Thrifty Thursday: Another Week of Pantry Eating

 

Friday:  I closed out yesterday's post before I said what we'd had for dinner.  I baked Pork Chops, and served them with Potato Salad, Butter beans and Bread and butter.  I used potatoes I'd had on hand a while, and the butter beans were frozen.

Today, John was out with his friend/former partner for lunch.  I went to the freezer to look for food of any sort and found a single serving of Moussaka that I'd frozen in July.  It was quite good and seemed a sort of decadent lunch.  Not my usual fare, that's for sure.

For tonight's supper, I pulled the breakfast casserole from the freezer to thaw as well as bacon and I served this with Tater Tots.  I bought the Tater Tots just this week and realized after I'd started frying them that I was messing up my own challenge.  

If I'd used my head this evening, I might have avoided some waste.  I've found that freezing the breakfast casserole uncooked generally leads to a mess as it freezes and again after thawing, so I had pre-baked this one.  It was only John and I for supper tonight, since Katie fetched Caleb early.  We cannot possibly eat a 9x9 pan of breakfast casserole.  It was thawed and I might easily have cut it in half and put the rest away for later in the week but no I reheated the whole darn thing.  As I stood there looking at the half pan left after supper, I realized that heating it again was not going to do the flavor of it a bit of good.  In the end, I fed it to the pets...Shame on me for not using my brain!

Not as much got done today as I'd hoped, but that's fine.  The house looked ready for the weekend despite my lack of 'doing'.  Meal plans for the weekend are open.  Tomorrow we'll pick up take out on the way home.   

John came home and we went back into town to run a series of errands.  John wanted to fill his car up.  We had to go by the bank.  Wish I'd remembered I wanted to go by the post office, but we'll be out tomorrow and Sunday, too.

Saturday:  I took water and mandarins with us this morning when we left the house.  I also dressed warmly because I knew we'd be in a cement block building with cement floors.  My feet still got cold and so did my legs though I kept John's jacket draped over them.  Getting back into the car was a joy, all that nice warm sun having warmed the car.  We enjoyed our mandarins and water on our trip over to the pizza place.

Pizza lunch today.  We brought it home to reheat and eat.  I made salad here.  The young gentlemen at the pizza place found a $3 coupon code for me to use, bless him!

Sam dropped off a pair of Josh's jeans to be repaired.  I'll work on those tomorrow.  It's really just a matter of trimming loose threads and iron on patches for this repair.

Currently I'm trying to determine what I might make for a nice hot lunch when we return from church tomorrow.  I know we'll be as cold as we were today coming in and we'll be more than ready for something hot and comforting to eat.

Tonight's supper: John fried eggs and had toast.  I reheated some chicken broth that was in the fridge, doctored it up with Chili Garlic sauce, onion, carrot, the last of the spinach from the packet I bought last week.  Then I broke into my bag of frozen mini wontons that are meant for next month's eating and tossed in a half dozen of those.  This was so good.   I confess that after eating it I felt really warm for the first time in days and that was a luxurious feeling after two weeks now of feeling cold nearly all of the time.

Sunday:  While I was heating my soup last night, I prepped vegetables for what was meant to be stew today.  I was planning to thaw a chuck roast and cut it up and had one that was the perfect size for that, but I looked at the sell by dates on the roasts and realized that one of them was dated 2022!  Goodness!  It looked just fine, but I'd no idea I had held on to that roast for that long.  I expect the reason I hadn't cooked it already was that it is a HUGE chuck roast.  Well, I decided that Pot Roast would do as well as stew for a meal.  

I left it all simmering in the slow cooker this morning.  My gracious!  When I opened the storm door, I caught whiffs of the cooking coming through the back door.  (Yep, it needs to be better insulated...).  Gosh but it smelled good.  When I opened the back door the warmth and the aroma were like walking into a warm hug.   It was soooo cold out and stayed cold all day long.  While I waited on John to putter around with a new piece of equipment, I had a cup of the hot broth hoping to chase the chill off the way last night's soup did.

