless period, which means that I must use up all my frozen and refrigerated goods before we move. And that is why I am designating June as my official Pantry Decimation Month! I will attempt to use up as much food as possible, to reduce having to cart around boxes of 8,474 types of rice and also to avoid wasting refrigerated goods that I’d have to get rid of.

This weekend I kicked off my challenge by burning through some frozen veggies with Happy Herbivore’s Biscuit Pot Pie. I used frozen broccoli, frozen peas, and – most notably – some frozen green beans that are probably two years old. I am very wary of freezer burn (I have very finely tuned senses when it comes to that particular smell/taste), but by rinsing the beans in water to remove their thin coat of ice crystals, I somehow managed to avoid it. The pot pie was not as good as the last time I made it (when we used a bag of mixed frozen veggies), but it was still yummy. It was not, however, very pretty, so you don’t get a picture. Instead, how about a tally of my pantry decimation thus far?

PANTRY DECIMATION TALLY:

• Frozen peas: Used half a bag.
• Frozen green beans: Used half a bag.
• Frozen broccoli: Used half a bag.
• Frozen blueberries: Used a quarter of a bag (not in the pot pie, duh).
• Frozen raspberries: Finished a bag (same comment)!

What’re your pantry-busting tips? How do you feel about moving?