Stretching It Until The Reinforcements Arrive

It was a shock to discover last night that we were getting low on food. At home I've got half the closets in the house set up as pantries. Here, what seemed like a ton of food during long weekends isn't really that much after all. A car full of food was to arrive with my hubby this evening. I had to make a decision. Do I give in and shop for today's food or do I get really creative and try to make it through the day? The challenge was too much for me to pass up, I decided to give it a try.

Surveying the cabinets, I came to a few conclusions. First there was plenty of homemade granola, raisins, and scones for breakfast but there was only a limited amount of soymilk to accompany it. To make things even, I did the serving. We had just enough for everyone. Whew!

There were plenty of yellow split peas in the cabinets but who wants soup in July? For lunch I ended up concocting a barbequed split pea over rice dish. It was actually quite tasty. The split pea mixture included an assortment of veggies that effectively cleaned out the vegetable bin in my fridge.

For dinner, I used the leftovers as part of a really creative dinner which I consider a supreme achievement, considering what I had to work with. I used the recipe for tortillas from the Complete Tightwad Gazette and filled it with the lunch leftovers. I topped each with some salsa and a cheese sauce recipe from the Uncheese Cookbook. I threw together a quick cornbread and peanut butter cookies for dessert. It looked quite impressive on the plates and I don't think anyone but I could tell how hard I worked to make almost bare cupboards yield food.