Pantry Experiment - Day 1

Okay so here it is. One week no grocery shopping only make meals from ingredients that are already found in my home or garden. Sounds easy right? Wrong! It can't be a meal you have cooked before and it can't follow a recipe.

So in my household my mother does all the grocery shopping and she takes a certain pride in doing it because just by this one afternoon spent shopping she is insuring her familys survival for another week because they will be well fed and properly taken care of. So every Monday you will see her in this order Target (household products), Walmart (canned goods), Publix (meats and perishables). Every week without missing a beat. She seriously has to be on deaths door to not go grocery shopping.

Problem is if you go to the store every Monday you will start to accumalate ingredients that you will most likely NEVER use again. You know that one recipe you just had to try because well it just looked so delicious whenever your favorite Food Network chef prepared it and so simple to boot. Five hours later the recipe is not as delicious as your imagined smell-a-vision had led you to believe and you have now come to the realization you are NEVER going to make that blasted not so simple recipe again. So now I am looking at all these random ingredients and thinking there must be a use for these.

Now cooking for me has always been enjoyable and something that my mom taught me from a very early age. I mean I could cook spaghetti before I even went to school for the first time. Another good thing I have to my advantage is that now I am older and I enjoy the different taste of foods (I was an extremely picky kid) and I like to experiment with flavors to see what I can come up with (something else my mom has lovingly handed down to me). True I am not probably re-inventing the wheel here but it is cool to see what my brain comes up with and then see my familys reaction to the meal whether good, bad and or the ugly.

So tonight the first night of my experiment my little mess in the kitchen was..............................

TACO SOUP
Ingredients:

• Beef
• Tofu "beef" - shh don't tell mom she doesn't know it was in there cause she wouldn't have liked the soup then.
• Onion
• Taco Seasoning
• Ranch dressing powder
• Black Beans
• Corn
• Canned Tomatoes (Rotel - Mild & Hot, Regular Diced)

Reaction from the family: mmmmmm that was really good! =)

So until tomorrows mess................