Waste Not Want Not Wednesday- Milk!

My sister and her 6 kiddos came to the farm to spend a few days this week – bringing with them lots of energy and lots of food! I soon realized that our refrigerator couldn’t handle all the wonderful things she had brought.

So, I called one of the boys to bring up our Coleman PowerChill cooler. I love the convenience of an extra refrigerator on occasions such as this. He plugged it in, we filled it up and forgot about it…

…until noon the next day when we started to make lunch for the troops.I opened the cooler to grab the cantaloupes and was shocked to discover they were hot. Not warm, as if it hadn’t been running, but hot.

In the chaos of unpacking, dealing with the piles of duffel bags, sleeping bags, suitcases, and food, we had plugged our warm/cool electric cooler on in the warm function.

Our 2 gallons of milk and 2 cantaloupes had been “cooking’ all night long.

Oops.

Now what do we do with 2 gallons of warm milk and 2 cantaloupes? Would it be okay to just cool the milk back down and drink it? Kind of double pasteurized?  We weren’t sure.

It was time to call Mom (of course!) After she stopped laughing, she started brainstorming ideas.

We decide to cut up the cantaloupe, put in the fridge to cool down and eat it immediately. It tasted fine.

Mom suggested making chocolate milk with one of the gallons. It was brilliant! I put it in a pot on the stove, added 2 cups of sugar, 2 cups of cocoa powder and a pinch of salt. After mixing it well with the immersion blender, I poured it back in the jug and put it in the fridge.

It chilled all night and the kids guzzled it down the next day!

One gallon down, one to go.

It was time to divide and conquer. We used some to make broccoli cheese soup for our lunch, some for the macaroni and cheese for the kids lunch, and the rest went into homemade vanilla pudding that we put in the freezer and made into pudding pops for the next day.

We did it! Nothing was wasted. Everything was used.

It is interesting to note that not one of us, my sister, my mom or myself, ever even thought of dumping the milk. We were determined to find a use for it because we had been taught from a young age that we should “Waste not, want not!”