Eating My Way Through My Fridge & Pantry Experiment Day #4

I have two frozen chicken breasts and I'm trying to figure out the best strategy to use them for two meals. Should I make one big meal to split out between a dinner and have leftovers be lunch the next day? Or should I make two separate meals? I could easily make chicken picatta with egg noodles and chicken parm with rotini pasta. I think for variety purposes I should try to do both!

The only other meat I have is frozen fish sticks and Weaver's Chicken Nuggets. The latter I'm sure has expired long ago. So I'm depending on these two chicken breasts for protein. Otherwise, I'm going mostly vegetarian until the 15th. If anything, this teaches me that I should have some more frozen meats available. It would have been helpful to have some frozen ground turkey or ground beef in the freezer.

Breakfast - My milk supply is very limited until Saturday so I opted to eat one of my stashed cereal cups I had at work and to use the office milk for it. I had Lucky Charms for the first time in many years. It was so disgusting! My hands were stained from the food coloring of those horrible dry "marshmallows". It was completely unsatisfying and I felt like I had eaten cardboard drenched in milk rather than a proper breakfast.

Lunch - Leftovers! Eggplant Parm and Rotini pasta went over well today. I added some of my rapidly dwindling supply of honey dew melon.

Snacks - I have lots at work but they are not very good. I'm working through my nasty Gluten Free Chocolate Chip Cookies (which are 120 calories for a cookie that's 2 inches in diameter. That to me seems excessive). When I opened my bag of 100 Calorie Mister Salty Milk Chocolate Covered Pretzels, I saw that they were white. I think the milk fat was starting to separate from the chocolate. Bleh. This sort of thing happens when chocolate melts and then hardens. I tried to eat them but they were gross that I had to throw them away. Double bleh!

Dinner - I was too tired to cook anything proper. So I made a green & red tomato salad with balsamic vinegarette (bottled) and heated up half of the frozen french fries I had. Pretty lackluster but it did the job.

So far this project is working well. I've only spent $2.25 on food and that was from the scone I purchased on day #1. I'm holding strong but am also looking forward to tomorrow when I get to go out for Jewish deli food. Yum! I hope to get something substantial that will allow me to have leftovers.

2 comments:

Jonas Nordin said...

Go Raquelle! I think this series of yours is totally genius! This experiment could be turned into an engaging TV series!

You provide teams with some base ingredients and an extremely limited budget. The goal is then to feed the team for a month or something. It will be thrilling and also show how resourceful we can be if we have to.

I'm sure it would work! People learn they can actually make half decent meals on a severe budget.
The viewers would learn how to find cheap food... Cooking cheap meals and possibly live a little healthier.

Totally in line with ecological living and saving natural resources.

Alisa@Foodista said...

I love reading about your experiment.And it just so happens that this week too, I've decided to use up all the food I have stored in my pantry.I realized I bought a lot of food that we never got a chance to eat.So, no shopping for me as well.Looking forward to your Jewish deli food post!