Success

The Pantry/Freezer challenge is wrapping up today and it has been an unqualified success.  I cleaned out the pantry, which needed it desperately, and also found several things to make in there.  The freezer didn't need as much work, but it provided more substantial eats.  Tuesday night was another nice piece of beef, roasted and served with a steam pack of pasta with veggies.  On Wednesday I made pizza dough and AJ had a little cheese pizza while Beth and I had calzones with ricotta, mozzarella, and a pack of spicy sausage from the freezer, with a little frozen ground beef mixed in just to use it up.  The calzones were really tasty, and AJ devoured his entire mini-pie.  Then last night we had plenty of the sausage and cheese filling leftover, so we did breakfast for dinner, mixing the cheesy sausage into scrambled eggs and having that with some frozen potatoes with onions and peppers and a few frozen tea biscuits.  I even had enough still leftover to roll some up into a breakfast burrito that I enjoyed this morning.

And that's it.  It never got as challenging as I thought it might, although it would have if I kept at it another day or two.  But we were well fed for a week, we saved money on groceries, and the pantry and freezer are both in much better shape than when we began.  I think I'll make this an annual exercise.

Now, time to start the "Eat Healthy Foods Again and Get The Kids Used To The Gym Day Care For The Summer" challenge...

Future yard boy

I was outside grilling the other night and AJ provided some comedy as only he can.  First off, he absolutely thinks he is my little sous chef.  We got him his own stool for the kitchen because he really thinks he needs to "help" whenever I'm cooking.  This tendency now applies outside as well.  "Daddy, are we going to grill?" he asked as I readied things.  Yes, son.  Yes we are.

This time I made a tactical error in that I was doing the meat on the grill outside, while cooking stuff on the stove top inside that also required my attention.  It wouldn't be a big deal, except I had to go back and forth frequently, leaving him unattended for a minute or two at a time.  Safety wasn't a concern, because he absolutely knows not to go near the actual grill, plus the grill was in my sight the entire time .  It was more a matter of what else he might find to occupy himself with.  Case in point: I ducked into the kitchen and came back out to find him getting animated.  "Daddy, there's dog poopy over here!" he exclaimed, pointing to a spot on the far side of the lawn.  And he's right.  There was.  We don't scoop up every doody every time.  I know that's terrible.  I've been doing a big, full pass of the lawn before I mow and that has been working out okay.  Until now.

He knows what dog poop is.  He's knows it's dirty.  I recommended stepping away from the poop and leaving it alone.  I had to duck back in, and upon returning the brown yard bomb was still the focus of his attention.  "Daddy, let's clean up the poopy!"  A noble sentiment, to be sure, and one that he was fully aware of because he has seen me do it.  But I didn't want to deal with that particular chore while cooking.  I think that makes sense.  I explained this to AJ and went inside to check on my side dishes.

The next time I came out, he was standing over the poop spot, with almost all of it successfully raked onto the pooper scooper, trying to empty it into the little trash can we keep out there for that.  The problem was that I hadn't put a fresh bag in since the last time I emptied it.  This frustrated the young lawn cleaner.  "Daddy, bring me a plastic bag!" he demanded excitedly, hovering over the can, balancing the turds on the scoop.  Fine.  If he wants to clean up that badly, I'll get a garbage bag in there and he can finish the job.  Better him than me.

I did just that, popping inside and right back out quickly, trash bag in tow.  I found that he had moved on to another canine deposit he had discovered.  He was picking this one up too.

With his bare hands.

"What the hell is that?!?"

Picking stuff to make from the pantry isn't a big deal because, as Bill Belichick loves to say, it is what it is.  But substantially older food from the freezer is a different ballgame.  Yesterday I pulled a couple of things out of there that made me feel like I was playing a more difficult version of Dave Letterman's game "Know Your Cuts of Meat."  One appeared to be a big shoulder or something like it (still thawing, and I'm still not sure what it is), while the other clearly looked like a piece of tenderloin.  At least it did to me.  It was in a freezer bag, and wrapped in plastic and black butcher paper inside of that, and clearly the paper threw Beth off.  She saw the piece of meat sitting on the counter and mistook the color of the paper for the meat itself, instantly wondering what the heck I was trying to pawn off on her

It turned out to be a beef tenderloin, and a good one at that.  I threw together a southwestern spice rub with some cumin, chili powder, ancho chili powder, cayenne, garlic powder, salt, pepper...good stuff like that.  AJ helped me put the rub on the meat and it must have been decent because he licked it off his fingers.  Yes, sometimes he can be a little weird.  Anyway, I did the beef on the grill and it turned out great.  We had it with some black beans, canned corn, and quinoa with some frozen peppers and onions mixed in.  I also found a little can of diced jalapenos and sprinkled them around in pretty much everything.  All in all, Pantry/Freezer week has been a rousing success so far.

Cleaning out the pantry

As part of Operation: Pantry & Freezer, I decided to give the pantry a top-to-bottom clean out.  The results were pathetic.  I think I threw away an amount of food, much of it unopened, that would reach close to four figures in retail prices.  There were sauces, crackers, canned goods, jarred stuff...you name it, and we had some of it that went bad.  The best find was a four pack of Red Bull buried behind some other stuff.  I have switched to the sugar free version almost exclusively, and this is the full-test stuff, but sleep has been so erratic lately thanks to the kids that I happily popped the four little cans in the fridge, knowing that they will probably be gone in a matter of days.

