a summer breakfast: bread, cheese, eggs, fruit, coffee
The older I get, the more important breakfast becomes. In my twenties, I’d have nothing but coffee in the morning — or, worse, coffee and a cigarette. Now, at thirty-six, if I don’t get a decent breakfast, I’m dizzy by ten, incoherent by ten-thirty, and drool-napping at my desk by eleven in the morning.
I feel incredibly lame for saying this, but I misplaced my receipts. I’m going to guesstimate it at $10 over, for a usual level of grocery expenditure, plus an additional lunch out.
I’ll keep better records next time, I promise.
For dinner Friday I made mjaddarah (using this recipe), hummus (using this recipe and the food processor Adam left in our basement), sauteed swiss chard, cucumber slices, and naan (using this AMAZING recipe. You should all go make naan right now. It was that good. Though, I used a griddle instead of the grill. I’m not a grill kinda girl.)
I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about eggs this week. This is, in part, because since I’ve started eating “good eggs” I’ve come to discover that eggs are not as gross as I once thought they were. And it’s also due to the fact that I saw “Mad City Chickens,” a documentary that chronicles the resurgence of the backyard hen on Monday.
Get it? Rolling it over? I'm a comic genius.
Last week, admittedly a short week because this week marked the beginning of the Friday-to-Thursday budget accounting, we spent a total of $69.66. That left us a budget surplus of $55.34. We decided (maybe because we were hungry) that we should be permitted to roll any surplus over into the following week, carrying it forward until the end of the month. Besides allowing us to “save up” to treat ourselves once in a while, it also allows more room in the budget for buying in bulk when it makes sense to do so. Now that I’m not hungry, I still think this sounds fair. If we were doing this budget exercise away from the public eye, we’d certainly carry surplus over. But is it not in the spirit of this challenge? What do you think?
Giddy with our extra cash, and, as I’d mentioned, hungry, on Saturday we spent $27 on Lebanese takeout from a place we like. We ordered vegetarian mezza, got it home, opened it up, and decided we could have made it better ourselves. So much for that. All this home-cooking might be ruining us for restaurants.
We didn’t spend any more of last week’s surplus. In fact, we’re under budget again this week, though not as drastically. We spent $111.78, for a surplus of $13.22. If we’re going ahead with the surplus roll-over, that puts us $41.56 in the black. I don’t think I’m going to dip into that, though. Not unless we have some kind of oven fire or pizza emergency. I mean, yeah, things come up. But I’m having fun trying to get that budget number as low as I can, without letting anyone go hungry.
So…rolling over the surplus… Yes or No?
hangar steak a-grilling
Sometimes I need a little steak. I like the classic sides with it, too. But when it’s seventy degrees and sticky on a school night, I don’t think baked potatoes and broccoli, or anything else that involves turning on the oven. Instead, I think steak salad.
I’ve been making steak salads since I was seventeen, when I discovered that by bringing the yin of the meat line and the yang of the salad bar together, I could produce a plate wholly more appetizing than anything else to be found in the college dining hall (this, if my GPA is to be trusted, was my greatest academic achievement). Nowadays, steak salads are familiar fare at NYC’s Vietnamese, Thai, and pan-Asian eateries (pan-Asian means that the food is cooked in an Asian pan, or wok; the cook, like as not, is a Mexican dude). But I do not reject the steak salad, as I do this year’s celebutante sandwich, the Banh Mi. For where the Banh Mi’s joys have been sung, tarted up, botoxed with truffle oil, bejeweled with foie gras drippings, and sung again, the steak salad is long past celebrity status, if it ever had any.* No one sings it, no one sends it flowers, not even a lousy nasturtium. That makes it safe to eat.
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Last Wednesday I decided that I was going to change things up and switch my “fiscal week” from Monday through Friday to Thursday through Wednesday. It would have all been fine and dandy had I not just gone to the grocery store and blown my entire week’s budget that day (I had spent $23 on Wednesday and still needed to pick up my $25 CSA Monday). But still, I stayed pretty damn close-ish to budget. Read the rest of this entry »
Are you sitting down? Get this. I did some math. As I was rolling out the dough for the tortillas yesterday evening, I got to thinking about Tama’s post that originally inspired me to make my own tortillas. She’d figured out that 9 tortillas cost her 40 cents. That’s 40 cents for all of them, not each. So I got to wondering how much our whole meal would add up to. Since not all the ingredients had been purchased in the last week or so, and so no receipts handy, I pulled the prices off the New Seasons website, and then did some rough guess (fuzzy?) math based on the amounts used in this meal. (We do all our non-farmer’s-market shopping at New Seasons. Yes, it’s kinda spendy there. No, I’m not going to start shopping elsewhere. But that’s a post for another day.)
Recently after a friend had three servings of a Basmati rice and sweet pea dish I’d made for a vegetarian potluck she said, “You really are the queen of simple food!” She then quickly apologized. She was worried she’d offended me. But I was not at all offended; she was right. I do simple food and I do it damn well.
While Adam and Cari’s ideas of eating well might be a tad more elaborate (and sophisticated) than mine—and to be honest, I’d rather be having dinner at either of their places—I pride myself in my ability to get the most flavor out of as few ingredients as possible. This is especially important when trying to eat on $50 a week. And believe it or not, of my favorite one-ingredient, one-dish dinners is roasted Brussels sprouts… not that I always liked them so much. Read the rest of this entry »
It was a week of $2.49 for a bag of chipotles that I thought cost fifty cents less, $4.18 for a half pound each of ground beef and pork, and another $4.31 for a pound of sweet Italian sausage. It was a week of $3.49 for peanut butter I haven’t dipped into yet, $1.81 for adzuki beans I haven’t yet soaked, and $2.89 for pumpernickel bread that I tore to pieces. I dined out on kielbasa and potato salad at the Bohemian Beer Garden, overpriced at $8 and $4, respectively, and went in on some credible basic-model pizza from Fascati.
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