On our way home, we went into Tractor Supply to get pet food.  Golly Gee!  When did dogfood get to be so expensive?!  I had to look hard to find a bag that was less than $60.  Wow.  I finally located a 50-pound bag for just about $20 that was the smaller kibble Rufus requires.  If I thought dog food was pricey, bird seed blew me away.  I paid more for bird seed that weighed less than half the weight of the dog food and that was the best priced of the sort I wanted to get for our feeders.  I kid you not when I say that buying cat, dog and bird food today, buying just 1 bag of each, ran us around $75 today.  

I bought a new bird feeder today as well.  It was very well priced and will hang on the Shepherd's Hook at the end of the patio.   I'll be buying another one next pay period.  I discovered that the old one hanging from the pecan tree around back has split all the way down one side.  It's still holding food but it's just a matter of time before it's too broken to be useful.

We also stopped at the local grocery where I wanted a can of Maxwell House coffee to carry us over until the Amazon delivery arrives.  I scanned the clearance shelf and bought two boxes of cereal (one just expired, one just about to expire), two bottles each of Grey Poupon and store brand steak sauce, and from the rest of the store a bag of tortilla chips, packet of hot dog buns (for the children tonight if they do eat supper with me), and almost four pounds of store made sausage meat that was on the meat clearance shelf.

My menu for the week ahead will change.  There is a LOT of meat leftover.

Repaired Josh's jeans.  Easy peasy.  The hardest part was trimming away the raveled bits in the hopes that he wouldn't pick at it and make it tear more.  

For a snack this afternoon, I offered the children vanilla wafers with peanut butter and Hot cocoa with Marshmallows.  Millie turned down the peanut butter and cocoa, but I had to restrain her over the marshmallows, lol.

Meals: Toast, I had eggs with mine

Pot Roast with Vegetables

Leftover pizza

Monday:  I used leftovers from the fridge and a bit of this and that from the freezer to make Chicken Fried Rice for our lunch today.

I had a chiropractor appointment today, so I batched several errands to make good use of the gasoline.

Since I was next door to a grocery at the UPS store, I looked at the app to see what was on sale that I could use.  I had added a $2 off/$10 purchase to my app wallet this morning.  I bought mostly buy one get one items.  This included frozen ravioli (worked out to about $3 per bag with one bag typically being a family sized item, which means two meals each for John and I), four dozen cookies for just over $4, Cabot brand Gouda cheese bars, two candy bars.  I also bought a bag of sale priced yellow onions and a packet of store brand ham.  I've found the store brand, pre sliced, pre-packaged meat is much less per pound than the deli counter sliced meats, even though it's still the store brand.  I spent just over $28 today and saved over $26.All of this except the cheese is meant to be part of February food stores.  They are not intended for this month at all.  Amazingly, I still have grocery money left this month...I like that!

In case you are curious, the cookies all went right into the freezer, minus two of the Oatmeal raisin, one for me and one for Caleb for afternoon snack.  Those four dozen cookies cost me about what making four dozen would have cost, since butter nor flour is cheap just now.

Tuesday:  Sometimes, I'd like to just bop John a good one...No, not terribly angry but more than a little aggravated.  On Sunday I went into the local grocery and picked up a box of Raisin Bran cereal, the real stuff, that was on the clearance shelf. I pushed the box onto the pantry shelf with the other cereal and didn't think a thing about it.  Then this morning when Caleb came in, John offered him Raisin Bran...

I pointed out that we had four (FOUR!) open cereals already and any one of those would do as well without opening a new box.  Well too late.  Raisin Bran was all Caleb could see once Grampa had held it up and that was all that would do.  I realized it wasn't a battlefield I wanted to stand on today but doggone it!  This is going to be the thing that makes having pantry cabinets not great.  At least having the pantry in the back meant that John (a) wouldn't make the short trek to actually get anything from the pantry and (b) lived in happy ignorance of what I had...I may just re-introduce that other hermetically sealed storage bin and put unopened cereal in it back in the guest closet...

This morning, I started bread right away and as soon as Caleb was here, I started banana nut bread.  I used some of the bananas from the freezer that Bess had brought me this past autumn that had gotten overripe at the grocery.  

For today's lunch, I made a rather good Makeover meal from Leftover Pork Chops.  I made a Carnita type filling for soft tortillas.  Yummy!  I'll post that method over on the Recipe blog.  

