The $15.01 grocery bill

No, I didn't push my thriftiness to new brilliance, but $15.01 was all I needed to spend because of the giant amounts of food I still have in the house. I had resolved not to buy food at all, but it transpired that I did need a few things. It's hard to feed a toddler when you don't have bread, and since I'd run out of both white flour and bread flour, I did need some more of those. (By the way, plain white flour works fine in bread, but the higher gluten content of bread flour improves the texture.) Also, eggs: Baby B loves a soft-boiled egg for her lunch, and it makes a change from the endless peanut butter sandwiches when we're at home for the holidays. Onions and garlic were necessary for most of our planned recipes, and the broccoli is so we don't get scurvy.

Planned meals:

1) We still have another vast container of creamy chicken spaghetti in our freezer. We've established that it tastes better when smothered in sriracha.
2) Mr. B will pan-sear some pork tenderloin, after tenderly anointing it with seasonings and so on. We'll have that with some broccoli, and bake some of the potatoes we have left from Christmas dinner.
3) I'll make Butter Chicken with the chicken thighs in the freezer. We don't have coconut milk, but I will substitute some of the cream left over from Christmas. Sides of basmati rice and broccoli.
4) I'm going to make a Shrimp and Pea Risotto, but with luxurious jumbo shrimp instead of the usual shrimp meat I use. (To be honest, I haven't bough shrimp meat for a while because I kind of stopped liking it. It simply doesn't have the flavor and bite of larger pieces. Jumbo shrimp will be heavenly, though.)
5) Tonight we made this Steak and Mushroom Cobbler with these (mysteriously named) Elvis Biscuits.
6) I also made a huge vat of Split Pea Soup and a loaf of Whole Wheat Sandwich Bread.

All of the above will have leftovers to tide us over so we don't have to buy any more groceries for a week. Ah, leftover leftovers, how postmodern, or something. Lunches will be soup and toast, eggs on toast, peanut butter sandwiches, leftovers from previous dinners, etc.

Observations: My goodness, the steak and mushroom cobbler was good. We wouldn't have bought flank steak if it had been up to us, because that stuff is expensive, but thank you, mother-in-law, we really enjoyed it. Baby B approved, too. Mr. B made the stew, and I made the Elvis Biscuits, my first foray into using lard. I assume they're called Elvis Biscuits because the tremendous amount of fat in them would probably cause you to meet an unfortunate demise like Mr. Presley's. I don't know why I experienced revulsion when I opened the container of lard, because it's really no different from using butter, and I've even used rendered bacon fat in baking in the past, but the unctuous white goo disgusted me. I cut it into the flour using a pastry cutter, but because it was much softer than butter, it was a little more difficult to work with. I'll admit that the biscuits were amazingly light and fluffy, but I doubt I'll be doing this again once the rest of the container is used up.

Today's groceries:

1.08 lb unbleached flour 0.36
1.01 lb bread flour 0.42
1.48 lb basmati rice 2.66
12 eggs 1.59
1 gallon Organic Valley reduced fat milk, 7.20
1.82 lb onions 0.87
1 head garlic 0.48
1.12 lb broccoli crowns 1.43
Total: $15.01