Well, I didn't entirely run out of money. We got paid again, but had some moderately large expenses, including a bunch of babysitting (unavoidable, for two workaholics such as ourselves), car repairs, etc. So there wasn't a lot left over for food.
I decided to make our usual cheap breakfast of steel cut oats topped with frozen berries (one medium bag lasts us a week) and a scoop of plain unsweetened yogurt; our usual cheap lunch of peanut butter sandwiches on whole wheat bread with carrot and celery sticks, fruit, and cheese; and some dinners that were not only cheap to make, but make vast quantities and could be eaten for several nights. And I also used a few things from our cupboards and fridge, so I did pretty well.
Recipes to last all week:
1) Tuna noodle casserole from Skinnytaste.com
2) Chicken, mushroom and wild rice soup, also from Skinnytaste.com (the original specifies shiitake mushrooms, but I don't like shiitakes, so I used the cheaper cremini ones)
3) Crock pot Santa Fe chicken, also from...you guessed it, Skinnytaste.com!
Sides of broccoli with everything.
This week's groceries:
Dairy:
1 gallon Organic Valley milk: 6.68
Nancy's plain low-fat yogurt: 2.43
Cheese Heads reduced-fat string cheese: 2.98
Challenge butter: 2.79
12 eggs: 1.34
Vegetables and fruits:
Frozen berries: 1.88
Frozen corn (enormous bag; they were out of the regular-sized ones): 1.19
1 lb cremini mushrooms: 2.98
3.62 lbs Fuji apples: 3.19
0.92 lbs broccoli: 1.18
1 bunch green onions: 0.58
1 head celery: 0.88
2 lbs carrots: 0.98
5 lbs onions: 1.98
Bulk:
Wild/white rice mix: 2.40
6 oz whole wheat egg noodles: 0.36
1.13 lb steel cut oats: 0.71
1.22 lb white unbleached flour: 0.37
Cans:
S&W black beans: 0.68
Bumblebee albacore tuna, 2 x 5oz cans: 1.76
Meat:
Two large chicken breasts: 6.00
Misc:
Sara Lee multigrain sandwich bread: 2.28
Total: 45.62
Observations: I haven't ever much liked canned tuna. I actually thought it was kind of disgusting--so smelly and salty. But I'm a giant fan of the amazing website Skinnytaste.com, and I felt that if its brilliant author, Gina, recommends something this highly, I should try it out. Well, I'm converted, to this recipe if not to canned tuna in general. It tasted wholesome and good, and it was so, so cheap to make. Baby B enjoyed it too.
The soup we'd already made before, so I knew it would be filling and delicious. It seriously makes enough for about three meals as long as you have a piece of toast with it each time.
The Santa Fe chicken was the best surprise of all. I picked the recipe because Gina had said it was one of her most popular recipes. It looked a bit plain to me, but I had a can of tomatoes with green chiles in my pantry that had been there practically since the dawn of time, plus my homemade chicken broth in the freezer, and all the various seasonings, so it was cheap to get some chicken breast, black beans, and corn and make it. Well, it was heavenly. First of all, it took ten hours to cook on low, which is very convenient for those of us who leave the house at seven in the morning and don't get home until half past five or six. (It didn't seem overcooked even though we cooked it longer than ten hours.) It made our house smell wonderful--is there anything lovelier than coming home tired and hungry and smelling dinner already made?--and all we had to do was steam some white basmati rice (15 minutes) and steam some broccoli (5 minutes), and we had a brilliant dinner. Seriously, this recipe tastes like something I'd order at a restaurant. The shredded chicken was perfectly tender and juicy, and the seasonings were perfectly balanced. I'm going to make this recipe again, and often.
These three dishes made absolute truckloads of food, further proving my point that you can definitely eat cheaply as long as you don't mind having the same sort of thing over and over again. (Me, I don't mind. I know there are those who despise leftovers, but if I really like something, I'll eat it constantly.)
Other things I've figured out about eating cheaply include the realization that the ability to buy in bulk is really a privilege. I'd always thought of "bulk buying" as buying ten tons of something at a vast discount. Now I realize that part of what enables me to stick to a weekly budget is that I only need to buy as much as I need. So I get small bags of flour for mere pennies, and that's usually all the flour I need for that week's baking and cooking. Actually, a 1-lb bag that costs me $0.30 will probably last for several weeks because I don't really bake that much. The eccentric design of my kitchen means I have almost no storage space, so it's actually good to have a bunch of small bags of things, rather than large bags cluttering up the cupboards.
But you know what? This constant penny-pinching is really getting to me. Sometimes I just want to relax and go out to a restaurant, or even go to the supermarket and not care about money so I can throw all the delicious fresh pasta, wild salmon fillets, fancy cheeses, gourmet ice cream etc I want in the cart and not have to think about the cost. There's really no way around this right now unless we started to make a whole lot more money, which seems unlikely, because we're already working as hard as we possibly can within some pretty major constraints, such as living in a tiny, isolated town. I try not to think about all our credit card debt because it makes me feel slightly ill. All we can do is try to chip away at the debt until it's paid, and who knows when that will be? Sorry to end with such doom and gloom, but sometimes the normally indefatigable Mrs. B gets tired.
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