I didn't take a thing out of the freezer last night.  I thought about cooking that portion of Ham but having had pork for lunch, I was less than willing to do that.  I'd rather wait until end of the week.  I contemplated easy things, flipped through my personal recipe notebook...Nothing inspired me.  I finally just stook one of those fourths of Lasagna from the freezer and set it out to thaw somewhat.  We'll eat that for supper tonight with a nice salad and Cheddar Bay Biscuits.

No, we didn't.  We had lasagna with steamed broccoli and salad and a side of bread and butter.

Wednesday:  One of the recommendations for cleaning my new cabinets was to use the magic eraser type sponges.  I found a big 50-pc multipack, no name sort on Amazon for less than $15.  I have no complaints.  They look and feel like the name brand, and they do the job well.  I expect these will also be used on the showers as well.

We've had the luxury of having to use next to no heat these past two days.  I'm curious what the next electric bill shall look like.  Last month's bill arrived the other day and I was a little shocked at how high it was.  Looking at the dates though, I can tell you that the dates coincide with the work done on the house.  Between added power equipment, lights on that typically might have been off, and the fact that the back door pretty much stayed open from the time the workmen arrived until they left on that last day and that it was downright chilly/cold during many of those days...Well, it is what it is.  Just one more unplanned expense related to the renovations.  At least it wasn't a HUGE overage, just an overage.

I am fully expectant that this next bill will be more in line with what we're accustomed to paying, perhaps even a wee bit less to balance December since we had a week without the heat pump, and we used the propane loads more than in December.

Meals:  Banana Bread and Fried Spam (me and Caleb), John had toast

Roast Beef Sandwiches, Oranges, Chips.  Surprisingly there's still a load of meat left.  I'm telling you this was one huge chuck roast, so I'll easily get another meal if not two more from what is still left.   I'm going to look for more creative ways to use it up.  I have two jars of leftover Birria Broth in the freezer and that might make a really good entree next week...

Glazed Ham, Brussels Sprouts, Potatoes Au Gratin (or as a four-year-old Sam used to say, Potatoes all Rotten), Cheddar Bay Biscuits.  I was fumbling for a green-ish side dish and remembered the bag of frozen Brussels Sprouts.  They are not my favorite but time to get them out of the freezer and free up that space.

Thursday:  Not feeling 100%.  I have a painful throat on one side, a crampy sort of feeling in my jaw and a slight headache.  I swear I think I might have mumps, but I'm not positive that is so.  However, the pain is enough to make me take a routine dose of pain relievers every four hours, apply warm compresses and do all the other things I know to do to fight off any virus or ailment: drink loads of fluids, get plenty of rest, take zinc and Vitamin C, use thieves oil.  I'm also keeping my distance from all the rest of the family.  

I slept really late this morning, almost until 9:30am.  

When I got up John was just making his toast, a second breakfast for Caleb.  I joined them at the table with my coffee and some leftovers I'd grab hastily from the fridge and reheated.

It was so nice and warm out that Caleb is dressed in shorts today.  We ended up putting shorts on him yesterday afternoon because he was so hot in the warmer clothes, he'd been dressed in.   He went out to play this morning, but it's looking like this afternoon he'll be shut in with the rain.  

I found some things in the shed that I think will work very well for one of my utensil drawers to corral things.  

Lunch today was Hot Dogs and Tater Tots.  I've mentioned before that Caleb is not crazy about potatoes...well that apparently includes Tater Tots.  Humph.  I admit I'm not over fond of them either unless they are deep fried, so I usually skip them, but I had bought them in the hopes he'd like them.  Nope, he doesn't.   Note for future: don't buy the things.

I have no idea what is for supper tonight.  We've plenty of roast beef, plenty of ham leftover.  I do have those frozen convenience foods I'd bought last week, so any of that might do, or perhaps I'll just do soup and sandwiches.  

We're running out of produce, and I need milk and eggs, but I'm nowhere near out of foodstuffs otherwise.  I'm definitely going to continue my pantry freezer challenge until end of this month.  I've got about $100 of my food budget for this month left, the rest having been spent on fresh items needed and stocking good sales for use in coming months.  

I'm off to get a fresh dose of pain relievers and think I'll lie down and rest.  I hope everyone is well and that your challenge is going well.

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