Saturday, June 19, 2010

Pantry Magic

At the same time as the WISH Card Challenge, I've been taking the opportunity to organise my pantry, freezers and stockpile.  It's meant that I've uncovered some finds that quite frankly nobody wants to claim.

The finds have not been anything to be excited about - usually something that has been pushed to the back of the pantry because nobody wants to look at it never mind eat it.  The exception are the surviving chocolate bunnies from Easter. Said bunnies are now living on borrowed time now that TootToot has remembered they are there.

One particularly unpleasant find was the discovery of a container of a muesli type cereal which had been lurking at the back of the middle pantry shelf since February. The picture on the box had promised us a feast of dried fruits, wholegrain flakes, oats and slivered almonds.  At home and with the box opened up it both resembled and tasted like horse chaff or sawdust.

Could frugal knowledge and cooking from scratch skills allow me to turn something that was truly inedible garbage into a tasty treat?

Muesli bars were thought of and swiftly discounted. TootToot has braces and really chewy sticky foods are not on the menu.  GuitarMan asked if it could be used in cookies. Brilliant!

I grabbed my $21 Challenge Book and made a half quantity of the basic biscuit mixture on page 176 and added a few additional ingredients.  Here's the result.

Muesli Cookies


1/2 quantity of bulk cookie mix (you can view the basic recipe and method via the link above)

To this I added

2 Cups Muesli Cereal
5 Tablespoons Maple Syrup
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

These may not be the best looking cookies you ever saw but they're tasty and will make good lunchbox treats in coming weeks.  I got 65 cookies from this batch and I'll freeze them to grab later when making up lunches.

You know, when I think of the amount of food we previously threw out I cringe.  When we were still firmly in our spendthrift ways, the cereal would have gone straight into the garbage with never another thought. Now I view things differently, challenging ingredients are an opportunity to work some pantry magic.

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