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

If it's the "A" house after the General Conference men's session . . .

. . . it must be the semi-annual banana split party!

We had

bananas
4 kinds of ice cream
4 kinds of spoonable toppings, some homemade
sprinkles
chopped walnuts
whipped cream
maraschino cherries

NO one went home hungry.

What is this dessert exactly??

Look at this container:

 Silly me, I thought I was buying ice cream.  What in the heck is "dairy dessert"??

Date night with dh

Twice a year our church has a "Stake Conference" which is the parent organization of about 8-10 "wards" or congregations. We meet at a different church building than our own because it is bigger and can accomodate the large crowd that comes on Sunday morning. The highlight for me is the Saturday evening session that is for just adults. It is smaller and more personal. The bad part is there is no babysitting available, so dh and I have not attended it together since C & E were born more than nine years ago. I usually go, or in the past year I have taken my mom.

Imagine my delight when my mom told me she'd watch the girls so dh and I could go together!

So this is how our evening went:

*Adult session of stake conference
*Auto show at a local diner--classic and/or cool autos--come park your car if you want to participate
*Ice cream at Culver's. It's new in town. I had a chocolate custard with brownie bits and Reese's Peanut Butter cups in mine. It was the size in the picture below and I almost couldn't finish it. I'll be back. Very occasionally. And it reminds me Wayne owes my girls and me a frozen custard in Nauvoo. ;-)

Dh and I had almost forgotten how much we like to go out together. I'm going to hit Mom up more often for her babysitting services so we can do it often.

Christmas in April

What is this you ask? Why of course, it is the pattern for the last Easter dress. Last night I was looking for the pattern pieces so I could psych myself up for cutting out E's dress. The pieces have been all over the family room where my sewing machine is and I didn't want to lose any of them. I asked the girls to look for them with me and S sheepishly handed me the two now sitting on the bodice piece. She had crumpled them up, put them in a glass of water, then chewed on the left one. I tried teasing the right hand one open but you can see it was really hopeless from the beginning. I was unbelievably ticked off, but all I did was speak very, very firmly to her and send her to her room. No yelling, certainly no spanking.

I really didn't know what to do--just not make the third dress? Give S's dress to E? Try to use another size from the same pattern to make the right size for E? Buy another pattern? I decided I'd better sleep on it and in the morning I decided to buy another pattern if one still was available and if not, try to approximate the right size from the existing pattern pieces. In the end Walmart still had the pattern in stock and I bought another one. I finished the hand work on the second one while I watched General Conference on TV today, so now I just have to make the last one. I still have no idea what possessed S to think dunking and chewing on the pattern pieces was a good idea.

Yes, it was like Christmas in April at Walmart this afternoon. There were a stunning number of people in the store, 98% of them locals, which is normal on Saturday afternoon and it was like a weekend in December in any other Walmart. I almost never go on Saturday afternoon because of the crush of people, but I wanted to get there before Sunday and I couldn't go earlier. Almost every one of the 36 checkout stands was open and each had a line 4-5 carts deep and those carts were PILED. Luckily we happened to get in a quick-check line that "only" took about 10 minutes to get through. It was crazy and I thought I was used to how our Walmart is.

Other than getting the pattern, the other reason I wanted to go shopping was because I needed to prepare for the semi-annual sundae bust at the A house. I always get sundae fixings for the guys to have after the Priesthood session of General Conference and although the situation was a little different this year I decided to do it anyway.

We received an ad from Baskin-Robbins a couple of days ago and the girls wouldn't let me throw it away because they've been enjoying looking at the ice cream concoctions depicted in it. They wanted the ice cream cake roll that is decorated like a rabbit and they wanted the chocolate M&M sundae. I wasn't about to get into making an ice cream roll, but I could oblige with the M&M sundae. I don't have a pretty parfait glass, but you can see what I did for S's M&M sundae.

I bought waffle bowls and the rest of us had our sundaes in them. Nice and crunchy and very tasty.