GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER

That moment when Mother’s Little Helper asks if a friend can stay over for dinner. That other moment when you get a call from someone you know who is passing through town tonight and you find yourself with an extra dinner guest.

How do you stretch your dinner plans into one or two extra servings?

Amazingly, two chicken breasts can go pretty far with the right extenders. Slice in half, pound flat, stuff with cheese and flavored butter, roll and dip in bread crumbs. That’s an attractive adult dinner with side dishes. If you have leftover vegetables, add them into the stuffing mix as well.

Slice chicken breasts thin, sauté and add to box of cooked pasta with your favorite sauce. This can be a lemon/garlic/chicken stock sauce, a brown butter sauce or a honey/orange juice or pineapple sauce. The honey/orange juice sauce works well with rice.It all depends on what is in your pantry.

Kabobs on skewers and served over rice…another great way to prepare chicken breasts for unexpected company. Fruits (pineapple/melon/) or vegetables (onions/green peppers) are great extenders and much less expensive to purchase than extra boneless chicken.

My mother would assign me the task of making hamburgers from ground chuck whenever she wanted to serve hamburgers for dinner. We were a party of five.

Why me? I could take a pound of ground chuck and make it yield five hamburgers. She never knew how I did it but on burger night, I knew my role. I couldn’t cook, but I could eek out an extra burger from that pound of meat.

Cooked ground meat with onions and chopped/grated vegetables stuffed into large pasta shells covered with sauce makes a small amount of ground meat feed many. Sautéed ground meat and a fun pasta shape mixed with sauce and mozzarella topping makes “pizza pasta” for hungry children or for adults, call it “baked ziti”.  

Your pantry is your friend when it comes to unexpected dinner guests. Combined with the web, a very resourceful tool, you can keep your budget in check without writing a check to your local grocer.

SOUND THE BUGLE! Today’s tip: In your recipe box (virtual or physical), keep “go to” recipes that you can make to ramp up “nothing to something” in a short time. Being prepared is another technique to maintaining a frugal budget!

       A BOX OF PASTA, CANNED TOMATOES, A JAR OF ARTICHOKES

                                  PERSONAL MEAT LOAF FOR EACH GUEST

 

 

TWO STUFFED CHICKEN BREASTS YIELDING FOUR SERVINGS