My first day on the $12 a day budget thing went pretty well, despite a few snafus. Last night, I came home and made mayonnaise, but I wasn’t feeling very well, and wasn’t paying attention, and so this task, something I’d done a million times before, I sort of screwed up. Definitely still usable, just a little runnier than my usual mayo. It will be showing up all over the place.
My illness continued into today, so my appetite wasn’t really up, so I’m going to tell you what B ate as his share. This morning I woke up and made my favorite lentil recipe, a quadruple batch, which might have been overkill. I normally eat them for breakfast everyday, so as lame as I feel having the same meal every morning, it is how I normally do, so I’m not switching it up.
While the lentils were cooking, I ran down to the local Vietnamese market to pick up some baguettes and was dismayed to find that the price had almost doubled! It used to be 4 for $1, but apparently they are now $1.75. Argh, oh well. I bought them anyway and made 1 baguette into two egg salad sandwiches. Mixing the mayo with 3 hard boiled eggs and a little bit of onion, I spread them on the sandwiches. I sliced up half a cucumber and split it between the two of us. We each took and orange and a bag of Korean roasted seaweed, one of my favorite snacks.
Oh, were you waiting for the food porn?
I sauteed some garlic in olive oil to make sort of a quick aioli, mixing it with the mayo, and cooked up two of the four artichokes that I got for $1.99. Some of the deals I found were truly ridiculous, such as that one. I had also picked up a nearly 5 pound chicken, which was bigger than I needed, but since it coast $5.27, I wasn’t too worried about it. I made it into Thomas Keller’s Roasted Chicken, which. was. Unreal. Un-freakin. Real. Crispy, delicious skin, juicy meat sliding off the bone. Ingredients? Salt. Pepper. Chicken. That is it.
Needless to say, from this 5 pound chicken we had a lot of meat leftover. I shredded it up and put it in the fridge, for later uses. I also have the bones simmering away for stock, because if I knew anything coming into this, it was that it would be a rough week without any stock.
I haven’t priced out each day, because I think it is easier to just do everything in totals, but so far I’ve spent just under $45, so I have $15 left to play with for the rest of the week, and probably plenty of food to get through it. Perhaps I’ll get us a nice bottle of wine with the leftover money.
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I wonder if having you and the other food bloggers participate in Hunger Action might in fact undercut the message. I assume the point is that it’s very hard to eat a healthful and satisfying diet on that little money. But you are so clever, the message which may come across is, With a little ingenuity and planning, you can eat decently on that amount.
That is a good point, and it did cross my mind, but I chose to stick with the point they made when they asked us to do it, which is to show that it is possible to eat balanced, healthful meals while participating in this challenge or living off food stamps, not just ramen and cup o’ noodles.
Not that there’s anything wrong with ramen.
Are you buying food at places which accept food stamps?
Great question! I’m fairly certain both the Dong Hing Market and Grocery Outlet do, and a little less certain, but still thinking that South Sea Grocery does. The tofu factory I’m heading to tonight for my $1.10 pound of tofu I would guess not though. I’ll check while I’m there.