Here are some recipes that can be made from items in your pantry.

Breakfasts

Instant Oatmeal Mix  – Add any add in you want and you have a delicious breakfast

Fruit Smoothie – Use any frozen fruit you have on hand, juice, and even any yogurt.  Be as creative as you like.

Lunch:

Sloppy Joes – As long as you have some hamburger in your house, you can whip up some sloppy joes.  If you have enough time, you can also make homemade hamburger buns to eat the Sloppy Joes on.  Save some of those sloppy joes for a Sloppy Joe pizza later.

Dinner:

Baked Spaghetti – Again you can use whatever meat you have in your fridge or freezer.  Use whatever cheese you may have in your fridge – okay maybe not bleu cheese.  If the cheese is not shredded, shred it yourself.

Ranch Chicken Legs – As long as you have chicken (doesn’t have to be just legs – use chicken breasts or thighs), Bisquick or something similar, and dry ranch dressing packet (or the ingredients to make your own), you can cook this simple main dish.

Taco Crescent Bake – You can switch this up with cooked chicken or even ground turkey.  You can try different cheeses.  This is a great main dish.  Don’t have tortilla chips but have tortillas, make your own chips.

Orange Chicken – I usually keep the ingredients for this simple dish in the freezer (popcorn chicken) and pantry (orange sauce) for an easy meal.

Crockpot Ribs – You can use this same method for chicken or even a pork roast.  Use whatever barbecue sauce you have on hand.

Spanish style chicken noodle soup – This recipe calls for raw chicken.  I’ve made it with cooked chicken.  You can use frozen corn or canned corn.  You can use dried black beans or canned black beans.  If you use the dried beans, make sure you prep it beforehand.

Pantry Challenge – Winter of 2012

As I was looking through various blogs, I found a pantry challenge.  IT DOES NOT mean only eating out of the pantry or freezer.  It means looking at what’s in the pantry or freezer before shopping or menu planning.

My goals for the pantry challenge are:

1.  Lower my grocery bill

We’ve been spending too much at the grocery store.  I want to lower that bill.  So does hubby.

2.  Clean out the pantry and freezer

We need to get that pantry cleaned out so if I cook dinners based around what I have in the pantry that will help us with the grocery bill.  This week we have had baked spaghetti which used up a half box of spaghetti that was sitting in the pantry and already cooked hamburger that was in the freezer.  We have also had peanut butter pancakes.  I used up some white whole wheat flour that was not being used.  Another meal was veggie beef soup.  In that meal, we used up some more of the hamburger meat from the freezer and half bags of frozen vegetables hanging around in the freezer.  We are going to have chicken scampi later on this week to use up some of the frozen chicken tenderloins that have made their home in our freezer.

Next week’s meals are going to use up a whole roasting chicken taking up room in the fridge’s freezer.  We are also going to use the cooked chicken for a soup the next day.  That soup contains corn and black beans.  I have cans of those in the pantry which is going to save us money.  It also calls for chicken broth.  Again I have that in the pantry.  The only expense I may have for that soup is the orzo pasta.  I will have to check in the pantry to make sure I don’t have that.

3.  Once a month cooking

I would love to do some once a month cooking.  In order to do that, I need to get the deep freezer cleaned out.  Since I make most of the dinners, I don’t always want to cook when I get home.  On those days, I like to stop at a fast food restaurant which is both not healthy and not cheap.  I would love to have back up meals in the freezer for the days I know I am going to be tired.  Also with it being winter, the weather is unpredictable.  It might take me longer to get home so I would like to have the option of a frozen meal that my hubby can pull out of the freezer.

Those are my three main goals for the pantry challenge.  As I navigate through the challenge, I think I will come up with more goals than those 3.