Pizza Day at Princess’ School and General Food Rambling

So no Lunchbox Report. She took more canned pears and some pink milk in for breakfast snack though.

Yesterday afternoon Buddy and I were a frenzy of frugal lunchbox cooking though. We made:

Oatmeal Raisin Cookies (cooled, prepacked 1/2 the batch into zipped baggies, placed into a gallon zip baggie in the freezer for easy access.)

Chocolate Pudding Cups (Skim Milk, Sugar & Fat Free Mix-happens to be name brand. The little gladware containers. 1 “4 serving” box of mix made 5 little cups with a few spoonfuls left over for Buddy to snack on. Plus he got a kick out of stirring the pudding for the 3 minutes. Stored them in the fridge for both of their snacks for the next couple of days)

Raspberry Jello Jigglers (store brand full sugar mix. Used the recipe that I posted a while back. A little admission, sometimes I post things just so that I can find them later! I’ll cut these up later this morning into little squares and put them in a big Tupperware and dole them out over the next week or so)

A side note. When I told Princess that we had made Jigglers for her lunches she told me “everyone is going to think that I have the coolest lunches ever!”. Coolness counts

For our own dinner, I have a container of mashed potatoes in the fridge, as well as leftover boiled potatoes from my MILs, so I’ll probably make Potato Pancakes and cook up the two leftover butterflied pork chops that I didn’t make into Schnitzel last Friday. Maybe I’ll pound them out and make pork piccata (practically the same thing, but just dipped only in flour and then you make a lemon pan sauce. Isn’t it amazing how many foods are really practically the same dish with very slight variations across totally different cuisines?)

OK, for those of you who MUST have a recipe (like my friend Lisa who goes insane when you say something like “and just throw some veggies in the crockpot“) here is one from Recipezaar for Chicken Piccata.

If you really don’t cook much, it is WAY easier than it sounds. All they are having you do is to dredge the cutlets in flour and then pan fry them. Then you don’t clean out the pan (all those little brown bits etc make it taste better-really) and add the garlic in, the slices of lemon, the broth, and you cook it all on high for just a minute until it boils just so the stuck stuff on the bottom of the pan can be scraped off, then you turn it down to a simmer and let it cook down until there is only 1/3 of the liquid left that you started with. Then you add in the other stuff (lemon juice, capers if you have them-not frugal though so probably skip that part) simmer it down AGAIN until there is 1/3 of the liquid left and you have a very flavorful sauce. Then swirl in the butter and voila-yummy restaurant style piccata.

One of these days I really need to do a Frugal Skills, Basic Cooking series. What do you think? Anyone willing to help out and be guest bloggers for something like that too?