Wah Fung's roast pork. $2.50, chopsticks not included.
… much of my week’s eating. Yes, a death in the family is a sad occasion, but it did curb my spending somewhat. I can by no means write it off as entertainment, but I also did not pick up the tab.
So this week’s damage: $112.57 for groceries. Looking back over the receipts, we have apparently been consuming massive quantities of fresh-ground organic peanut butter, bananas, pears, and orange juice. Clearly the fetus has been making up the shopping lists lately. We also bought broccoli twice because I was craving it and we aren’t growing any in the garden.
Broccoli, man. Total garden space hog for very little payoff. We grew it our first season and never again.
(Wait…what’s that you say? You saw me and my family at an ice cream shop on Saturday evening? And yet you see no accounting for that here in the budget post? Well, fine. Ice cream was eaten, and enjoyed by all. But I don’t have the receipt, because what kind of kill-joy saves the ice cream receipt? We took my mom out for ice cream. Let’s call it an entertainment expense. No way it was enough to push us over budget, anyway.)
I think I’m going to make some lemon jam. Or lemon curd. Lemony goodness something. Not sure yet.
Those are eight lemons plucked straight from my friend Rachael’s tree Sunday afternoon. “We never use them, except for drinks,” she said. “Take as many as you want. Really.”
I wanted to fill my suitcase, but I used some restraint.
I love lemons.
Oh…yeah… So we were in California this weekend. We left on Friday morning by rental car, took our sweet ass time on the scenic routes (Redwoods! Details at ye olde personal blogge), arrived in Oakland on Sunday morning, attended a family wedding Sunday evening, and left by train (sleeper car! craptastic food included!) Sunday night. Yes, this is my excuse for failing to do my regularly scheduled budget post on Friday.
So, rather late, last week’s budget:
Sep 28
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.
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:
(What week is this, anyway? I think it’s time to stop counting the weeks. I mean…it’s not like this thing has an end date.)
So Friday is my weekly budget reporting day, and I’m glad to report that we’re under budget this week. We spent $105.64 on food. Not bad, hunh? Yeah, except that we didn’t start keeping tabs again until we returned from hiatus on Tuesday. And I forgot to ask Billy how much he spent on lunch this week, and he certainly had to buy lunch a few times. So…uh…
Yeah. This $50 a Week + Fetus stuff is going to be interesting.
I think we’re getting the hang of this budget thing. We ate one (inexpensive) restaurant meal this week, Billy bought his lunch twice and had a couple of scones, I had some deep cheese cravings that led to a serious stocking-up on on-sale Tillamook cheddar, a LOT of organic fruit was purchased and consumed, and we still came in under budget.
The breakdown:
We’re under budget this week, coming in at $109.18 total, but I spent a healthy chunk of food money this week doing something that was a regular part of my life before this experiment started, and it felt weird and wasteful enough that I’m going to need to make a change going forward.
Squash blossoms and mixed baby greens from the garden
Have I mentioned how much I love my garden? Maybe once? Twice? Yeah. Love it. We spent $123.20 this week for the three of us. I was worried we’d go over budget because we ran out of a lot of staples at one time: dried beans (I went for pinto beans and black-eyed peas this time, a change from our usual black beans and adzukis), dried chickpeas, brown AND white rice, soba noodles, and tahini. What I got will carry us through a few weeks, so over the course of the month it will work out budgetwise, but I was sure I’d blown it for this week when the first shop came out to $55.40 and we were still going to need more fruit, yogurt, and peanut butter, etc as the week went on. Well, we cut it close, but we squeaked in underbudget. It wouldn’t have been possible without the garden.
His and Hers Tamales
$68.22. That’s what we’ve spent on food this week. That’s going to go up a bit, as I need to do a small shop today to get us through the weekend. But I don’t expect to spend more than $20 or so to do that. We are WAY under budget this week. Of course, the free tamales our neighbor made for us didn’t hurt the effort, but they amounted to one lunch for each adult, so I think it’s fair to say it wasn’t the gift food that made the difference. (Ah, but free food is delicious. Especially when made by a neighbor who can COOK. My god, can that woman cook.)
Let’s assume I end up spending $90 total this week. That’s about fifty bucks less than I spent last week. So what did I do so drastically differently this week? Well, I did a better job of meal planning to ensure that all the leftovers got used up. That helped. And the kiddo didn’t get to dictate any purchases. That helped. And I didn’t buy any bread or bagels because I baked instead. But also, no big staples were needed this week. Last week we bought canola oil, tamari, and tea. That’s almost $30 right there. I know, that sounds like a lot, right? But the oil and tamari will last us the rest of the month at least. We get the big oil and tamari because we use a lot of both. The tea won’t last quite that long, but Billy loves his PG Tips and the man deserves some pleasures in life. (That, and it’s the second cheapest tea in New Seasons.) Staples that aren’t purchased on a weekly basis are going to skew things. I’m thinking the total at the end of each month is going to tell a truer tale of how we’re doing than the week-by-week will. That said, I’m still feeling pretty damn triumphant about this week’s total.
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