Final week – August Pantry Challenge

August Pantry Challenge is officially over! It was truly a challenge and I believe I’ll continue to do this until some of the harder items to use are gone.

What did I eat this final week?

Ate out a few times which didn’t help the cause. Daniel didn’t went two of those times and ended up eating a pork chop that was in the freezer for a while. For the other meal he used up all the shrimp rissoles (I couldn’t find the English name, but in Portugal it’s very common to eat, it’s called “rissóis”) that I made with my mom in the beginning of the year.

Sunday I used the last piece of zucchini in a dish that I do often: vegetable + chicken pieces with soy sauce on top of rice. All the zucchini is gone! Finally 🙂

After the granola bars success from week 3, I decided to try out another Minimalist Baker’s recipe: Chickpea Bolognese, picture above. It was great, I used tomato sauce that I had frozen and finally opened a package of nutritional yeast that I bought three months ago. I didn’t have carrots so I didn’t add them to the sauce and served with pasta, I also didn’t have panko and replaced it with nutritional yeast to coat the chickpeas. I’ve been wanting to cook with nutritional yeast for years but never did and really like the flavor. I’d say the only thing that I didn’t particularly liked in the recipe was that I felt it was too tomatoey. I believe with homemade tomato sauce this wouldn’t be an issue but since it was store-bought it was too strong for me, I added a little bit of wine and then water at the end to tone it down a little bit.

We bought salmon and ate it with puree (store bought) and green beans that my mom gave us. That made three meals for each one of us so less time spent in the kitchen.

Thursday, we used two pieces of pizza dough that were in the freezer to make a pizza for each one of us. Also spent a little bit more of the frozen tomato sauce.

I really wanted to bake some kind of cake to get rid of some cacao powder that it’s in my pantry but honestly didn’t have the patience to do it last week.

Looking back I was kinda of ambitious, thinking I’d spend what’s on my pantry in a month. It wouldn’t be impossible since my pantry is just a cupboard, however it’s it does requires some planning and not as easy when you’re leaving work so late.

Nevertheless, it was still a positive experience, how many meals did I make to use up all that zucchini? A lot! Plus some packages that have been there for years!

What’s the ingredient that you’re struggling the most to use up? Mine is definitely wakame!