~Freezer Challenge Day 2~

Well today's plan went sideways...I planned on using the leftover shrimp and scallops to make pasta but was missing a key ingredient in the recipe I wanted to make. So instead I found a lone M&M chicken breast griller and cooked it for myself with some salad and Ethan had spaghetti and meatballs.

I did find some pumpkin purée that I had made and froze so I decided to make some muffins with them.




I found a recipe on All recipes for a pumpkin chocolate chip muffin and used it. I switched out the oil for applesauce, used more pumpkin then they called for and added small pieces of cream cheese to the batter. I also subbed Epicure's Pumpkin Pie spices for all the spices they called for. The recipe made a dozen regular size muffins and 8 mini muffins for Ethan's school snack.




We ate half them already :). They are super tasty! I'm almost glad now that I have a few more bags of pumpkin purée in the freezer now so I can make more, yummy!

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~Freezer Challenge~

If you saw my fridge freezer you would probably take it and dump it in the garbage. It's the catch all for little bits and bites of this and that; package of 6 sausages and we only eat 4? Two hit the fridge freezer. Got sick of that ham, turkey, beef, pork roast? Throw the rest of it in the fridge freezer. I always have good intentions of using it, and always make soup from my freezer (hello, half a cup of peas left in the bag, perfect!) but I can barely close the freezer and Randy has threatened to throw it out. So this week I am challenging myself to make our supper meals from the freezer...it will take some creativity but I have lots of time right now to browse for ideas online while I sit and feed Carter. For fun I'm going to blog the challenge, feel free to join in! Maybe next week will be a pantry challenge, it's equally full...

Anyhow, here is the freezer as of today:




So tonight I started with 2 smokies that were long forgotten from last summer. I remembered I had pinned a few new casserole recipes last week so I went to my Casserole board and found this recipe: Peroxide Casserole. It looked good and for bonus points I just happened to have an open bag of perogies in the freezer as well. I subbed a diced fresh tomato that was dying a slow death of neglect in my fridge instead of the can of diced tomatoes and added a bit of milk to the soup to loosen the sauce a bit. I also want to start using my HUGE Selection of Epicure Spices more so I snuck in some French Onion soup mix. I figured it would be like onions on perogies which is a must! We'll have some peas and corn from the freezer with it and probably a salad for me. Randy will get a grilled steak too, he had one leftover in the fridge from the weekend.




Here is the casserole hot from the oven! Mixed reviews from Ethan, he didn't like the French Onion seasoning but cleaned his plate and then went back for seconds! I only had a taste so far (feeding Carter took precedence over me eating) but it was tasty. I cooked it initially with the cover off and the cheese created a nice crust and browned up but when I stuck a fork in the perogies were still cold. So I covered it and cooked it longer, as a result the soup bubbled up to the top and covered the cheese. If I made it again I would cook it initially covered without the cheese and add it towards the end and finish it uncovered to brown it. It looks like a new recipe to add to our family favourites to make again!

Tomorrow I think I will do a seafood pasta of some sort, I saw some scallops and shrimp leftover from Christmas Eve...lets see what I come up with!


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