Eating My Way Through My Fridge & Pantry Experiment ~ Day 3

This morning I was hurting for coffee (and the caffeine it provides) really bad. I went to make a coffee at home but realized my faux creamer expired. Drat! By the time I was almost out the door, I realized that last Friday I had purchased a highly coveted Silk Hazelnut Soy Creamer. I rarely find these and it's perfection with coffee. I poured a little into a container and brought it to work with me. I had some free, although normally gross, office coffee with the creamer and some Splenda packets I had also brought with me. I think I will do a short post on how I do my "Reccessionista Coffee Brewing". It's basically how I make do without a coffeemaker.

Last night, Kevin did end up treating me to dinner. He's so kind. When he purchases the condo of his dreams, I'll return the favor by treating him to dinner to celebrate. Thanks Kevin! I had a nice Steak Taco Salad. Mmmm.

I'm already getting bored with the food in my kitchen. I'm desperate for Saturday when I get some milk and eggs. My beau offered some grapefruit juice and anything else I needed for next week. It's almost cheating with all these donations but they do help and they are given with lots of love I'm sure.

Breakfast - Cereal, grapefruit juice, coffee. Pretty basic. Had my last Cherry Toaster Struedel as a mid-morning snack.

Lunch - The last can of soup. Today it's Campbell's Select Harvest Garden Recipes: Minestrone. More Wheat Thins and more Honey Dew Melon. Good thing this is the last day of this lunch as I'm already sick of it. However, I'm not looking forward to several frozen food lunches next week.

Desperation - Free Office food! Some tortilla chips helped balance out my lunch and I made sure to walk through the Sales department area to steal a few Hershey's Kisses from the share bowl. Hee hee.e

Dinner - I found a still-good baby eggplant so I made eggplant parm!

Eggplant Parm ala Raquelle

- I peeled, halved and sliced the one eggplant. I salted the slices and set them aside.

- To batter, you need eggs but I didn't have any. In a pinch, I use milk. It's viscous enough to wet the eggplant slices and make the breadcrumbs stick. So I dipped the slices in milk then breadcrumbs then pan fried them in light olive oil.

- I put the fried slices in a baking dish and spooned some of my leftover marinara sauce and the fresh mozzarella I had. I baked it in the oven at 350 degrees while I boiled some rotini pasta.


Voila! And I had made enough pasta that I could split this meal into two portions. One of them will be my lunch tomorrow. During this project, if for any reason I can make two meals out of one dish, I will definitely try as that is a great way to pinch a penny.

1 comment:

Raquel said...

This is such a great experiment! (Or perhaps it's just necessity being the mother of invention! But it's still great!) I think you're doing quite well all things (in the kitchen) considered and are being very creative in your approach to this task.

I'm going to take a page (webpage) from your book (blog) and start making sure I use everything in my kitchen. No more waste! I took a first step by food-cycling some wilting arugula into a pesto.

Also, your little fried eggplants look scrumptious!