The early leader for "Saddest/most ridiculous item still around" was a six pack of some Tropicana fruity drink thing.  Firstly, there was only one bottle gone out of six.  Secondly, and more importantly, the "best by" date: September of 2007.  This is lame in and of itself, but the atrocity is compounded by the fact that we moved in June of 2008.  This means that, yes, we paid somebody to move those five bottles of juice for us so they could take up space in our new house and then I could throw them out two years later.

However, even the poor Tropicana was trumped at the end of the process when I stumbled upon a little bottle of truffle oil of some sort.  The expiration date?  May, 2003!  We have a winner!!

Sunday night dinner: Grilled cheese, oranges, and Goldfish crackers (requested) for the boy.  For us, I found a nice looking frozen Lobel's strip steak so I used that in an Asian stir fry.  Seasoned everything with salt, pepper, garlic powder, Szechuan seasoning, and soy sauce, tossed it together with a pack of frozen veggies, and served it over sushi rice, because that's what we had.  Very easy and really tasty.   Then, little pastries from the Greek Food Festival for dessert while we watched Lost.  Good stuff.

Pantry & freezer week

We are working on a self-imposed dining challenge this week: no grocery shopping.  We're going to try to go from Saturday night to Friday night eating only what we have on hand in the fridge, freezer and pantry.  This will knock out an item from The List, it will save a few bucks, and it will help clean out some stuff from the kitchen in a major way.  I'm going to buy a gallon of milk on Sunday or Monday, but that's it.  So far there are predictions that we'll be down to cereal or pancakes by the end of this, but I really think we have enough stuff around that I can come up with semi-real meals for the whole week.  We'll see how it goes.

Saturday night: all leftovers, including grilled pork chops, two kinds of pasta, and chili.

Sunday morning: bacon, eggs, and toast.  It's been easy so far, but I also realized that we have fewer eggs than I thought we did.  That could become an issue later in the week.  Okay, off to find something frozen to thaw for dinner.

Great Saturday

I often vent when the kids act up or behave badly, which has been pretty frequently lately.  So I owe it to them to give equal time to the other side of the coin.  Today we started off with a low key breakfast lounging around the house because Mommy and Daddy both felt like Will Ferrell during a particular scene in Old School.  But both little ones were perfectly fine with our slow start.  We made it to the Greek Food Festival right when it opened at 11.  AJ didn't quite remember what it was all about but he was still excited to go.  The temps quickly reached the high 80s but through lunch and picking up some goodies to go, we didn't hear a single negative peep out of either one.  Next stop, Target, to pick some stuff we needed.  Again, stellar behavior from start to finish.  Then we popped in at Beth's mom's new house, and again they were little angels.  There were plenty of things around that AJ could have gotten into, but he didn't.  And the girl continued to just smile and coo like a perfect baby out of a movie.  If their behavior was a baseball pitching performance, it was something like this one*.  Top notch, and good times for all.

* (And if you actually checked the link, to complete the analogy, the solo homer would be AJ's last minute bail out on going into the bouncy castle deal.  Can't really fault him, because the last girl out before him was screaming her head off and that clearly spooked him.)

AJ-isms of the week

Some random AJ quotes from last week, if only so I can remember them some day:

I was holding Courtney and she started crying while the boy was trying to watch Chuggington. He matter-of-factly got up, quietly walked around the coffee table, came over, kneeled over her, said "SHHHHH!" in her face as loud as he could, then went back to watching his show. I'm not sure if this is an improvement over last week, when the circumstances were very similar but he loudly announced "Courtney, stop it, you're making me crazy!"

We were playing in the library and he did something out of line. We'll often give him a count of three to get his act together. This time, Beth did it, but for no apparent reason she started the count in Spanish. Her: "Uno...dos." Him: "Tres, cuatro!" Okay, so apparently he's learning Spanish numbers at school. News to us!

We had a greeting card laying around, one that talks and sings when you open it up. AJ, of course, is fascinated by this. He kept opening and closing it until we couldn't take it any more, so Beth told him to give it a rest. He closed the card and announced "Oh no, it's a disaster." We're not quite sure where he picked that one up.

"I saw a bird!"

It's tough to get A.J. to talk about his day at school. I thought this might be a trait that doesn't start in kids until high school, but at the ripe old age of three it's like digging ditches to get him to give you the slightest insight or details about what he did. That's why I was thrilled with this unprompted conversation we had in the car on the way to the store today. I've tried to transcribe it verbatim.

AJ: Daddy, I saw a bird today at school.

He has been really into seeing birds around the house lately, so this didn't surprise me. My goal at this point was to treat him like a guilty criminal suspect and just keep him talking as long as possible to see what else I could find out.

Me: Really? Where did you see it?

AJ: Outside.

Okay, not a lot to go on yet. Time to dig a little deeper.

Me: What was he doing? Was he flying?

AJ: No.

Me: Was he driving a car? Was he playing basketball?

AJ: No, daddy. That would be silly.

It has taken him just this long to figure out that his dad is a silly goofball.

Me: So what was he doing?

AJ: Nothing. He was dead. Really, really dead. Miss Paige scooped him up and put him in a bag and said not to touch him because it would make me sick.

Despite the morbid ending, this qualifies as a wonderful post-school discussion.