Saturday, October 12, 2013

Create a .... Pantry Noodle Soup

I am back from annual conference and I am recharged and ready to go! Like my vacuum after the battery has been plugged in and has full charge, it practically sucks my carpet off the floor. It was fantastic to be introduced to the new curriculum that Food $ense is going to be teaching all of us. I can't wait to learn and explore it more. We are all going to be such kitchen whiz-kids, dinner is No match for US!!

So I learned that the first thing we needed was a well stocked kitchen, well not even that, we needed to have a few cans of something in our pantry. If you attend a Food $ense class or go to the website you can get This awesome handout, that can tell you what you might need in your pantry and some ideas of what to do with it. Remember, this is NOT about going out and buying everything on the list, it is about buying what you can when it is one sale and restocking when you can afford it. The point of having a well stocked pantry is to save us all money, not cost us our entire budget.  Here is the Food $ense lesson page about Cooking Basics and starting to equip your kitchen and stock your pantry. 


Tonight I got to put my new lessons into action for the first time. I spend the whole day working hard to finish a project that is due next week for a friend of mine. And happens so often dinner time rolled around. My husband says, "so, what's for dinner" and I replied, "are you hungry or are you just asking because you are curious?"  Turns out that in spite of all my lovely knitting that I had accomplished the people that live in this house with me still expected to be fed! Can you imagine? :) 

My first thought was, "those doritos tacos sound pretty good", and then I got a hold of myself and thought, "I have this, I have handouts and I attended classes and I tell people they can do this, so can I". 

 I started with two cans of chicken and pasta, this was a good place to start. I put the pasta on to bowl and thought, I can either make a soup or a pasta dish, what sounds good to me (besides horrific taco heartburn)?  It was a chilly day today and so I thought that soup sounded better. I check in the fridge to see what I had. Snack bags of veggies! I sneaked the carrots and celery from a few bags and chopped them up and threw them into the pot of noodles, then I added the cans of drained chicken and lastly to actually make it chicken noodle soup, I added a bit of S.O.S. mix!   I called it "creamy chicken noodle soup" and most of the kids had two bowls. The baby had her bowl empty and on top of her head, and dinner was saved.