In the kitchen...

As I mentioned in a post on the Green Phone Booth this week, I've joined Money Saving Mom's Eat From the Pantry Challenge. This is a make-your-own-rules challenge where you're encouraged to eat up all the things you've stock piled or forgotten about in your pantry, fridge or freezer.

You can still go to the grocery store as much or as little as you'd like. Some limit themselves to dairy and produce at the store, others have a goal of spending under $100 for the month. It's all up to the participant and anything goes.

My goal is to use as much from the pantry or freezer as possible in each meal. I'm allowing myself dairy, produce and bread at the store, but trying not to buy anything that isn't meant for a specific meal. Meaning, no stock piling because something is on sale!

Because one of our bigger goals this year is to move away from canned and boxed food, this will give us a great jump start on getting it all out of the pantry. We're also considering getting rid of our old deep freeze that holds a lot of meat, so I've been discovering all sorts of things in there.

Here's a view of our pantry. Yikes, looks like it's time to organize in there again.


Maybe next year it'll look more like this. Ha!


Here are a few of the meals I've made so far~

Shepherd's Pie - A different variation of it at least! Ground beef (freezer), cooked and mixed with beef gravy (pantry), layer of corn on top of that (pantry), topped with seasoned mashed potatoes (pantry) and a bit of cheese. Bake at 350* until bubbly and brown. It was pretty darn good for a boxed/canned/frozen meal.

Chili - Tomato sauce (canned, pantry) mixed with kidney beans (canned, pantry), chili seasoning (pantry), and a few grated carrots and onion that were close to death in the fridge.

Improved Spaghetti Sauce - Found two cans of half-used pasta sauce in the back of the fridge, as well as a bag of mixed veggies in the freezer. No one seemed to like the sauce or the veggies (which is why they were still there). I gave the veggies a whirl in the food processor to make them unidentifiable...


...then added them to the sauce along with some of the aforementioned dying carrots...

...and a little berbere, which is an Ethiopian seasoning my kids love. I think they knew something was up (the veggies) but they did eat it.

That's some of the more creative (for me) cooking I've done this week. We've also had some of the old standard pork chops and stuffing type meals as well. I'm pretty much a by-the-recipe-book cook. I'm not very good at it and, honestly, I don't really know what kind of seasonings and flavors go with what, so it can be a little scary to try to throw things together. We'll see if I learn anything over the next few weeks!