Eat From The Pantry Challenge

Inspired by Tanner's favorite blog, we decided that January was going to be "eat what you've got" month. It's so easy to buy stuff that you think you'll eat and then it just sits in your pantry taking up space forever. So we decided that we'd just eat what we already had from our pantry & freezer, and the only things we were allowed to add to the mix was fresh produce, dairy, and meat. It was quite an adventure coming up with recipes with only what we had at home! **

The most creative ingredient that we worked with was 2 pounds of vanilla yogurt that was left over from the big family get-together. We don't like vanilla yogurt, but we were determined to find something to do with it! We tried 3 different recipes....yogurt brownies, orange crumb cake, and waffles. The brownies were TERRIBLE! You know it's bad when sweet-toothed Bo votes to throw them out. The orange crumb cake was quite good, and we made several substitutions to that recipe. The best thing we made, though, were the waffles. They were delicious! Plus, we made Paula Deen's yummy praline syrup to go with it, so we were loving it!

We also had tons of potatoes to use, so we fried potatoes for the first time, and we came up with a taco potato recipe that was awesome. We also made an interesting version of potato soup that had us throwing everything but the kitchen sink into the pot, including a homemade roux at the end to thicken it up. We didn't think the soup was going to be able to be salvaged, but it ended up delicious!

The Eat From The Pantry Challenge was not nearly as tough as we thought it would be, and we came up with some new and interesting recipes that we'll use throughout the year. We actually are looking forward to doing this challenge again in a few months!

the delicious yogurt waffles with praline syrup

**By the way...if you're wondering what about all the bargain groceries we've recently bought, they're sitting in our guest-room closet waiting until February to be used!