The Bare Essentials Challenge: Weekly Recap

You know I have to say that I'm really pleased with how this is going so far.  I never expected that I would be able to buy meat on a grocery budget reduced by 2/3, but it's worked out that I could get a few things on so little money.  So far stores are still holding up okay, although I grated the last little chunk of cheese up tonight for dinner, so I'm, once again, going to be using about 10.00 out of my 50.00 for groceries to get more cheese in the next week or so.

Anyway, here's how the stores held up this week.

For breakfast lately the kids have been pretty set on eating toast for breakfast (their choice, honestly as I'd love it if they ate like oatmeal or something to mix things up) and with the home made bread that has been pretty cost effective to do.  I've been using margarine for baking period and saving the butter for the toast as my son won't do margarine on his toast.  So far I still have four pounds of butter left.  I managed to find one pound of butter I still had in the fridge, which lasted us a while, so I'm going to be pulling the last four pounds out of the freezer here soon.

With lunches the kids have been taking a lot of pasta to school (in the case of my daughter it's definitely her choice there), so that has helped to stretch the grocery budget too.  I mean one pound of pasta goes a long way for lunches with the kids, so that's been really nice.  My husband has been taking lunches on and off, which has helped to cut costs somewhat and he's been working local sometimes so he has been able to come home for lunch too, which has also helped to reduce spending.

Now onto the dinners for the week.

The menu plan went kind of awry a couple of times this last week.  My husband wasn't feeling good one night and wanted to just eat pasta and the kids will eat pasta for dinner as well so I just did a noodle bowl night instead of corn beef hash (hash will be moved to next week's menu).

1.  Shrimp Cocktail Night

I was going through the freezer to do my menu plan for the week and ran across a bag of shrimp I'd gotten on 5.00 Fridays at Carrs about a month ago and was kind of shocked to find it was pretty badly freezer burned.  I turned the bag around to find that a box from a mini-pizza had managed to punch the bottom in such a way that it separated the bag's seam, so it'd just been open to the freezer for goodness knows how long.

I tried to think of something I could do with the shrimp to use it up quickly and decided to do shrimp cocktail.

I make shrimp cocktail KIND OF like Alton Brown, but with some tweaks.  I take a pan of water and add 1/2 cup of salt (about) and 1/2 cup of sugar (about) and a couple tablespoons of some acid (in this case some white wine vinegar), mix it up well and then put the shrimp in.  I then boil the shrimp till just done in this mixture.  The shrimp come out perfectly seasoned every time when I do it this way.  It seems like a lot of salt and sugar, but trust me, only a small portion actually absorbs into the shrimp, but it's enough to help make them good!

I then took some Emeril's Baby Bam Seasoning and mixed it up well with the shrimp once I had drained them well, making sure to rub the seasoning into the shrimp with my fingers so that it got into the meat.

I served the shrimp with cocktail sauce (from the fridge) and used that up and then I used up all the little amounts of leftover fries from the freezer so those were taken care of too.

It turned out well.  I only had a couple of shrimp that tasted mildly of freezer funk, so I was grateful for that.

2.  A lot of my accomplishments for the week came from desserts, actually.  I was trying to think of different ways to make jello more exciting, so I made a three color jello in a mold (thanks to the reader who suggested that mix up :).  It was fun and unmolded like a champ (woot!), although I was the only one who liked the mango and lime jello flavors (they didn't really go together well, but I ate them separately alright...I didn't have any lemon jello or I would have used that for the top layer).  My daughter liked the strawberry jello on the bottom anyway *laugh*.

3.  I convinced my daughter (actually all I had to do was suggest it) to bring chocolate chip cookies into her class for her birthday treat.  I just used the good old Nestle Tollhouse recipe (found it online) and used that to make the cookies (which following the whole "1 rounded tablespoon" direction actually only gave me 3 dozen cookies, but it was enough for her class anyway) and when I was on the site I saw they had directions to make cookie bars.

My husband isn't a big cookie person, but I remembered that he actually LIKES cookie bars, so I made some.  I then convinced my doubtful daughter to try them, which of course she loved, so now I have a great way to go forward with cookies for dessert.  Make them into bars!

4.   My biggest accomplishment for the week was definitely that chicken from 2013.  When it defrosted I rinsed it REALLY well to try and remove any surface freezer funk (I removed the giblets and neck first, of course) and then I jammed it into my crock pot (I have a smaller crock pot).  I then took taco seasoning and just went to town coating the chicken with it, I think I probably used about 1/3 of a cup of taco seasoning on the chicken.  I then added enough water on the bottom of the pot to avoid any scorching or anything (somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of a cup) and then I cooked the chicken on high for about five hours.  I then took the chicken carefully out of the crock pot and shredded the meat that I knew would be okay (like I skipped the wings as they were really freezer burned) and placed it back into the crock pot (I left the liquid from the chicken when it cooked).  I then added yet MORE taco seasoning to the shredded meat, sprinkling it liberally over it and cooked it on low for an additional 3 1/2 hours (I did end up adding salt and pepper and a bit of chicken bullion powder to season it at that point as it was kind of bland, believe it or not).  I then removed the meat to a bowl via slotted spoon and let it sit overnight int he fridge before serving.

Final verdict?  The chicken came out tasting a-okay!  No freezer funk to be had and nice and heavily seasoned for tacos.  I call it a victory!

I now have a huge bowl of taco meat, but I'm thinking I'm going to take some of the leftovers and make taco soup out of it for next week.  Sounds good to me!

5.  I had the container of boxed milk in the fridge and I had some left that had been sitting in the fridge for a week and was tasting a bit sour.  Instead of throwing it away, I added some lemon juice to it, to sour it fully, and made Irish soda bread.  My oven has been having temperature issues (I'm REALLY hoping it just needs to be cleaned as I don't want to have to replace a thermostat right now), so the bread didn't rise very well and we ended up with a kind of doughy tasting small loaf, but we ate it for breakfast toast and it turned out alright for that.  The loaf was so small that once we all had toast that pretty much wiped the loaf out *laugh*.

So there you are folks.  My frugal adventures for the week.  You do anything interesting on the food front this week?