Casual summer Pantry Challenge

Jessica at Life As Mom is having another Pantry Challenge to winnow down her pantry and freezers.  I wasn't calling it that, but I haven't posted a menu for several Sundays because I'm doing the same thing: eating down my food storage.

Here's the things though, she's feeding eight people, including some teenage boys and is spending "only" $100/week on food, which is half her normal budget.  With our six here, but much smaller eaters, if I spent $50 a week during the challenge, that would be about the equivalent.  I can do that easily.  Now, I will say she feeds her family lots of organic food and I don't care much about organics, so that would account for part of the difference in what we spend.

That said, here is tonight's dinner from the pantry:

The soup turned out better than I expected and better than it looks here.  It's a can of mixed vegetables, a jar of my canned diced tomatoes, a sprinkle of dried onions and black pepper, a tablespoon of beef buillon, a couple cups of water, and some large spoonsful of leftover white beans and ham.  It was really delicious!

The ice cream was from this easy recipe:

Simple Vanilla Ice Cream

Summary: adapted from the booklet that came with the Cuisinart ICE-20

Ingredients

• 1 cup milk
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 2 cups cream
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Instructions

1. In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the milk and sugar until the sugar dissolves. Evaporated sugar cane juice takes a little longer to dissolve than regular granulated sugar. Some grains didn’t completely dissolve, but I was okay with that.
2. Stir in the cream and vanilla.
3. Freeze in the ice cream machine according to the directions provided by the manufacturer of your particular machine.
4. Once the ice cream has thickened, eat immediately as soft serve ice cream or transfer it to an airtight container and store in the freezer for an additional 2 hours or more.

Preparation time: 5 minute(s)
Cooking time: 30 minute(s)

Number of servings (yield): 8