Hey y’all!
How is everyone coming with their pantry meals? We are in the home stretch and down to the last few days of the month, LOL! Hooray! We are going to continue with some pantry meals on into the month of February, and continue using more of what we have on hand. I have already started a grocery list though, of items we have run out of, that I like to keep on hand. I’ll start purchasing more at the grocery store the first weekend in February. 🙂
We had a great week last week, and cooked almost all of our meals in their entirety from our pantry (with a few fresh ingredients like veggies, salad, fruit, eggs, etc).
Sunday, Tim wanted hot dogs before our big Saints game (which they lost, and we are still rather heartbroken about that very poor call that the referees missed). We have hot dogs in the freezer, so I only had to purchase buns for those. Sunday night, we had one really small piece of flank steak left in the freezer, that I thawed out. We usually marinate our flank steaks in an Asian marinade, and we had Sesame Green Beans and a packet of instant potatoes from the pantry. So, we cleaned out a lot with this one meal!
Monday, we had the only healthy meal of the week, haha! We had a giant salad with some grilled chicken. I cooked some dried garbanzo beans from my pantry (I love chickpeas on a salad), and made a homemade honey mustard salad dressing using things I have on hand. We thawed two boneless chicken breasts from the freezer. Tim’s got Mrs Dash Southwest Seasoning and a dash of salt, and mine got Mrs Dash lemon pepper and a dash of salt. He grilled them up and we put them on top of a salad with lots of carrots, mushrooms, onions, garbanzo beans, craisins, olives and cheese. Yum!
Tuesday, I brought out a recipe I had not made in many years, for Baked Hoisin Buns. I have actually always made these buns using a shortcut. The original recipe calls for thawing some frozen dinner rolls, but I had always made them using a roll of Pillsbury (or similar brand) canned French or Italian bread loaf. I had some Rhodes frozen rolls in the freezer leftover from Christmas, they are a main ingredient in our Overnight Sticky Buns. I thawed those out and then rolled them out (which was a lot more work). To make it a true pantry meal, I opened a big can of chicken from Sam’s Club. I normally poach boneless breasts or thighs in chicken broth and seasonings for these buns, and I didn’t do that this time. The resulting filling for the Hoisin Buns was good, but not as flavorful as it normally is. Next time, I will not used canned chicken, but cook my meat as I usually do. The filling has hoisin, oyster sauce and other seasonings, then you fill the rolled out dough and wrap it up, brush on an egg wash and sprinkle with sesame seeds and bake. They are really good, and you can serve with your choice of Asian sides. Tim picked egg drop soup, crab rangoon and I picked edamame.
Wednesday, we had something that you rarely see in our house -spaghetti! I almost always make my own meatballs or we do a simple meat sauce. But I had purchased a bag of Kroger brand frozen turkey meatballs when they were on a 2 day sale a while back and they had been sitting in the freezer. I was reminded after we finished dinner, of why I prefer to make my own meatballs. They were good, but not great. We had a nice spaghetti dinner though, something we don’t have often, so we really enjoy it when we do. Next time, I’ll make my own Crockpot Meatballs, or bake some in the oven.
Thursday night was leftover night, and Friday night, I made broccoli cheese soup. It’s a very old recipe from a cookbook that I purchased in the late 80’s or early 90’s. The recipe uses Velveeta, and while I don’t like to use it often, it works great for this soup! I’ve tried through the years to use shredded cheddar or a mix of cheeses, but it’s just never the same. Something about Velveeta melts better and gives a better taste to the soup. The broccoli was from the freezer, the block of imitation Velveeta from the pantry, and I used some fresh carrot and onion. We also had Texas Toast from the freezer. Love a meal that uses up so many items from the pantry and freezer, hooray!
Saturday, we had a frozen pizza that I spiced up my normal way. I added more pepperoni, some of my favorite topping (Jimmy Dean Meat Lover’s Crumbles), more shredded cheese, some Parmesan on top and a nice healthy sprinkle of Italian seasoning. We had a big salad too.
All in all, a great week! How did you do this week with cooking from your Pantry, Fridge and Freezer? Leave us a comment and let us know!
Have a wonderful and blessed day, y’all!
Stacy
We had leftovers at the first of last week for two nights so I was able to use all that up before cooking a few more meals! I did ahi tuna one night with instant potatoes (gasp!) and roasted zucchini so sort of a healthy meal combined with using stuff I already had. I did a crockpot stew another night using stew meat from my freezer along with one of those grain/quinoa seeds of change package and purple hull peas from my the freezer, all of that was pantry and freezer. I used the last package of David’s deer tenderloin Friday night, a box risotto mix from the cabinet and leftover veggies. Saturday night I did cook some seasoned chicken breasts I had bought on clearance but got them b/c I knew it would be enough for when David was home! To go with it I used the last of some small noodles from the pantry and stir fry veggies from the freezer. Sunday I made a mexi beef skillet recipe using ground turkey from my freezer, because I don’t cook with red meat a lot! We had green salad with that and instead of serving over rice like recipe said I used another package of that grain/quinoa mix. I did buy a small amount of produce/fruit and that marked down chicken but everything else from all week was already here!