Potato Soup

Last week my mom gave me most of a 10 lb bag of potatoes. I made Crash Hot Potatoes with some of them and decided to make Potato Soup with the rest of it. Here is the recipe I made up with what I had on hand:

~6 lbs of potatoes, peeled and cubed
1/2 onion, diced
3 stalks celery, diced
1 T minced garlic
2 T butter
2 cans of evaporated milk
8 oz cheese, shredded
salt and pepper to taste

Cook potatoes in water until tender. Saute onions and celery in the butter just until brown, then add garlic. Heat through until you can really smell the garlic.

Once potatoes are tender, drain off half of the liquid and half of the potatoes. Use your hand mixed (or masher I suppose) to create a puree right in the pan with the remaining water and potatoes. Stir in sauted vegetables, evaporated milk, and cheese. Stir until the cheese is melted then add in the remaining potato cubes.

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Apart from the time spent peeling and cubing the potatoes, this was very simple to make. If I had it, I would have tossed in crumbled bacon and then topped with green onions. But they weren't on hand today. You could also use heavy cream instead of evaporated milk.

This recipe is one that is hard to mess up though. So, if you have less or more of something it probably wouldn't matter much.

What do you do with extra potatoes?

Week 1 Progress Update

So far we are doing really good with the January Eat From the Pantry Challenge. I went to the grocery store Sunday night and spent $28, including 2 newspapers. I hadn't planned to buy clementines, but since the 5 lb box was on sale for $5.99, I picked it up. That is a good price where I live.

Our meals so far haven't been too far off the reservation, though tonight's dinner was a little unusual for us. My mom had a 10 lb bag of potatoes she wasn't going to use up so she gave them to me yesterday. I made our favorite potato recipe, Crash Hot Potatoes. That was the star of the meal, along with some appetizer type foods I had around - mini frozen crab cakes, summer sausage, crackers, and block cheese.

I did realize though, I will need to buy sliced bread. We eat way too many sandwiches around here to give that up and I don't have time this month to learn how to make an excellent sandwich bread. But I am still collecting recipes and tips in case anyone wants to chime in.

The more I look into our pantry, the more I know we can do this. There is just so much food in there!

Have you had to start stretching yet, or are your menus still pretty normal?

Week 1 Menu

After browsing through my pantry and trying to figure out what we might eat that doesn't require a trip to the grocery store, I came up with a week's worth of dinner menus.

1 - Spaghetti w/ jar sauce
2 - Summer Sausage w/ crackers, cheese, and fruit
3 - Canned soup w/ crackers
4 - Caribbean Bean's & Rice (from recipe on light kidney bean bag)
5 - TBD Prepared meal from the freezer (I have several to choose from)

I realized that I don't have a very wide variety of items in my pantry. Spaghetti, soup, and rice dishes will likely be on the menu every week because I have a lot of those.

There are several cans of tomatoes - crushed, diced, whole, etc... that need to be used as well. I think they will work for chili a few nights. I wonder if my husband, Bruce, will miss having meat since I don't have a lot of that stockpiled.