It’s been a while I know but the food challenge is back!  When I did a recent survey, much of the feedback had requested that I bring the food challenge back into play.  It was a lot of fun but at the time, I had a lot going on personally but am excited to get it going again and thanks to some amazing sponsors already, it’s gonna be a blast! I cannot wait to see your creativity so lets get this food challenge started!

**You DO NOT have to be a blogger to enter. There will be a form that non-bloggers can fill out to enter their recipe so everyone is welcomed to join in!

ABOUT THE FOOD CHALLENGE

Participants will be asked to create an original recipe using the required ingredients in the current month’s challenge.  Participants will need to follow all the rules below.

JANUARY’S FOOD CHALLENGE

Mandatory ingredients for January’s food challenge are:

• Beer
• Ham
• Rosemary

DEADLINE

Recipe submission deadline is January 28th, 2011 at 12pm CST. Voting begins on January 28th, 2011 at 12:01CST.

THE RULES & JUDGING/VOTING

• You must use ALL 3 of the ingredients given in the challenge with any other ingredients you want.
• A photo is required of the final dish.
• The recipe needs to be original, not copied.
• Would love for all bloggers  participating to provide a link back to the homepage or to the Food Challenge post.  Grab code is available for you to use if you like.  All bloggers will need to leave their entry link in the linky below.

Once the contest closes, it reopens for voting. When the voting closes, three judges will pick from the top 5 recipes with the highest votes. Winner will be announced win the next Food Challenge begins!

THE PRIZE & SPONSOR

The winner of the Food Challenge for January will receive a KitchenAid Waffle Baker from the Pro Line Series, valued at  $199, thanks to our sponsor, KitchenAid! FEATURES:

• Baker produces two 7 1/2-inch diameter by 1 1/4 inch thick waffles
• Double-sided, clamshell baking unit flips to provide uniform waffles with superb consistency
• Stainless Steel and Die Cast Metal Construction
• Constant Baking Temperature
• Simple Controls
• Non-stick waffle plates
• Digital countdown timer
• Automatic Shutoff
• COOL REACH™ Design
• 2 Year Hassle Free Replacement Warranty

KitchenAid is a household name that has been trusted or years because of the quality and sophisication of their products. I own several KitchenAid products myself including the sleek refrigerator, hand mixer, and of course the all mighty stand mixer. They offer everything a foodie would love.  Check out KitchenAid on Twitter | Facebook | Website

If you would like to sponsor a Food Challenge month, you can email me at sponsor@mywoodenspoon.com with food challenge in the subject.

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*NONBLOGGERS -If you do not have a blog but want to participate, you may submit your recipe here if you don’t have a place to upload your photo (or know how).  Flickr and Photobucket are great thought if you do want to have your own place to upload photos. Then you can just upload, write the recipe with your photo and grab the URL and add to the linky.  Either way, I’ll help you all I can.

*BLOGGERS -Leave the url to your recipe in the linky below.

LINKY

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Good luck to all who enter! Can’t wait to see your recipe creations!

I know from experience how chaotic & busy life can be and trying to find something to make for supper should be at least one thing you don’t have to worry about.   Walmart wants to help with their new Meal Solutions and as a Walmart Mom, I’m here to give you my take and spin on the meal solution that works for our family.   Having such a diverse group of friends and readers, I’ve learned that there are a million different things you can to do to recreate a meal.

First off, the list of foods that Walmart gave for this particular meal solution are:

• Manwich Original Sloppy Joes 26.5 oz for $2.12
• Lipton (Knorr) Rice Sides, Cheddar Broccoli 5.4 oz for $1.00
• Great Value Hamburger Buns 12 oz $1.06
• Lipton (Knorr) Rice Sides, Chicken 5.45 oz for $1.00
• Kraft Velveeta Shells & Cheese 12 oz $1.75
• Bush’s Original Baked Beans 16 oz $.94

Now by just looking at the ingredients, you can clearly see that there isn’t any vegetables involved (aside from the bits of broccoli in the Rice Sides & beans–are beans a vegetable? hehe), which is a problem for us. I always have a good helping of vegetables in every single meal I make so I needed to find a way to incorporate those.  I also see that if I choose to pick the Cheddar & Broccoli Rice Side, then I probably don’t need another helping of Velveeta Shells & Cheese.

PRODUCTS I’M OMITTING

For my meal solution, I will be not using the Kraft Velveeta Shells & Cheese or the Lipton Rice Sides, Chicken.

