The Kitchen Mouse

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Tulkojums nav pieejams. Pašlaik nav iespējams iztulkot visas receptes, taču ja tevi interesē šī recepte pievieno komentāru un es centīšos to drīzumā iztulkot.

I really wasn’t sure if we would be able to make this far. We spent almost our entire budget in one day last week and this week. I was positive we’d forgotten something.

Something I’m learning with this challenge – I do not need to worry so much when I’m going to be doing the grocery shopping again in about three or four days. I would feel differently if we didn’t have so much food in the pantry and freezer that we can make all sorts of meals — being out of one or two ingredients, while inconvenient, is not the end of the world.

Now, while my husband and I are living the life of unemployed college students, we don’t have much. But we do have enough to eat well and eat healthy; we actually spend more than $50 per week on groceries usually. And yes, we do spend more time in the kitchen because we enjoy cooking and baking — but that’s not true every day. Some days, we don’t want to do anything in the kitchen, not even the dishes!

I hear of a lot of people saying they can’t eat well with less than $x per week, that they have to buy processed food, that fresh produce is too expensive. It doesn’t have to be that way, but you have to be willing to try.

Here’s my advice:

• Watch where you shop. If you don’t you WILL pay too much.
• Be willing to experiment and cook from scratch. If you aren’t, processed, unhealthy foods often seem cheaper and/or easier.
• Rome wasn’t built in a day: It takes time to build up a thorough pantry. It also takes time to figure out what you really want to have on-hand all the time. If I had to make a list, it’d probably wind up being equally divided between spices, flours and baking ingredients, protein, dairy and veggies. When you don’t have much in the way of ingredients in the pantry, getting started is a monumental challenge — and very expensive — so take it slow.
• Be willing to buy frozen or canned at some points during the year. Sometimes, especially in the winter, fresh produce IS too expensive or too expensive for the quality available.
• Always remember to keep frozen and canned veggies in mind. They’re picked when ripe and in season then preserved for later. In areas with bad tomatoes, canned is much better – there’s a reason many recipes call for canned tomatoes because you can get reliably ripe and good ones canned.
• And the corollary: Watch for what’s in season and try to buy that instead. In the winter, enjoy root vegetables and winter squash along with pomegranates and citrus, for example. What is in season will taste the best.
• Learn to cook, at least the basics, because knowing is half the battle. If you know how to cook, you can take basic ingredients and transform them into a good meal easily and quickly.
• Learn to make a few dishes really well. These will save your ass when you’re too tired and too lazy to do anything. Always have those ingredients on hand. It could be as simple as roasted chicken with potatoes and carrots – 5 minutes of prep, 1 hr of cooking, 2 (or more) meals if you’re single or married w/o kids.

We’re starting to use up some stuff in the pantry now but by choice, not by force. Last night, we went to Walmart to buy some household products, like paper towels and scrubbie sponges, neither of which are counted towards our grocery challenge budget (thankfully). We picked up some sour cream though, since they have the best price.

We spent: $1.90
Remaining Budget: $48.10

Today is Shopping Day, so we headed out fairly late to Winco and Rancho. Unfortunately, today was not the day Rancho got all its good produce in — some of the sales advertised in this week’s circular weren’t out on the shelves, like cherries and spinach. But we did manage to get three wonderfully ripe cantaloupes for $2 and a big watermelon for less than $2. I also got some plantains, so I’m going to make that roasted plantain dessert again once they ripen to mostly black. (There will be a blog post, I just need to double-check my measurements before I finish writing it.)

We spent: $8.66
Remaining Budget: $39.44

We also stopped at the little taco truck on 35th South and (roughly) 72nd West for lunch. My husband was hoping for some chicharrón tacos (fried pork rinds) but we were too late, so we got some spicy shredded beef (birria), chicken (pollo), head (cabeza) and pork (carnitas) tacos. Damn but they’re good. They beat the stuffing out of Del Taco or any other Mexican fast food chain.

We spent: $4.00
Remaining Budget: $35.44

Finally, Winco. We weren’t able to get a lot of produce at Rancho today so we had to get it at Winco. Plus, we needed some extra bulk goods – more unbleached flour, gluten flour (for Gluten Bread from the Beard on Bread book later this week) and small items like dried parsley and dried tomatoes. We did, however, opt to spend 45c on a small handful of Crown dark chocolate truffles as a treat. Really rather good, I’m definitely buying them again for my chocolate cravings.

We spent: $33.56
Remaining Budget: $1.88

Yikes! Almost all the way gone again and I’d hoped to buy a box of tea for my husband’s newfound iced tea habit. We still have a ton in the cupboard though, so I’ll plan on that purchase next week.

Monday
Breakfast: Manna (Eng. farina or cream of wheat) with preserves, breakfast sausage patty, homemade applesauce
Lunch: Fried rice
Dinner: Pollack pancakes¹ with Tartar Sauce, Curried Bulgur, cabbage-carrot-cucumber salad
Dessert: Pear and peach tart² (based on the Free-Form Peach Galette) with milk

Tuesday
Breakfast:turkey bacon, hot cereal with strawberries, fried egg³ and coffee
Lunch: Tacos at the taco truck! 4 tacos, $4. Delish.
Dinner: Chef salad with garlic-rosemary bread (again, from Beard on Bread)

Notes:
1. We had this horrible frozen pollack in the freezer. It’s so wet, you can’t easily fry it. Just awful. But I didn’t want to waste it by throwing it away so instead I combined it with everything from the Easy Salmon Cakes in the food processor and whizzed it until it was a thick batter. I had to add more flour and cornstarch just to get it to thicken up a bit more, then fried it up. Tasted pretty good!
2. Another thing I needed to use up — leftover frozen pears from last year and two peaches from last week.
3. The last of the eggs! We skipped eggs at breakfast on Monday so we’d have the last two today. I’m so glad we went shopping today!