Eating Well on $50 a Week

Three writers. Three cities. One culinary experiment.

Archive for September, 2009

Sarah McColl Stays Under Budget in Style in the First Fifty Bucks a Week Challenge

Sep 30

Posted by emily in budget analysis, contest

chicken-cauliflower-curry

Last week, blogger Sarah McColl was brave enough to participate in the first ever Fifty Bucks a week Challenge. And it turns out we could all learn a few things from Sarah. Not only did she stay under budget spending only $44, she made beautiful dishes including Curried Chicken and Cauliflower, Butternut Squash Bisque and Stamppot with Kale—all while house sitting, no less!

Sarah had recently cut her grocery budget anyway, but as previously mentioned was worried she wouldn’t be able to get the “eating well” part down. But I never doubted her and she proved me right, employing a little something I like to call 1 Girl, 1 Chicken (if you don’t know the reference, be glad).

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Almost But Not Entirely Unlike Pizza

Sep 29

Posted by adam in recipe, update

almost but not entirely unlike pizza

almost but not entirely unlike pizza

I’m late with my post today. I’m sorry. Today was both emotionally and logistically complicated. By the time I was home, with everything settled that couldn’t wait till tomorrow, what I wanted was some comfort food.

I had planned to tell you about my Cheez Whiz® epiphany at the BBQ this weekend. It was the first time I’d eaten Cheez Whiz® in adult memory. The processed cheese food was part and parcel of a broccoli, chees/z and rice casserole, which was just about exactly the right accompaniment to the best backyard brisket I’ve ever tasted. (Note to Southerners: although he’s a born and bred New York City boy, my host was of Louisiana stock. You can put down your shotguns now.) I had planned to tell you about how it made me reconsider the local food thing. Not that I’m opposed to local and natural foods. Far from it: I’m delighted to support my local CSA; and I fully believe that, in addition to being demonstrably tastier, locally-grown low-intervention produce is actually healthier than its wan supermarket cousin. What I was thinking was more along the lines of this: if we’re good little locavores and eat all our kale, what’s the harm in a little Cheez Whiz®?

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Adam’s Spending: Week 15

Sep 28

Posted by adam in budget analysis

We had company over last Monday night: Matt Lambert, the director, cinematographer, and editor of the strange and sexy sci-fi web series The Fold (note: link rated R, at the least, for sexiness, and JPW, for Just Plain Weird, which gets it an additional rating of ILI, for I Like It). We talked about movies, web video stuff, and our mutual friends, The Fold’s creators, Polly and Ray, presently out in California. Having done an honest day’s work, and not having prepared anything in advance, I made us hamburgers, roasted potatoes, and a green salad. The ingredients cost $17.00, of which I ate somewhat more than a third, so I’ll set the Official Dinner Guest Decimal Multiplier at 0.4, for an Adjusted Post-Dinner Guest Personal Outlay of $6.80, which I will generously round up to a Readjusted Post-Dinner Guest Outlay, Whole Number Fetish Edition, of $7 even. I’m sure some will say that’s a lot for burgers and fries, and no doubt it is, but they did come with some excellent pickles.

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Battling the Burnout

Sep 28

Posted by cari in rant

Kruger's Farm on Sauvie Island, because it's so much more attractive than this rant

Kruger's Farm on Sauvie Island, because it's so much more attractive than this rant

No, not the kid with the van and the AC/DC t-shirt back in high school. Wherever that guy is, he hasn’t bothered me in years.

Budget burnout. Thrift fatigue.

I’ve got it.

The meal planning, the savvy shopping, the eating what we have in the house when I’m hungry for something very different. All this…responsible behavior.

Our break leading up to labor day was supposed to alleviate some of that, I suppose, but I spent that whole break disgusted by the thought of food. I survived on graham crackers and ginger ale. Now we’re back on the budget, and I’m HUNGRY. And it’s not that our $125 a week won’t let me eat enough. If that were true, I’d accept some additional budget room for the fetal food demands.

It’s just that we’ve been at this for a while now, and I’m getting tired of it. Tired of planning the meals days in advance. Tired of saving the receipts. Tired of wanting takeout and cooking anyway.

Kvetch kvetch kvetch.

Welcome to adulthood, Cari.

We’re not just following this budget to see if we can do it. Our real family budget is benefiting greatly from this $50 a week thing, and we have no intention of giving it up. It’s pretty damn vital to our continued fiscal well being that we stick with it.

