Hangin' Tough- the home stretch!

 This is it!  We are heading in to the last week of the Eating from the Pantry challenge.  Are you going to hate me if I say that ultimately it wasn't that hard?  I think the biggest key is being totally committed to it.  It also made my life a little bit easier not going to the store all the time.  The biggest change is instead of saying "I feel like having this tonight", and then going to the store to get what you want I had to have the mind set of " Lets see what we can come up with tonight."  It also helped to brainstorm a list ahead of time of dinners to make.  And granted the fact that there are only three of us helped A LOT!  We almost always have leftovers so that is lunches for Darin, and Ivy and I don't need anything fancy. 

I went to the store on Saturday and we got some apples, a couple of grapefruit, yogurt and a bunch of bananas.  Bringing my total for the month up to $33.42.  We are gonna reach our goal!  I am going to need to get milk and eggs in a couple days- and probably more bananas, they don't last very long around here- but that certainly won't break the budget.  I have a turkey in the oven for tonight so my meals this week are pretty much centered around leftovers.  We'll be having turkey with rolls out of the freezer and baked peaches, turkey pot pie, paninis, twice baked potatoes and zucchini bread french toast.  Yum, I'm excited about this weeks dinners.  Lets just hope nothing happens to the turkey!

Heading in to week three

The Eating from the Pantry Challenge is still going strong around here.  Darin even said he hasn't noticed a difference.  If anything he probably likes it better since I am more likely to cook rice.   I tried the Fried Rice from the BHG cookbook (you know the one with the red checks) and it is definitely a keeper.  I had some thawed out pork roast left from the Green Chili I made so I cooked that up with it to make it a meal in one.  That cookbook is quickly becoming my favorite and I'm not entirely sure why I haven't turned to it more often.  We also got invited to peoples house for dinner twice so that was two less meals I had to make.  Yay!  Tonight I am excited to try out the Bisquick chicken tenders and we are going to have some sweet potato fries and applesauce.  Here's some other stuff I'm thinking about having this week...
-Enchiladas (and a quesadilla for Ivy)
-Twice Baked Potatoes
-Salmon and Rice
-Breakfast for dinner
-And pulling a turkey out of the freezer that I stocked up on during the holidays.
We are on our last box of cereal so we have been having some fun breakfasts also.  I made English Muffin Bread for toast and blueberry muffins.  I stocked the freezer with blueberries this summer.  There is an awesome organic blueberry farm a few miles down the road that is U-Pick.  It was one of our favorite things to do.  I think they probably should have weighed Ivy before and after though.  I'm sure she ate about a pound of blueberries every time we went!  The only thing we'll have to get this week is bananas and maybe some more grapefruit.

Eating from the Pantry week 2

I need to take some pictures of the stuff I have been making lately so I can post them on here so for now I'm just gonna update how my pantry challenge is going.  So far so good!  I've decided I am going to be more creative at the beginning so that I can fall back on easy stuff at the end.  I went to the store tonight to stock up on fruit for my little fruit face.  Its a good thing we have all those canned peaches and pears.  Instead of making sure Ivy eats enough servings of fruit I have to make sure she doesn't eat too much! Anyways.  The only thing that didn't happen was having ravioli on Friday since we were at the Greenies art show.  But I'm not complaining since I can just add it to my back up meals. A couple new meals I'm gonna try this week are Fried Rice from the Betty Crocker cookbook (I'm going to add pork too) and those chicken tenders on the bisquick box.  I think the biggest challenge is going to be when we run out of cereal for breakfast!