{"id":2895,"date":"2010-01-11T10:35:49","date_gmt":"2010-01-11T16:35:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paige.ericksonfamily.com\/?p=2895"},"modified":"2010-01-11T10:35:49","modified_gmt":"2010-01-11T16:35:49","slug":"eat-from-the-pantry-challenge-week-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/paige.ericksonfamily.com\/?p=2895","title":{"rendered":"Eat from the pantry challenge&#8211;week 1"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One week down, and I&#8217;m proud of how we&#8217;ve done.  We&#8217;ve eaten soup, corn dogs, macaroni and cheese, spaghetti,meatball sandwiches, meat gravy over mashed potatoes, and some leftovers.  <\/p>\n<p>Around Thanksgiving, I bought a HUGE bag of yukon gold potatoes, and I&#8217;m having a hard time eating them all.  This week I noticed that they are starting to sprout, so I took action.  I cooked up three big pots of potatoes, then mashed them, adding only chicken broth.  Then I froze them in freezer bags so that I can have quick mashed potatoes later.  I also made up a big batch of potato salad for Megan, my potato salad lover.  I don&#8217;t know if we&#8217;ll be able to get through all of these potatoes before they go bad, but I&#8217;ll try.  This week we&#8217;ll bake them up as fries, or maybe loaded potato skins.  <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve also gotten some &#8220;help&#8221; in my challenge.My neighbor called and asked if I needed fresh eggs.  I had JUST gone to the store, so I told him I could only afford 18 eggs, and he said, well, how about if I give you two dozen, but only charge you for one dozen?  Well, that&#8217;s a good deal for me, so I got two dozen fresh eggs for only $2.  Yes, it went over my $25, but I&#8217;ll try to cut back by $2 this week.  My sister-in-law even gave us her leftover ham from Christmas!  Hey, we&#8217;ll never turn down ham. <\/p>\n<p> By Friday night I was kind of tired of cooking, and I told Cole he was in charge of thinking of something to have for dinner.  He said How about Ramen noodles?  Sounded great to me.  I like it that the kids actually WANT to eat ramen noodles. And since Ryan was out of town, there was no need to make a &#8220;real&#8221; dinner.  Although last night we did have a roast (from the freezer) with sweet potatoes, yukon gold potatoes, and carrots.  So we&#8217;ll have some leftovers from that dinner to use up this week.<\/p>\n<p>I only went to the grocery store one time this week, and I almost stayed within my $25 budget.  I did go over by a couple bucks, but I actually put some things back, when I realised I hadn&#8217;t bought the right item that was on sale and went with the coupon I had.  <\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/paige.ericksonfamily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/01\/IMG_9466-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"IMG_9466\" title=\"IMG_9466\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-2896\" srcset=\"https:\/\/paige.ericksonfamily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/01\/IMG_9466-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/paige.ericksonfamily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/01\/IMG_9466-1024x768.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s not a whole lot of food, is it?<\/p>\n<p>This week I&#8217;ll need more fruit, as I was getting tired of apples and canned fruit, but I guess that&#8217;s the point, right?  We had bread in the freezer, but we&#8217;re almost out of that, so I&#8217;m going to have to make my own bread or buy some more this week.  This week we also ran out of the cheese that the kids like.  It&#8217;s the presliced American cheese that I buy in a huge block at Costco.  But I don&#8217;t think I can go into Costco and ONLY spend $25, so that cheese might just be a no no.<\/p>\n<p>We also did some baking.  I brought out a bag of muffins I had stored in the freezer.  The kids gobbled up those muffins and asked that we make some more.  So on Sunday we made a bunch of two different kinds of muffins for the kids to grab and eat.<\/p>\n<p>The hardest part for me is seeing the deals on cereal and other stock up items that I can&#8217;t buy right now.  We do NOT need cereal, as I buy lots of it when it&#8217;s on sale, but I hate to pass up a deal.  I&#8217;m also getting low on diet coke, so I&#8217;m going to have to add that to the list this week.<\/p>\n<p>How are you doing?  Did you eat from the pantry this week and avoid going to the grocery store?  Well, if you didn&#8217;t, it&#8217;s not too late to try.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One week down, and I&#8217;m proud of how we&#8217;ve done. We&#8217;ve eaten soup, corn dogs, macaroni and cheese, spaghetti,meatball sandwiches, meat gravy over mashed potatoes, and some leftovers. Around Thanksgiving, I bought a HUGE bag of yukon gold potatoes, and I&#8217;m having a hard time eating them all. This week I noticed that they are [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[23,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paige.ericksonfamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2895"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paige.ericksonfamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paige.ericksonfamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paige.ericksonfamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paige.ericksonfamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2895"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/paige.ericksonfamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2895\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2901,"href":"https:\/\/paige.ericksonfamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2895\/revisions\/2901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paige.ericksonfamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paige.ericksonfamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paige.ericksonfamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}