Time to clean out the pantry. By which I mean the pantry, baking shelf and refrigerator.

Some of these items are easy. Leftover beef and chicken taco fillings? They’ll be tacos. Leftover spaghetti sauce? Toss it with the remainder of the bag of kluski noodles.

The tomatoes? Yurgh. Still avoiding dealing with the mound of tomatoes. Don’t feel like peeling and canning today, not to mention all the cherry tomatoes.

Part of the challenge is the dry goods. I have navy beans, northern beans, pinto beans, and small amounts of barley and lentils. It seems like I should be able to snag some cheap meat from the market and throw something in the slow cooker with some veggies.

Then there are a gazillion dessert ingredients. Sure there are the instant mixes: raspberry JELL-O, coconut cream pudding, pistachio pudding. But with just a little creativity I could do something more, like parfait layer with a tapioca mixture … or is that not enough contrast? Do raspberry and coconut go together? Maybe not.

And there are the sweet odds and ends: graham cracker crumbs, pineapple, dates, crystallized ginger, coconut and a handful of white chips.

Time to flex some ingenuity, with a healthy dose of willingness to fail and a little help from bigoven.com’s “use up leftovers” function.