ZFW: Homemade Chocolate Pudding

As I mentioned before I am doing the Zero Food Waste challenge (ZFW) and it has been an experience. At this point I have cut $200 off our monthly grocery budget! That is just nuts! As I mentioned in my last post I over bought on milk the week before and I had a gallon and a half of whole milk that was about to go bad. We won't talk about the number of gallons of milk that have been poured out here in the last month or so because they were past their dates and smelling funny. I had assumed it was because we were not rotating them correctly and the kids were instead opening the new jugs before the old ones. Nope, not the case. I was just buying too much and it wasn't getting used. My kids prefer water  however I have twins who have been diagnosed as "failure to thrive" so I push the higher calorie drinks on them whenever I can.

This week I figured the best way to use up milk was with pudding. So I wrote "pudding mix" on my grocery list. Then I stopped and realized that way back when my grandmother or great grandmother wouldn't have run to the store for a mix they would have just made it from scratch. So I hit up my old favorite allrecipes.com and found this super easy chocolate pudding recipe.

I gathered all my ingredients and got down to business....

 Less then 20min later I had the yummiest pudding. Seriously better than anything out of a box, you really can't beat the real butter in this recipe! Better yet? I didn't spend a dime more to use up over 5 cups of milk and my kids were SO happy to have a big bowl of pudding after dinner. My littlest failure to thrive baby had TWO bowls which is a BIG deal she doesn't usually take more than a bite or two of even things she likes.

This is for sure going on my "will make again" list!