Pantry List Additions
For this week's post I looked at my pantry and tried to determine what items I could add to it that I would actually use over the next few weeks. To find these items I decided to visit the Cub grocery store by my house and the closest Aldi grocery store so I could compare prices. The items and prices are as follows:
Apple Cider Vinegar - Cub 16oz for $1.69 Aldi 33.8oz for $4.29 Organic
Brown Rice - Cub 16oz for $1.19 Aldi 28oz for $2.59 Organic
Almonds - Cub 12oz for $5.99 Aldi 14oz for $6.39
Garlic Bulbs - Cub $3.99/lb Aldi $1.39 6oz
Garlic Bulbs - Cub $3.99/lb Aldi $1.39 6oz
For the ingredients in the meal for this week I used Garlic, Brown Rice, and Olive Oil purchased from Aldi. (At Aldi the only options they had for the Apple Cider Vinegar and Brown Rice were organic, while at Cub I only recorded the prices of their house brand Essentials for the purposes of this assignment.)
Recipe: Garlic Fried Rice
For this weeks meal I wanted to make something that I hadn't tried before outside of restaurants, and using my pantry to do so sounded like it would be fun! Garlic fried rice is a staple at my favorite vietnamese place so i decided to do that! The recipe I followed can be found here.
The finished product first! For this meal I tried to make my plate look similar to the food plates we looked at a couple weeks ago. On this plate I have the garlic fried rice, broccoli, zucchini, red & orange bell peppers, as well as some leftover turkey breast from a previous meal.
To start I got the rice in some water with a little bit of olive oil and salt. It took a bit to start to boil so while I waited I started prepping the veggies
Once the veggies were prepped I fried the garlic in the pan as directed in the recipe and waited for the rice to finish up. I then made my first mistake. I decided to try and have three pans going at once since I didn't have a wok big enough to fit all the veggies into. This led to me being unable to properly pay attention to the broccoli as much as I should have which resulted in the scorching of quite a bit of it. I also didn't notice that the rice was sticking and burning to a part of the pan that didn't have enough oil.
The meal still turned out fine though! The brocoli wasn't so burnt that it was inedible, and most of the rice was salvageable. A big takeaway was I need a bigger pan for these kinds of meals! Another thing I liked about this meal was that the leftover turkey went really well with the garlic fried rice.
Cost Reflection
Estimated cost of items used
Olive Oil - 4oz - $0.84
Garlic - 2oz - $0.46
Brown Rice - 8oz - $0.74
Total = $2.04
Wow that's' pretty darn good!
In my opinion a pantry staple is something you keep in your house that has a long shelf life and can be used in multiple ways to make meals. By having these pantry staples in my house I can make easy more flavorful dishes from scratch without much effort. Something that surprised me about making this meal was that I had enough leftovers for about two more meals if I just made a couple eggs each time to go along with what I had already made. I need to build out my pantry more so I can make a variety of dishes like this without having to go to the grocery store every time.
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