A no-spend week, starting in the kitchen

This is the time of year when the thrill of post-holiday spending gives way to the quiet guilt of all those little indulgences. That’s when a no-spend week starts to feel less like deprivation and more like a little ritual: a chance to slow down, pay attention and make what you already have feel new again.

For the uninitiated, a no-spend challenge is just what it sounds like: a set period — usually a week or a pay cycle — when you put discretionary spending on hold. Bills and necessities still get paid, of course. But the shiny new sweater, the $12 latte, the impulse buy that whispered your name from the checkout line? Those take a holiday of their own. I’ve been doing this on and off for a little over a year, and for me, the kitchen is where it really sticks.

My guiding rule is simple: “Buy new groceries only when I’ve used up what I’ve already got. And those new groceries? They have to play nicely with whatever’s left lurking in the back of the pantry.” It’s not just frugality; it’s a tiny, self-imposed puzzle.

There’s a clear, tangible benefit: saving a little money after the holiday splurge. November and December are always my heaviest spending months, so by January, I’m ready to reclaim that sense of calm in the pantry. But there’s a quieter, almost comforting side effect, too. Cataloging what I have — and tossing whatever is expired, off or otherwise a little gross — feels like a little spring cleaning in miniature. It’s grounding.

And then there’s the emotional payoff. A no-spend week nudges me toward living out that old Depression-era saying my grandmother liked enough to have embroidered on a pillow: Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without. There’s a satisfaction in the challenge, in proving to myself that I can stretch ingredients, improvise a meal, and still feel taken care of. It’s a small, quiet practice, but it leaves me feeling resourceful — and a little lighter — long after the week ends.

Maybe you’re interested in trying it, too?

As my Salon colleague Andi Zeisler rightly observed, 2025 was the “year of overconsumption.” Labubu hauls, Temu hauls, endless TikToks of nails clicking ASMR-style up and down a color-coded Stanley tumbler—it was a little hypnotic, a little horrifying.

So for 2026, I’m experimenting: a monthly no-spend or low-spend week. Not to be a buzzkill, but mostly to create a buffer between “ooh, I want that” and “click to purchase.” And not just for the big-ticket impulse buys, either — mostly for the tiny, perfidious ones. The consumables that linger untouched, slowly dying in the fridge or pantry, leaving you to rue your choices like some sad, spoiled culinary ghost.

In the “click it and get it” world we live in, it’s laughably easy to be halfway through cooking dinner, realize you’re missing a single ingredient, and order it on InstantCart — along with a dozen other things, because minimum delivery and, honestly, convenience is king. Pandemic habits didn’t help. Suddenly, your kitchen feels like a curated warehouse of neglected purchases.

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And yet: sometimes the most satisfying answer is to say, “Screw it,” close the app, and work with what’s already there. That half-bag of kale, the lonely carrot, the dried-out bread—it’s all raw material. A little improvisation, a little patience, and you’ve turned leftovers and pantry odds-and-ends into something that feels like magic. Or at least like lunch.

That said, not every no-spend “challenge” is a game. I’ve been there: counting the coins in my purse, checking pockets for forgotten bills, just trying to keep the household fed until the next paycheck. Fun it is not.

And let’s be real: this isn’t some “skip avocado toast and you’ll own a house someday” logic. Grocery prices are jacked, access to fresh food is uneven, and SNAP is being hollowed out. These are structural issues, not moral failings.

Still, there’s something almost magical about knowing you can make a meal from scraps, stretch a budget, and feed yourself well. That’s a skill you can rely on, again and again, and one worth passing along to people you care about. It’s not about deprivation—it’s about confidence, creativity, and a little quiet pride in what you can make happen in your own kitchen.

Here are some tips to make it work.

Determine your own “no-spend” rules

The basics of a no-spend—or low-spend, depending on your personal definition—challenge are just that: for a predetermined period of time, you abstain from nonessential purchases. It’s simple on the surface. The trick, I’ve learned, is that a no-spend challenge only works if you define it for yourself. Otherwise, it quickly devolves into a week-long argument with your own brain about what, exactly, counts as “essential”—and whether almond milk has somehow crossed that threshold.

