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.)

Lists are boring, so here’s a picture of a delicious kid first.

Vegetarian kids love vegetables (and cookies).

The meal that fed all three of us and left Billy with a very generous lunch for today amounted to $9.20, broken down as follows:

• 16 oz pinto beans: 99 cents
• 2 avocados: 5.00 — By far the most expensive part of the meal. It’s a matter of priorities. All three of us LOVE avocados. Worth every penny.
• cilantro, beet greens, and baby kale: free, from our garden
• brown rice: 50 cents
• 3 cloves garlic: 20 cents
• five or six grape tomatoes and half a cucumber: leftovers from last week’s budget: free because leftovers. (Is that cheating? If you think so, add about 50 cents to the total.)
• 9 homemade flour tortillas: 40 cents
• lime: 75 cents
• 3 zucchini: 75 cents
• 1 onion: 60 cents

Because our early spring greens were completely devoured by baby slugs, we’re only now starting to harvest from the garden. Just a few greens for now…

…but soon that harvest basket will be full. Hopefully we won’t need to buy much at all by way of vegetables. The bush beans will be ready soon.

The pole beans will come in behind them. We’ve got five zucchini that look like they’ll be ready by the weekend, and many more coming in after that. We’ve got two acorn squash growing so far, but I want to cure and save them for the winter…

Whoops. Didn’t mean to turn this into a gardening post. It’s just that I’m madly in love with my garden right now. The point was…

Look! Dinner! Really really good dinner! And lunch for Billy! And if we didn’t love avocados so much, it would have cost us $4.20. Or $6.70 if we’d been moderate and used only one avocado, which really would have been plenty. Billy’s got an obnoxious amount of guac packed in his lunch today.

The pink plate is mine. The pink plate is ALWAYS mine. Don't come between me and the pink plate.

I started writing this post thinking that we’d had a really cheap dinner, but now I wonder how cheap that is compared to the other meals we eat? Now I’m thinking this might be one of our pricier meals, because of the avocados… Hmmm… I think I’ll venture more math for the next week or so, see what our individual meals are coming out to. You know…for fun.