Cook From the Pantry Challenge

I saw this challenge at Dewey's Treehouse . . . and ignored it because most home skills are beyond me. But we haven't really done a real grocery shopping trip since before Christmas and probably won't until this weekend. Tim felt like it would be interesting to see if we could do without having to get anything from the store, just use what we have, until the weekend. So, we aren't doing the challenge for the whole month. It's just for a week. And we'll still be getting lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers so I can have daily smoothies and they can have salads.

We have one frozen chicken breast, three boxes of taco shells, an envelope of taco seasoning, lots of canned beans, a little rice, pasta, lots of gluten-free Thai rice noodles, a jar of peanut butter, some oranges, a couple of onions, parmesan cheese and a jar of pasta sauce.

Here is our week's menu:

Monday - Thai noodles with peanut sauce
Tuesday - orange hummus (no lemon!) with taco-shell chips
Wednesday - pasta with tomato sauce
Thursday - pasta with butter and parmesan cheese
Friday - chicken tacos
Saturday - sauteed onions and kidney beans over rice

We also have our stand-by (apple cinnamon muffins and baked beans) if we need another meal. I've been dropping the muffin batter onto cookie sheets in order to save money on foil muffin liners. It makes them look like monstrous blobs, but they taste the same (one child says they taste better this way).

We'll make bread (we do have a bread machine), and Miranda has a box of frozen gluten-free waffles in the freezer (that's her bread). I think we have some rice cakes, too.

Part of the official challenge was to donate all the money you save to charity. We won't be doing that. We have a car that needs repair because a deer jumped out at us a few weeks ago, and a washing machine that needed repair last week, and we have other bills. So any money we save will be absorbed into the family budget.