I’ll leave it to you to determine what works outside the kitchen. But if you want your no-spend challenge to extend to how you eat, here are a few rules you might consider mixing, matching, or gently bending:

• No takeout for the duration of the challenge
• No dining out (or only dining out once, intentionally)
• Coffee is made at home, every day
• Meals are planned around what’s already in the kitchen
• Every cooked meal must include at least one pantry, freezer, or fridge orphan
• No new groceries until absolutely necessary—even if it leads to some…creative results

This may sound ironic coming from someone who attended Catholic school and later seminary (a brief stint, for the record—I dropped out after a semester), but I don’t believe a punitive environment is the best place to learn any lasting lessons. And that, after all, is the point of this exercise. The goal is to come out feeling steadier, more confident and maybe even a little smug—not beleaguered and hungry.

So if you find yourself standing in front of your cabinets, drafting rules that feel overly strict, incomplete or vaguely panic-inducing, consider loosening your grip just a touch. I’m a firm believer that small, repeatable shifts tend to stick far better than sweeping, chaos-inducing overhauls.

A “low-spend” challenge might mean cutting back on takeout from four nights a week to two. Or making coffee at home every day except Friday, when that double-shot dirty chai earns its keep by shepherding you through end-of-week meetings. Or keeping your grocery order lean and strategic: a fresh protein or two to pair with the kaleidoscopic assortment of gourmet noodle packets and frozen vegetables you’ve been quietly collecting for months, like a very specific kind of pantry museum.

“Reverse shop” from your kitchen

The first place I start any no-spend cooking challenge is by “reverse shopping” my kitchen. Instead of adding items to a cart, I make a blank grocery list organized by category—meat and protein; fruits and vegetables; dairy; grains; pantry, plus a final catchall section for pantry extras. This is where the oils live, and the spices, and the half-forgotten jars of jam, olives, vinegars and other bits of kitchen ephemera that have been quietly waiting for their moment.

Then I put on my headphones and start browsing. Not scrolling — browsing. Opening drawers, peering into the fridge, excavating the freezer. The kitchen becomes the store, and I’m its only customer.

It helps to be specific. “Six slices of Swiss” tells you far more than “cheese.” “One sourdough heel” is a different proposition than “bread.” Writing things down this way gives you a clearer sense of what you actually have on hand—not what you think you have, or what you vaguely remember buying in a moment of optimism.

This is also the moment for a little gentle reckoning. Anything expired, off, or unmistakably past its prime can go. The goal is that, by the end of this process, your list and your kitchen are in quiet agreement with each other. You should be able to look from pantry to paper—and back again—and trust that what you see is the truth.

Start planning meals

Once I’ve reverse-shopped my kitchen, I grab a fresh slip of paper and start with protein. It’s the first building block, the thing that quietly dictates how the rest of the week will unfold. This week, my list looks like this: one pound of ground beef, a pound and a half of frozen chicken breasts, a can of black beans and 13 eggs.

With roughly a pound each of beef and chicken, I immediately know they’ll need to stretch. During weeks like this, it helps—or, let’s be honest, it’s necessary—to think of meat as a flavor enhancer rather than the main event. I jot down a short, unglamorous plan:

• Beef dinner #1
• Beef dinner #2
• Chicken dinner #1
• Chicken dinner #2
• Chicken dinner #3

That’s a full workweek accounted for before I’ve decided what I’m actually cooking.

Next, I start pairing in carbs. Rice is a given—I nearly always have extra bags on hand—and in a pinch I could grill the chicken, sauté the beef, add some vegetables, and eat variations on miso-butter rice all week long. I would be perfectly happy. But I decide I want a little more variety, which is when I pull back and look at the rest of the kitchen.

I have carrots. I have onions. I have celery. The beginnings of mirepoix announce themselves, which immediately steers me toward soups, stews, and bolognese. A portion of the ground beef becomes a bolognese. The chicken starts whispering about soup.

Then I remember the buttermilk. Buttermilk means biscuits. I briefly consider breakfast-for-dinner — biscuits and eggs are always tempting — but land instead on a skillet chicken pot pie: chicken, frozen vegetables, cream, and biscuits as the topper. One more dinner, decided.

The black beans aren’t quite enough to anchor a whole meal, so they get demoted — kindly — to side-dish status. Rice, chicken, tortilla chips and a little queso bring them back into the spotlight. Another dinner.

