THE ELEPHANT WALK

Morning walks should be a peaceful time. But Old Mother Frugal’s mind gets bombarded with ideas during this time of peace and tranquility which jolts me into action once back in the kitchen.

A “pantry challenge”.

It consumed my walk this morning.

If you are unfamiliar, a pantry challenge is when one prepares meals only using what is in one’s pantry (that would be dry goods pantry/refrigerator/freezer).  If you must supplement, it would be for weekly perishable items.

In that Old Frugal Mother mind, there has got to be a better way....a more organized way to corral pantry madness.

The refrigerator is a side-by-side so the freezer has 4 shelves.

The pantry challenge will be to only use the freezer items from the top shelf for the 1st week of the challenge.

The next week, create meals from the 2nd shelf of the freezer.

When that is used up, move onto the 3rd shelf, etc.

How do you eat an elephant? 
 One bite at a time.

That is going to be Old Mother Frugal’s approach to my pantry challenge. Create meals from one section of the freezer at a time.

Here is what is crammed onto the top shelf of the freezer:

-  8 chicken wings uncooked
-  Leftover mini-meatballs in spaghetti sauce
-  2 cups of cooked chicken
-  Turkey mini-meatballs
-  3 cups cooked rice
-  1/2 carton vanilla ice cream
-  1/2 package of frozen mixed vegetables
-  12 oz package of frozen pollack fish fillets
- One package turkey bacon
- One package Barber Chicken/Spinach Florentine breasts
- 3 cups of cooked/mashed sweet potatoes

The only thing that stumped Old Mother Frugal during the walk was the ice-cream. What to do with ice-cream?  Well, besides the obvious of eating it as ice-cream but where’s the fun in that?

I'm thinking of waffles. I'm thinking that in place of milk and sugar, using the vanilla ice-cream. It's that kind of creativity that makes a pantry challenge fun...or a flop!

There may be some odd combination of food items being served up on the dinner table at Old Mother Frugal’s house next week.  Bacon wrapped meatballs, anyone???

SOUND THE BUGLE! Today’s tip: Periodically go through your freezer and look for those small packages of Ziploc bags that contain tiny remnants of leftover food and create a meal. The easiest meal would be soup. But consider taking a protein (meat/bean); a vegetable; a carb (potato/rice/bean) and mixing them together in a sauce to make an elegant yet economical crepe dinner.  Any leftover crepes can be used as a dessert or a breakfast crepe the next day or stored in the freezer for another meal.