Food Pantry Haul End of Week Report 4/8

Here is our end of the week report on how we used items received from the Food Pantry, to give an idea of how I work them into our meals. This week we used less items than we normally do, as I've felt under the weather which means quick fix meals like canned goods or frozen pizzas.

Daughter has eaten both boxes of the cracker sandwiches as well as the Sweetarts candy, and I've eaten a little of the cheesecake trimmings even though I shouldn't on my diet. Managed to get daughter to try cheesecake for the first time - she will eat it but isn't crazy about it, and as she can only have the New York Style bits due to allergies, I see this box lasting quite a while. We've eaten about 2 boxes of the Skinny Cow bars - I was craving chocolate. The Hamburger buns will be used for tonight's dinner of Burgers & fries, as well as the planned leftovers for tomorrow.

Delightfuls, Gatorade powder, Chocolate covered blueberries and the remainder of the Skinny Cow bars are all being held for next month when daughter's friends are here, as those are foods in high demand with 3 tweens around. The Peanut butter cups will become part of a birthday gift for a friend - I'm going to make her a candy bouquet from them as they are her favorites.

Two loaves of bread have been eaten, the rest is in the deep freeze for use as needed. Given that I often get 2-5 loaves a week from the pantry, I foresee needing to pass bread on to others at some point. I do try to score artisan bread when possible, as it tends to get eaten much faster than regular white / wheat bread. I may do a breakfast dinner and make french toast with turkey bacon this coming week as well, since that uses about half a loaf of bread. Thankfully right now we have the eggs to be able to do that with, since I stocked up with some good egg sales around Easter. Soon hopefully we will have eggs from our chickens to supplement with as well, so that will mean more egg dishes.

I bagged up items we couldn't use due to allergies {so from this week's batch that included the taco meat, Guac, and Cheeze-it crunched}, and posted them onto a local giveaway group, asking for a gallon of milk in return. I normally can get someone willing to trade milk, since a lot of people with small children tend to have more milk than they can use. I was lucky again this time, and ended up trading 3 bags of food pantry items we couldn't use for a gallon of whole milk which we needed. Yay for not having to buy milk! At $3 a gallon it does add up. I normally do this once or twice a month, depending on how much stuff we get that we can't eat. It helps me on fridge and freezer space, and helps out another family that might need it.