With the mirepoix, some remaining chicken, and a box of spaghetti, I find myself craving a lemony chicken soup. I make a note to steal a handful of pasta from bolognese night and toss it into the pot. Another dinner.

Finally, I land on one of my favorite clean-out-the-fridge meals: a lazy woman’s bibimbap-inspired rice bowl, with spiced beef, whatever vegetables are left standing, and one of my surplus eggs perched on top. And just like that, the week comes into focus.

Divide ingredients over several meals — and give leftovers a job

We’ve already established that stretching meat across several meals is a smart move during a low-spend challenge, so it follows that the same logic applies to the rest of your kitchen. The goal isn’t austerity; it’s allocation.

Take feta. Instead of tipping an entire tub into a Mediterranean-ish clean-out-the-fridge pasta—a personal favorite for using up olives, tomatoes, red onion, and a handful of slightly wilted herbs—I hold some back. That feta has a second act planned: whipped into eggs and crowned on a rice bowl later in the week, where it feels less like an afterthought and more like a flourish.

The same goes for pasta. During my most recent no-spend week, when I came across a box of spaghetti, I knew I’d make bolognese — but I also knew I didn’t need every last strand for that. I squirrel away a small handful to snap into a fideo-style chicken soup. The bolognese remains hearty, the soup feels complete, and one box of pasta quietly becomes two meals.

During my reverse shop, I make a point of flagging any container that’s more than half full and asking myself a simple question: Can this ingredient touch more than one meal? Sometimes the answer is no. But more often than not, there’s a way to let it pull double duty.

I like to think of this as giving leftovers a job. The sourdough heel I found lingering in the fridge wasn’t good for much, but it was perfect blitzed into spiced breadcrumbs to scatter over bolognese. The buttermilk left behind after biscuit night? That one was clearly destined for fancy ranch, baby. Gainful employment, all around.

Make note of what you’re missing

A no-spend challenge doesn’t end in a vacuum. One of its quieter gifts is that it teaches you how to look ahead.

As the week winds down, take a moment to notice what you didn’t have—those small but persistent absences that made themselves known while you were cooking. Maybe it was fresh herbs. Maybe it was lemons. Maybe it was the kind of pantry staple you only miss once it’s gone. Depending on the rules you’ve set for yourself, this might be the moment for a small, intentional grocery shop: a handful of items meant to support what’s already in your kitchen, not overwrite it.

Or perhaps you make it all the way through without shopping at all. In that case, the exercise flips. What’s still left behind? Which ingredients—despite your best planning and creative combinations—remain untouched? Those are clues, not failures. Use them as the building blocks for your next week of meals. They’ve already volunteered.

Either way, this is a gentle on-ramp back into shopping and meal planning, informed by everything you just learned. You know which ingredients stretched beautifully, which ones quietly anchored multiple meals, and which ones you’d skip next time. You return to the grocery store — not with a blank slate — but with a little lived-in wisdom tucked into your pocket.

You deserve something sweet

One of the unexpected joys of a no-spend challenge is that it almost always nudges me back into baking. Usually one evening during the week, or a slow weekend afternoon, I find myself reaching for the pantry staples — flour, sugar, spices — and seeing what might be coaxed into existence without a special trip to the store.

It’s made me a more confident baker, especially on weeknights. When you’re working with what you already have, you learn how to adapt: how to swap, stretch, and trust your instincts instead of treating a recipe like gospel. Some of my favorite personal recipes have come out of these moments—things I’ve returned to long after I’ve gone back to “normal life.”

Most recently, that looked like a pie-sized peanut butter cookie. I was out of butter, so I used oil instead. I pressed the dough into a pie tin, sprinkled the top with turbinado sugar and flaky sea salt, and baked it until the edges set and the center stayed soft and blondie-like. It was sweet, salty, deeply satisfying—and it immediately convinced me that a whole genre of pie-sized cookies belongs in my future.

A no-spend challenge shouldn’t feel joyless. In fact, it’s often the opposite. Making something sweet from what you already have—something a little indulgent, a little unnecessary, and very much yours—can be the thing that makes the whole week feel not just manageable, but good.

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