Update: Leanne

Thursday March 24, 2010

We have a good week so far with our food items.

Monday night’s stir fry was great: onions, garlic, carrots, mushrooms sautéed in olive olive oil. I realized that we hadn’t had much protein that day so I whisked up 4 eggs and then added those to the stir fry. We cooked rice to go with it. Mark had voiced some reluctance earlier on Monday about the challenge and I’d convinced him to be fully on board on Monday night. As I served up the stir-fry, I looked at it and said: “I’m going to have a bit of soy sauce on this.” And Mark laughed and said: “Well, you’re a good example aren’t you?”. So we did add a bit of soy sauce. And added a bit of cheddar cheese too (pantry item). Later that night, while watching the news, Mark said: “Can’t I have a little bit of whisky?” And I said no, and he didn’t.

Tuesday morning was 2 pieces of toast with peanut butter and bananas, plus juice. Mark woke up a few hours later than me and told me later that he didn’t know what he should have for breakfast so he had coffee (pantry item) and waited to lunch to have left over stir fry. And the stir fry (with cheese, no soy sauce) was my lunch as well. For supper, Zoë suggested macaroni and cheese. We cooked 3 boxes of the macaroni, added milk and a bit of butter (pantry item) plus only 2 packages of the powdered cheese. We added some of the old cheddar that we have been using for our pantry item. I also sautéed onions, mushrooms and broccoli and added these as well (along with one whisked up egg). While I was doing this, Mark and Zoë were happily making the chocolate pudding and we had a great discussion about the use of our milk quota for the pudding. Mark and Zoë argued that it would be ok to use the milk for this purpose as they intended to eat all of the pudding and therefore would get all the nutrients. How could I argue with this?

Wednesday morning was back bacon, scrambled eggs and toast with butter morning. We don’t normally buy this type of bacon but Zoë said that she liked it. For lunch we all took leftover macaroni and cheese. I took an orange too and Zoë took leftover chocolate pudding and a juice box. She is lovin’ the juice boxes. Wednesday night we were low on veggies. We chopped up the potatoes and made roasted potatoes with garlic. We also opened our first can of soup – the roasted chicken noodle soup. Both of these went over well. We all cheated again and added ketchup to the potatoes. Wednesday night was chocolate cake night. Zoë read the recipe and saw we need 3 eggs. I said well we only have 3 eggs left, should we use them for the cake or just eat them for breakfast? She agreed that we shouldn’t use them for the cake. She then took our lists of foods left and foods used and, after looking at them, said: “Mama, we’ve used 7 eggs in total so we have 5 eggs left, not 3.” I checked this and saw she was right. So we agreed to use 2 eggs instead of 3 for the cake. We turned the cake into cupcakes which we thought would be better for lunches.

Thursday morning we look after one of Zoë’s friends before school. She really likes crepes. And so it was because of her that we kept flour on the pantry item list. We made crepes with eggs, milk, butter and flour. VERY YUMMY. And since we couldn’t let her have maple syrup all by herself, we joined Zoë’s friend in putting maple syrup on the crepes (cheat number 4 !!). We also opened the pineapple tidbits and ate those. Thursday was an unusual morning and Mark and I forgot to pack lunches for ourselves. I hadn’t brought all our Good Food Box home (as I ride my bike) and so had 2 bananas in the office which I have eaten. Clint brought me a chocolate chip cookie which I ate (and will deduct from our treasure trove of chocolate cookies that we were given – we are definitely going to have chocolate chip cookies left over!). Zoë made herself a peanut butter sandwich and added a banana, cupcake and juice box to her lunch. For supper tonight we may try my idea of Shepard’s pie – using the canned chili and the rest of the potatoes. We have a few carrots and onions and some garlic left so we may add those. We will be eating cupcakes and cookies for DAYS!

We are going to continue with the challenge until tomorrow. The rest of the canned soups and some of the other items we are going to bring to the BBKC food cupboard. The two top things that have struck me about this week are: 1) When we have been faced with limited food choices and a challenge to be creative, we really did get creative….maybe not wildly so but somewhat. As a spin off of this creativity and limited food choices, we got better at planning ahead and all of us loved having leftovers as lunches AND 2) Zoë was excited and engaged with this project for the whole week (and before the food came too). She was into the planning, preparing and eating the food….and NOT just because of the cookies, pudding and cake. We had fun. And we are thankful that we have choices.