How to Bulk Up Meals to Make Your Food Supply Stretch

When you have a large family, you HAVE to learn how to stretch food out.  You strategize ways to "beef up" your meal without using all the beef, if you catch my drift.  Because what happens if, heaven forbid, the kids eat all the eggs?  The kitchen shuts down, that's what!  No cinnamon rolls, no pies, no dinner rolls, no cakes, no waffles, no pancakes, or breakfast casseroles, cookies, brownies, and a bajillion other things that require eggs in the recipe.  That's like 99.9% of the recipes I know.  Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating a bit (like .1% exaggeration) but I'm serious about the egg thing!  So when my kids cook breakfast for themselves and use up a whole dozen eggs, I'm like, "Shoot, now I have to readjust our whole meal plan for the next week."  Just buy more eggs, you say?  What a simple solution that would be--if we weren't living in March of 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Have you BEEN to the stores lately?  Have you SEEN what they DON'T have on the shelves?  It's eggs.  Well, eggs, toilet paper, water and any other necessities.  It is pretty sad.  And yet, I can't blame my kids for eating almost all of our eggs.  I left to work this morning without making breakfast so they cooked for themselves, and eggs were on the menu.  Luckily, a good friend came to the rescue without my even having said anything and offered to share part of her egg surplus with me today.  I love you friend!  You will be on my loyalty  program if I ever start raising egg laying chickens.

This brings me to the secret of making our food stretch for 8 people.  Its called "bulking up the main dish".  How do I do this, you ask?  By adding ingredients that fill the belly.  Flour, beans, rice, veggies, etc.  

• If we're having tacos, you better believe I'm adding in 2 cans of black beans to that meat.  Sometimes I'll even make Mexican Rice and add it to the taco meat to bulk it up.  
• We'll eat casseroles or homemade hamburger helper over rice.  
• If we have spaghetti I'm adding diced tomatoes, onions, and mushrooms to the meat sauce.  
• Sloppy Joes go a long way if you add a can of pork n beans to it.  
• Philly Cheesesteak or Fajitas can stretch when you add extra onions, bell peppers and mushrooms too.  
• And for breakfast I'll use a FEW eggs every day (not a full on dozen) to make pancakes, waffles, biscuits and anything else that requires flour and a little bit of water or milk. 
• Sometimes I bake bread or make donuts because it requires little else than flour, sugar, salt, water and yeast.  And home baked items are way more filling and delicious than what you get from the store anyway.

Soo you kinda get it?  Tonight, Tava and I did the whole "bulking up meals" thing with Tava's Chicken Tortilla Soup.  We bulked it up using lots of veggies, black beans and tortilla chips to make our soup hearty yet healthy.  And guess how much chicken I used in this recipe for a family of eight?  14 oz.  Yup.  That's it.  For a family of 8. Two days ago David made teriyaki chicken for dinner and that required 4 lbs of chicken breast. Which meal do you think was cheaper?  Mine and Tava's.  Don't get me wrong, both meals were good and filling.  However, Tava and I used so many fresh ingredients that our meal was a different kind of "good" and a different kind of "filling" because we used fresh ingredients.  Fresh ingredients makes your body happy and your brain invigorated.  Don't depelete your body of essential vitamins, nutrients and minerals just to save a buck or two.

I will share my recipe for Tava's Chicken Tortilla Soup on tomorrow's post.  But for now, let me tell you where we got our fresh ingredients for tonight's Chicken Tortilla Soup.  I had it delivered from Imperfect Foods.  It is a company that takes produce and other items that are denied by regular grocery chain food stores because the food is misshapen, too small or has some other minor irregularities.  Instead of throwing it away and wasting hundreds of thousands of pounds of food just because the way it looks, Imperfect Foods sells it to the public for a discounted price via online orders.  And the food tastes fine!  There's nothing wrong with it except for the fact that it is "imperfect".  Take a look at our first ever (drum roll, please) YouTube unboxing video of...Imperfect Foods!!!! (P.S.  Don't be too hard on the cameraman, she is 13 and decided she wanted to get into photography and videography.  Today.  Smh...everybody has to start somewhere I guess.)  Anyway, I couldn't be happier with the products and timeliness of my Imperfect Foods delivery!  Quality tasting food at a really affordable price.  If you want to order from Imperfect Foods too, use this referral link to get $10 off your first order.  Once you've done that, you can refer others and continue to get $10 off for every referral that uses your own customized link!  I got a butt-load of groceries for $48 originally.  But with the $10 I'll be saving from a friend referring me, that only amounts to $38 TOTAL--and that includes the delivery!  

Be nice to your budget, be nice to yourself, and be nice to your family by saving time, money and hassle with Imperfect Foods.  I am not their spokeswoman, but I would not deny the opportunity should they ever offer it to me (hint, hint).  Now, you check out the links above while I  finish eating my chocolate covered raisins from Imperfect Foods.  There may or may not be chocolate fingerprints on my keyboard as we speak.  But its ok.  I've got 6 kids. I can blame that on any one of them 😆😆😆