Groceries, including $12 of cheese, $5 of sweet Italian sausage, $5 for eggs from the farmer’s market that didn’t taste any different from the usual less-do-goody eggs that cost a dollar less, and $12 of cookies that I needed very badly: $47
Current estimate of percentage of groceries eaten by myself: 75%
Adjusted grocery income, rounded to nearest dollar: $35
Eating out, including a much-needed cheeseburger and fries after the NYC Century ride on Sunday, and an bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich on a toasted sesame bagel: $15
Gatorade and Payday bar expenses incurred during NYC Century: $7
Adjusted total for the week: $57
Posts Tagged overbudget
Adam’s Spending, Week 13
Sep 14
cucumber-tomato-chard salad, tahini dressing
Groceries: $26.00
Pizza: $9.00
Dumplings: $6.00
Coffee: $4.00
Brunch: $11.00
Subtotal: $56.00
Six dollars over-budget. Not bad, considering that I worked three meals out into that figure. Well, actually, four.
Overbudget, you say? Impossible!
Well, we went over budget this week. Here’s the breakdown:
- Groceries: $91.56 (this includes 15 lbs of organic bread flour, by the way)
- Marionberries: $15.50
- Burritos bought en route to berry picking: $11.50 (to feed the three of us. Cliff bought his own burrito)
- Burgerville: $14 ($13 and change, but we lost the receipt, so let’s round up)
Total spent on food this week: $132.56. We went over budget by $7.56
It was the milkshake that did it. Or rather, the craving for one. That’s right. Here I am all garden this and organic that, and our budget this week was undone by fast food. Eaten in the car! Yeah. I hang my hippie head in shame. (And yes, we knew we were going over budget even as we pulled into that Burgerville lot.) Here’s how it happened.
"burger" (and fries) from stu_spivak's flickr stream
(Photo licensed under Creative Commons, http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuart_spivack/ / CC BY-SA 2.0.)
It was a stressful week, of lining up jobs; of trying not to care about the Tour de France, which, to judge by the way things have been going the past few years, will end in the courts, rather than on the Champs-Élysées; of doing battle with the slugs in the backyard, who, to judge by their acceleration up the brick wall of the garden towards anything recently cooked, are, I’m guessing the lucky recipients of Iban Mayo’s now superfluous stash of EPO; and of taking flak from our piece in Time Magazine’s Cheapskate blog. Mostly, what that made me feel was how much it must suck to be a celebrity, and wake up to that kind of hate every morning. I won’t say that I understood Heath Ledger in that moment, but maybe I had some insight into Liz Lemon, because what I most wanted to do in all the world was eat, eat greasy, eat pricey, eat anything I wanted. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t indulge myself a little.
in line at Sahadi's
Now why would a guy who’s so notoriously averse to waiting in line that, even when he has the money to pay for them, he eschews and pooh-poohs Brooklyn’s It restaurants in favor or places where he can get seated quickly? For one thing, because the line moves quickly, past signs reading “No Smile, No Service,” and, “Of course, I’m in shape. Round is a shape.” For another, because this swift queue belongs to Brooklyn’s own Sahadi’s.
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.
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.
lamb patty sandwich with avocado and radish greens
It was a week of reinventing leftover lamb (rehashed as sandwiches and pasta sauce), a week of takeout coffee, a week of political upheaval in Iran that will rewrite the way we get our news. In a vain attempt to reconcile these extremes, I overspent my budget by several dollars, a figure that would have risen considerably higher, were it not for the timely intervention of a post-wedding party in Harlem on Saturday, and a barbecue in Queens on Sunday. You might say that I lacked focus. If you were talking about my food photography, you’d be right.
