Eat from the Pantry Challenge: Room in the freezer!

One week left in the Eat from the Pantry Challenge, and things are going well!

I stuck to my menu plan for last week, except for Saturday night, when I served a leftover extravaganza instead of the pancake dinner I had planned.  I take out all the leftovers, heat 'em up, and everyone gets to decide what they want to have.  In this case, I also made some whole-wheat pasta to serve the leftover sauces on.

The freezer is empty of the cuts of meat I had bought for some special event and had never made; there's only chicken breasts, ground beef, and a whole chicken in there, plus a few chicken carcasses to make soup with.  Other than that, there's a couple different kinds of flour, some margarine bought on sale last week, a few packages of hot dogs, and some frozen, overripe bananas.  And that's pretty much it. There will be lots of room for a freezer cooking day next month!

I was also able to make some room in the kitchen door sauces and condiments, including a bottle of apricot sauce (called "chicken sauce") which I used to make, not unexpectedly, chicken.  That had been sitting there since last Passover - I guess the sugar content allowed it to not go bad all that time.

We did run out of a few things.  We did buy juice (which I dithered over in my last pantry challenge update) and two boxes of cold cereal.  We ran out of instant oatmeal; I made oatmeal in the crockpot, instead.   The white flour pasta is pretty much gone - good riddance!  We try to eat the whole-wheat pasta (of which I still have several boxes), but the white flour stuff is always a temptation. 

There are still way too many cans of tomato sauce, bought last December either 3/$1 with $1/3 coupons or with $1 off Muir Glen coupons.  Lots of canned mandarin oranges bought at Walgreens to get totals above $25 so I could use s $5/$25 coupon.  Lots of strange flours bought for my daughter's science experiment on how gluten make baked goods rise.  So, we still have work to do clearing out the pantry!

Thanks to Life as MOM and Money Saving Mom for this great challenge!