We’ve finished week 3 of the pantry challenge and only have 1 more week to go! I’ve had to be a little more creative with my cooking but it still isn’t to hard!

Just to remind you, here are my “rules”:

1. I can purchase milk, eggs, cheese, sour cream & produce.

2. Spend $50 or less during the month of January.

3. Put the remaining $110 of our grocery budget into our home improvement fund!

Here are the meals I put together last week from the pantry:

Monday Beans, Green and Cornbread!

I’m not a huge fan of greens so here are my Beans and Cornbread! Yum!

Tuesday Lemon Pepper Chicken with Boiled Carrots and Broccoli and Cheese Rice

Wednesday I made Cheesy Broccoli Rice Soup to use up the leftover Broccoli and Cheese Rice! It was an experimental dish, I based it off of my Creamy Broccoli Soup recipe which has cream cheese and Velveeta in it. I kept the cream cheese, substituted cheddar for Velveeta and added the rice! Amazingly it turned out really good, my husband even liked it!!

Thursday Chicken Casserole and Hashbrown Casserole. I brought dinner to our neighbors who had a baby last Monday and made us the same dinner! This was the night of my casserole mishap but everybody got their dinner and it turned out delicious!

Friday Baked Country Style Ribs in Barbecue Sauce and Cheesy Smashed Potatoes! A delicious dinner, although baking the ribs in a vinegar based barbecue sauce made them turn out more like pork chops than ribs!

Saturday This pizza was our lunch on Saturday! I had a 4 pack of crescent rolls that I used for the crust…the triangle shapes are perfect pizza size! I topped with spaghetti sauce, cheese and pepperoni for quick pizzas! They turned out pretty good but the crescent rolls were a little sweet tasting and didn’t make a wonderful pizza crust however, I was using what I had!! Our dinner was Double Breaded Chicken and leftover Cheesy Smashed Potatoes from Friday!

Sunday We had our guest worship leader and his family over for lunch after church! We had tacos! There were plenty of leftovers so we had tacos for dinner tonight!

We started this week with $24.31 left in the grocery budget (I was shooting for spending $50 this month instead of $160). I went to Aldi last Tuesday and picked up these groceries:

I did “break” my rules a little bit purchasing green beans, cream of chicken soup and hashbrowns since I fixed dinner for the neighbors but I don’t feel bad at all about that! I spent $14.61 on these groceries which left me with $9.70 in the budget!

Well, we went back to Aldi last night to pick up stuff for tacos (including ground beef which we didn’t have) and we spent $23.62 which put us $13.92 over the goal budget but I don’t feel bad at all going over $13.92 and fixing dinner for neighbors and having company over…I think I’ve done really well! We should be set to not spent anymore on groceries for the remainder of January and if we can then we will be able to put $96.08 in our home improvement fund, which isn’t too shabby!!