But ugh. This week I find myself in an antsy, angsty, teenage-style full on resentment phase. The first few weeks of a new budget are easy because there’s still the excitement of the challenge. Now I know we can do it, and so the drudgery has set in. Gotta ride it out.

Meh.



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Cari’s spending: back on track

Sep 25

Posted by cari in budget analysis

With all the orange juice and cottage cheese and pears I’ve been consuming (okay, and there may have been a doughnut involved at some point, as well), I didn’t expect we’d make it. Especially since our anniversary dinner was this week (mmmmm….Ethiopian!), and we ate at restaurants as a family twice due to exhaustion/bad planning.

But you know what? We’re under budget this week. Maybe we won’t need to tack on extra money for the fetal food demands, after all.

The breakdown:


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Milk Money

Sep 25

Posted by emily in Uncategorized

shatto_milk

You know what I want to do when I’m at home and don’t have milk for my coffee? I want to leash up the dog and stroll ten or so blocks to the coffee shop where I can have a skim latte (with an extra $.50 shot!) and look at semi-interesting people and feel like I’ve gone somewhere.

But because I’m hard-core (hard core!) back on my budget this week, that just wasn’t an option yesterday. But I did go somewhere. I went to the grocery store. And I bought a bottle of milk, a box of cereal I probably wouldn’t have purchased had it not been for the $.75 coupon, some dog treats that don’t count toward my $50 a week and, yes, a jar of peanut butter. Still, I left the store only $2.59 in the hole and pretty dam proud of myself. How?

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Sardines: the Democratic Fish

Sep 24

Posted by adam in recipe, update

sardine salad

sardine salad

Consider the humble sardine. No, don’t turn away. I’m not about to carry on about some horrible disease contracted from canned fish. I do, though, have a bone to pick — a very small bone, even an edible one, as in the smallest of sardines, for I reject the revulsion in which these small fish are often held. People turn their noses up at them, associating them, perhaps, with hobos, or uncles with especially bad breath. I, too, was once an a priori sardine hater. The reason for that was simple: I hadn’t tried them. If you feel badly enough about sardines to exclude them from your diet, I’d like to convince you to change your ways.




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Emily’s Spending (Vacation)

Sep 24

Posted by emily in budget analysis

So, I said I was going to keep track of my spending while traveling through the marvelous Pacific Northwest. That—well—it just didn’t happen. I am slightly ashamed considering we took more than a week of before Labor Day, but slightly less ashamed since this was my first vacation from the Internet in more than two years. So I didn’t want to have to worry about anything. And I got to eat Voodoo Doughnuts and smoked fish pizza by the ocean. So there’s that.

But since getting back on Satudray, I had one meal out ($8), picked up my CSA ($25) and bought a few pounds of Honeycrisp Apples ($10). Oh, and there were those two lattes because I had no milk for my coffee when I returned ($8). Not quite a success, but not a failure, either, right?

Tomorrow is a new week, and considering I’m pretty damn broke, I don’t see how I could go over $50, even if I wanted to. Which I don’t.

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Kale: It’s the new zucchini

Sep 23

Posted by cari in Uncategorized

Okay, so maybe it’s not as bad as all that. I do foresee a day in the not-too-distant future when I’ll want to eat kale again. Sadly, that day has not yet come. I say sadly, because the main bed of our fall/winter garden looks like this:
kale

Each of those plants is nearly two feet tall. And no, that’s not all the kale. There are nine more plants not pictured there. (Though what you can see on the left of the photo are our glorious Brussels sprout plants, which I love dearly. In the front is the sprawling monster of a tomato plant that set so many heavy fruits it Broke Its Cage. Yeah. Thing’s a beast. It’s trying to take over the world, starting with my kale patch.)

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Do Not Try This At Home Unless You Want to Die a Horrible Death

Sep 22

Posted by adam in update

may_contain_death

One of the small truths that writing a food blog has brought home to me is that they can’t all be delicious. It’s the tendency of the food blogger to err towards the Martha Stewart, to make every meal lovely and wonderful with bright, authentic flavors surrounded by the sort of blown-out backgrounds that suggest the catalogs of furniture stores slightly more expensive than you can actually afford. White scarves, green fields. Thoughtful expressions, balanced with bright, laughing smiles. Bottles of herb-infused oils. You know, advertising.

This is not that kind of blog.

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