I will be using the Manwich, the Great Value Buns, the Lipton Rice Sides-Cheddar Broccoli, and the Bush’s Beans.  We have NEVER had Manwich to be honest.  We’ve always made our sloppy joes with ketchup and mustard with a little salt & pepper and seems to be quite popular here in the Falcon home so I wanted to not mess with our sloppy joe tradition so I found a new way to use the Manwich.

MY MEAL SOLUTION

SLOPPY JOES with ROAST

Ingredients

• Can of Manwich
• Roast (we use a 5lb roast)
• Water and Salt & Pepper
• Great Value Hamburger Buns
• Butter

Directions

1. Add a roast to a crock pot.  I used a 5lb roast to have plenty for leftovers.  Add the can of Manwich, some water to cover, and a little salt & pepper. Cover and cook on low or high until done.  We wanted it for lunch the next day so started it late at night, placed on high and cooked overnight.
2. Right before you are ready to serve the roast, butter & toast the Great Value Hamburger Buns on both sides.  (I sprayed with Smart Butter)

Serve your sloppy joe roast on the toasted buns.

LIPTON RICE SIDES, CHEDDAR & BROCCOLI and CAULIFLOWER

Ingredients

• Lipton Rice Sides, Cheddar & Broccoli
• A bag of frozen broccoli or broccoli & cauliflower mix.

1. Cook the Lipton Rice Sides just like the directions call for except add more broccoli.  I chose to add Great Value’s Broccoli & Cauliflower mix to it.  For two bags of Rice & Sides, I added a whole 16 oz. bag.

You can see the added vegetables. It’s a great way to sneak a few more in and since it’s mixed with rice & cheese, the kids won’t even notice.

Serve both with Bush’s Baked Beans, warmed.

So as you can see, I still used the ingredients they provided for their meal solution but added a couple of twists to the actual sloppy joes and the Rice Sides.

I’d love to know what YOUR meal solution would be. What would you do to change it up?

If you want to see how other Walmart Moms put a twist on their meal solutions, check out Denise from Wholesome Mommy,  Jenn at Frugal Upstate, and Heather at Domestic Diva.

Disclosure: Walmart has provided me with compensation and a gift card in return for this post. Participation in this program is voluntary.  All opinions are my own, always have been, always will be.  Read my full disclosure and blogging ethics. There will be more meal solution posts to come so be on the lookout!

I actually had a great recipe that I was going to post but after getting my pictures onto the computer, I realized that I forgot to take the final picture!! Gah! What was I thinking.  So now I’m gonna talk about my process for the recipe I created and the cost of it for the Velveeta Challenge.

As I mentioned before, when I think of casserole recipes, I think of fast, family friendly, and low-cost so I kept all those things in mind when creating my recipe.  The hardest challenge for me was coming up with something that was original but I finally just told myself to do it and don’t think about other recipes.  You’d be surprised at how you can use Velveeta..in fact, did you know that you can even use it to make fudge?  Yep!  You can!!

Anyways, after several days, I created my Shrimp Stroganoff Casserole.  With only 6 ingredients, it really is super easy and fast to boot!  As many of you know, I’m not a fancy schmancy cook so I didn’t go all crazy and add extra spices or such to pile on the ingredients.  I kept is simple, I kept it real.

For a family of four, this would actually be less than $10 bucks but since the casserole will serve 8, it’s under $20–$17.24 to be exact!

I had planned on buying the ingredients separate but I don’t go to town very often and bought all my groceries at once so you’ll see this recipe’s ingredients highlighted on the receipt.

There are 6 ingredients as you can see.  Prices are as followed:

$1.92 for Broccoli

$1.12 for Sour Cream

$1.14 for Egg Noodles

$4.84 for Velveeta Cheese

$1.08 for Cream of Shrimp

$7.14 for Shrimp

$17.24 Total Cost of 6 ingredients that serves 8.

I did have some trouble finding the Cream of Shrimp so if you can’t find it, you can always substitute with Cream of Mushroom or even Cream of Chicken.  The broccoli was fresh and the shrimp was not on sale so it’s a good deal!

You have to wait to see the recipe in full but I hope that you will enjoy it as much as we did!  And if you do think it’s a winner, I hope that on October 30th, you will all vote for my recipe!

Consider subscribing because I’ll have some AWESOME giveaways for you thanks to some wonderful sponsors!

Until then……………………..

P.S. Check out my exciting news over at my personal blog!