How many of us have frozen bananas floating around our freezer? Boxes of butter purchased months (years) ago on sale? In my case, grated coconut and 3 packs of egg roll (lumpia) wrappers!? At the start of 2020, I found myself at home with a great deal of time to fill, and a 2 year old in dire need of entertainment beyond watching Frozen for the 40th time. I decided that it would be a great goal to use up some of these forgotten ingredients. 

We started easy with old popcorn kernels that were in a sticky old jar in the back of a cabinet. I wasn't sure if they would even pop anymore, but they definitely did and she loved every stage of the process! I let her pour in the oil, throw in handfulls of kernels, and sprinkle a little salt on top at the end. The popcorn was a great accompanyment to our Frozen screening that night (not joking, sadly).

Our next project took a little more time and used up a lot more of those forgotten ingredients. Sugar cookies! I pulled out our flour, a couple sticks of butter from the freezer, and the remaining bags of 3 different kinds of sugar (just me?). We don't follow recipes 100% here, but that's a part of the fun. Our daughter helped with the entire process, from dumping the flour and other ingredients into the bowl, cracking eggs, and mixing the dough. She helped me roll the dough into little balls, and we pressed half of them in some of the leftover sprinkles I pulled from the back of the cupboard. We left the other half of the cookies plain and saved them to be decorated the next day as another activity.

The next day, we spent another hour spreading frosting from an old container I had stored in the freezer, and had defrosted overnight in the fridge, and sprinkling the other half. So much fun and focus from just a few forgotten ingredients that we already had.