Last week's meal plan went to plan. We didn't sneak out for comforting Chinese takeout, even though we were all ill with a horrible cold/sinus infection thing and really didn't feel like cooking. Nor did we sneak out to buy any extra food, so hooray. The moussaka with potatoes was a big hit, and we all liked the shrimp fajitas so much that we're having them again this week.
This week I spent $61.99 on food for the three of us, so $8.86 a day. Not counting that Baby B has her weekday breakfasts, lunches and snacks at daycare, so if you factor that in it's a lot more. (Daycare in general seems designed to suck money out of our every pore. I'm not quite sure why, given that the teachers are paid a pittance. I'm sure their overheads must be gigantic, however.)
The other thing was that we were given two major items that would have cost quite a bit had we bought them. My mother-in-law gave us a large package of pork tenderloins that will do for one dinner and then packed lunches for the rest of the week. Someone we know who is a hunter gave us a pound of ground elk meat that we will use for elk burgers. I've never had elk before, so this will be interesting.
Also, I had a number of things that were left over from last week's shopping, such as tortillas, onions, rice, and oats. I had plenty of my own homemade chicken broth in the freezer (sometimes I have far, far too much chicken broth, more than I know what to do with), and there was some salsa, mayonnaise, mustard, and ketchup in the refrigerator and flour and sugar in the pantry. We have a small herb garden and a pear tree in our garden, so those things were free. So the true cost of this week's meals is considerably more than $61.99.
I don't know what I was really setting out to "prove" when I started a blog on cooking cheaply at home. I certainly didn't aim to moralize to people on low incomes about what they "should" be doing. Our society wants poor people to be grateful and humble and receptive to their wonderful advice about living economically, but I find this view particularly obnoxious when you consider that so many people on tiny incomes lack the equipment, facilities, knowhow, time and energy to do any of the cooking they're "supposed" to do. Plus, I can easily imagine that if you drag yourself home from working long hours at two different low-paid jobs a day, the last thing you want to do is whip up a nourishing casserole for your squawking children. There are so many things denied to you in life, and if you can have one thing--fast food, for example--that takes no effort and makes you feel good, who am I to judge?
The fact that I'm able to feed our little family on so relatively little is because I have a nice kitchen, ten tons of kitchen equipment (thanks again to my mother-in-law), around an hour a day that I can spend cooking (and simultaneously playing with my enchanting toddler), the education to do so, etc. Also, I always have a few dusty old bags of dried beans and rice knocking around in the cupboards, a package of frozen peas or beans in the freezer, and so on. It's not like the cupboard is bare every time I go shopping. If it were, it would cost me significantly more to make the things I've been making.
The Meal Plan:
Breakfasts: steel cut oats with a spoonful of yogurt and sliced bananas OR eggs (boiled, scrambled, poached, fried) on whole wheat toast with a scraping of butter.
Lunches: whole wheat sandwiches with cold roasted pork tenderloin and coleslaw, with sides of fruit and carrot sticks.
Snacks: fruits and raw vegetables, slices of pear bread.
Dinners:
1) Roast pork tenderloin with butternut squash (I don't have a recipe for this, Mr. B does it!)
-> leftovers for sandwiches for weekdays
2) Elk burgers (with homemade buns made from my all-purpose bread dough, plus sliced tomatoes and a sprinkling of grated cheese, with a side of coleslaw
-> coleslaw makes loads, enough to put in sandwiches all week
3) Roast chicken with a side of lightly steamed broccoli
-> boil the chicken carcass with all the vegetable peelings I keep in the freezer to use for homemade chicken stock
-> leftover chicken to make...
4) Chicken-zucchini curry with a side of basmati rice (I lightly stir-fry the zucchini, then warm the chicken in the same pan, then add a simple curry sauce made of Taste of Thai curry paste and a can of coconut milk)
5) Whole wheat spaghetti with turkey meatballs in pumpkin sauce
6) Baked Mexican omelette, served with warm tortillas
7) Shrimp fajitas, again
The groceries:
Fruits and vegetables:
4 lbs butternut squash: 5.21
1 cabbage: 1.84
2.5 lbs zucchini: 2.87
2 broccoli crowns: 0.82
3 lbs nectarines: 3.00
1 red pepper: 1.28
1.06 lbs tomatoes: 1.04
2.5 lbs apples: 2.24
1 avocado: 0.88
2 lbs carrots: 0.98
2 lbs bananas: 0.90
Eggs/dairy:
Nancy's low fat yogurt: 2.43
1 gallon Organic Valley milk: 5.96
Lucerne light sour cream: 1.38
Darigold light cottage cheese: 1.88
18 eggs: 2.18
1 can Taste of Thai light coconut milk: 1.48
1 lb Challenge butter: 2.48
8 oz Sargento reduced fat shredded Mexican cheese: 2.68
Meats:
1.25 lbs ground 93% low fat turkey: 3.98
0.75 lbs shrimp meat: 2.52
1 small chicken whose packaging claimed it was "cruelty free": 6.75
Misc.
1 can pumpkin puree: 1.88
1 package Taste of Thai red curry paste: 2.04
1 lb whole wheat spaghetti: 1.00
1 loaf Sara Lee whole wheat sandwich bread: 2.28
Total: $61.99.
Observations: reading through this, I feel guiltily that I could have saved more money than this. It seems extravagant to buy "expensive" vegetables such as red peppers and avocados. I could have made us steamed carrots and broccoli every day for far cheaper. I guess it's a privilege to allow oneself more variety. I also could have made my own sandwich bread this week, which would have cost mere pennies if I added up the prices of 3-4 cups of whole wheat flour, a few teaspoons each of yeast, salt, sugar, and oil, plus the cost of electricity for 45 minutes in the oven. I plead that I'm busy, sick, tired, and don't feel like it. Some day I will become the sort of wholesome earth mother who makes every single thing from scratch. Today is not that day.
On a different guilt-trip, I also feel uneasy about buying vegetables that have been shown by the Environmental Working Group to contain a lot of pesticide residues. Should I be feeding this stuff to my toddler? OK, the reason I continue to give her apples and stone fruits is that I want her to grow up learning to like a wide variety of foods, and I'm going to assume that the benefits of fresh fruits and vegetables outweigh the dangers of pesticide residues. I hope I'm not doing something bad here. I simply can't afford to go to our local organic shop and buy all organic, locally sourced fruits and vegetables. I want to but I just can't justify it when our expenses and our debts are so huge. I do buy organic milk because she drinks two large glasses of milk a day and I'm uneasy about the hormones and so on in non-organic milk. But I wish I could give her everything organic. I feel bad enough about having her spend the first year of her life drinking decidedly non-organic soy formula after I tried very hard and failed to breastfeed her.
And on yet another guilt-trip, I'm uneasy about the provenance of all the meats we eat. I don't buy factory-farmed beef for cruelty and environmental reasons, but I don't particularly adore beef, so that isn't a big sacrifice. But we do eat a moderate amount of pork, and the habitual cruelties of the pig-farming industry are well-known. I try to buy poultry that comes from farms with humane practices, but you never really know what you're getting unless you visit the place yourself, it seems. I'm almost afraid to Google the shrimp industry, because I'm sure it's awful too. The only reason I don't dare is that Baby B loves shrimp above almost any other food. It seems like you can barely raise your fork to your mouth without exploiting workers, torturing animals, or ruining the environment. I suppose the answer to this problem might be to grow all my own food and raise my own animals for slaughter, but I'm a busy working mother and I prefer to spend my tiny amount of leisure time doing other things, such as playing with my toddler and writing blogs. What to do??
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