Success!

Although I've been a coupon, and thus stock-up shopper, for a couple of years I had yet to have an eat from the freezer/pantry challenge for a WHOLE month. We've done it before for a week at a time, but never a whole month, which just seemed so daunting and overwhelming. I would not consider myself a creative cook so I was envisioning a lot of spaghetti in our future! However, it was a success! We survived the whole month eating from our pantry and freezer, with a few exceptions, of course. And I think that's pretty darn good, considering that what we had in our freezer were a LOT of bagged vegetables, and about 8 servings of mashed potatoes!
Here's some of the low down:
We did shop during the month for necessary consumables, like milk, baby food, and fresh fruit.
I did also buy fresh ground turkey on 2 occasions when it was under $1.99 a pound-an absolute steal!
I made a couple of surprising substitutions. We had Shepherd's Pie one night, but didn't have any gravy. My mom was here and suggested we use cream of chicken soup as the gravy. And this time her advice was spot on, unlike this time.
Another time, I truly believe God was directing me in what to cook. I wanted to make meatloaf and was looking for a particular recipe. Well, before I found that particular recipe I found another one which used many more ingredients, but I had them on hand, including fresh carrots, that I really had no other wise plans for.
With the meatloaf we had leftovers, but rather than eating it again 2 days later, as was my plan, I happened to notice on the recipe that it was one of those meals where you cook once and enjoy 3 times. I flipped over the magazine page and found a recipe for Speedy Stroganoff, so we were able to have a completely different meal, but using the same meatloaf! With that meal, I decided to be brave and substituted cream of chicken soup for the sour cream (since anyone who knows Foster Dad knows he hates the white stuff) and used some FREE Garden Delight Pasta rather than the egg noodles, and it turned out quite delish. And yes, I was very proud of myself that I took a risk and it turned out so well! And seriously, God's hand was all over that!
We did have quite a few brinners, but you don't hear any of us complaining! :)
And finally, I truly think we had more in our freezer than we originally thought at the start of the month. We did have some frozen pizza in there, but also some Woodland Park Italian Beef that I had made back in January, Shredded Salsa Beef, some chicken thighs, and a couple of other meats that we were able to space out over the month so we had good variety! (Our side dishes, however, were rather monotonous-mashed potatoes!

And because we accomplished such a big challenge, we are about to undertake an even bigger challenge come this summer! Stay tuned for the announcement in my next blog post!