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    • If not LOCALLY PRODUCED, then Organic. If not ORGANIC, then Family farm. If not FAMILY FARM, then Local business. If not a LOCAL BUSINESS, then Fair Trade.

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    October 28, 2009

    Wordless Wednesday - October 28

    clitoria

    Posted at 03:03 PM in musings | | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

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    October 22, 2009

    Pizza as a Secret Weapon & Day 6 of the Eat on $30 challenge

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    Pizza - it's my secret budget weapon.  For $1.06 and the price of a pizza stone, I can make two large pizza crusts better than just about any I could find in Knoxville.  Friday nights are pizza night in our house and we do this for two reasons.  One - it's a fun tradition and it's a cheap one.  Two - homemade pizzas taste so freakin' good and they're fun to make.  I'll make a post next week with the pizza crust recipe we use and a couple of topping suggestions.  For the Eat on $30 challenge, we stayed pretty basic.  We went with a homemade sauce, mozzarella cheese, onions and homemade turkey sausage.

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    Thoughts on the food I ate yesterday:
    I'm missing our usual sweet tea that we drink with most meals - a lot.  I also am having cravings for the crappiest candy imaginable - things like Laffy Taffy and Nerds.  I had a dream about Lemonheads.  I don't even want to try to interpret that.

    Thoughts on the Eat on $30 Challenge so far:
    Again - I'm using a pizza stone.  You can make pizza without it but I think the results are far better with it.  I also find myself skipping ingredients so I don't have to account for the cost.  I had no idea how much a garlic clove should cost because we grow our own garlic.  I didn't want to run down to Krogers just to see how much it cost so I left it out.

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    Breakdown of costs:

    Pizza crust cost:
    3 cups flour: 51¢
    2 tbsp olive oil: 40¢
    1 tbsp yeast: 15¢
    Total Cost: $1.06 for two crusts

    Breakfast: Scrambled free-range eggs, bread, fair trade coffee and local organic milk
    Lunch: Hamburger Stroganoff over penne pasta
    Dinner: Homemade pizza with homemade sauce, cheese and turkey sausage
    Dessert: Snickerdoodle Blondie - 2

    Breakfast:
    3 Eggs: 57¢
    6 tbsp milk: 18¢
    3 tbsp coffee: 33¢
    Bread: n/a
    1 organic local apple: 70¢
    TOTAL: $1.78

    Lunch:
    Beef Stroganoff - 2 servings: $3.59
    TOTAL: $3.59

    Dinner:
    Crust: 53¢
    1/2 can organic tomatoes: 63¢
    4 oz mozzarella cheese: 56¢
    4 oz homemade turkey sausage: 26¢
    2 oz onions: 10¢
    TOTAL:  $2.08

    Dessert:
    Snickerdoodle Blondies: 76¢
    TOTAL: 76¢

    GRAND TOTAL FOR THE DAY: $8.21
    TOTAL SPENT SO FAR: $46.16

    Here are a list of the other wonderful bloggers participating in this project! If you decide to follow along on Twitter the hashtag is #EatOn30:

    Posted at 01:16 PM in Eat on $30, frugal, musings | | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)

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    October 20, 2009

    I'm a cheater - Day 5 on the Eat on $30 challenge

    I feel like I never have enough time in the day.  I'm horrible at time management so I'm sure that's part of my problem.  I'd love to be one of those women who wake up in the morning and have a list of things done by 9am.  Of course, that involves getting up by 8am so I may be reaching a bit in wanting that level of organization. 

    I also have a lot of demands on my time.  I run my own business with my husband and while I love being my own boss, when you work from home, it's hard to delineate where work stops and home begins.  I own more cats than I'm willing to admit to most people, several who have medical conditions and I feel like I've spent weeks of my life just scooping litter boxes.  I have a rather large garden by urban yard standards and I try to produce and preserve as much of our food as we can.  This involves lots of canning.  We have a house that was built in 1894 that will one day be gorgeous.  Right now, it's missing things like walls, plumbing in some areas and is a bit decrepit.  Lots of time goes into fixing it up.  My husband and I talk about kids but I'll admit that I feel so crunched for time now and I know how much time kids take!

    However, no matter how rushed I feel, I have an abundance of time when you compare it to a lot of people on food stamps.  I work from home so it's easy for me to let a pot of stock simmer all day.  Eating a meal of leftovers involves no planning.  No figuring out how to get it to work and heat it up.  I have time to bake my own bread and preserve my own food.  Granted - I make the time for that but I'm not having to work two jobs to get by.  It's not a choice between me baking bread or working an extra job so my kids can have clothes to wear.

    I've got lots of ways to save time:   I make extra and freeze it. My freezer right now holds containers of gumbo, Hopping John, spaghetti sauce, mushroom-wine sauce, chicken stock, frozen pizza dough & a bag of breadcrumbs.  Whenever I make something that might freeze well, I usually double the recipe so that I have some to eat later.  I also have a list of quick, easy meals that are made from wholesome ingredients but come together in a flash. I always have pasta on hand and I make use of a slow cooker and pressure cooker.  But these tips might not be helpful to someone who doesn't have the extra money to buy food in bulk.  You have to first own a pressure cooker or a slow cooker. I bought a chest freezer so I'd have space to save leftovers - that was a serious upfront investment.

    What it comes down to is that there's no way I could do this challenge and not cheat.  No matter how closely I count my pennies or follow my planned meal plan, there's no way this even begins to approximate the choices and considerations that someone who lives this budget on a daily basis has to deal with.  I knew that when I started this challenge but I don't think I really KNEW that.  It's become a lot clearer to me that no matter how strictly I follow this challenge, I can't really follow it because I'm not really living this life.  

    PS - I apologize for the lack of pictures in this post.  My data card got corrupted and all my pics were corrupted as well.

    Thoughts on the food I ate yesterday:
     I often make Beef Stroganoff with hamburger. It's a great way to use ground beef and make it different.  I've never really followed a recipe before but I had to with this challenge.  I needed to know the exact cost to make sure our budget could swing it.  So I turned to SimplyRecipes.com because I knew Elise had posted a recipe for this dish recently and I knew her recipe would be great.  It was wonderful.  Instead of winging it, I'll probably use her recipe in the future.  Normally, I'd serve this dish over egg noodles but since I had penne pasta and it was cheaper, I used that.

    Thoughts on the Eat on $30 Challenge so far:
    I've been thinking a lot about the time component of this challenge.  The amount of time it takes to make sure that we don't go over our budget - the calculating out every last thing.  But even though that's a pain, I'm lucky because if we do go over our budget, it just means I've screwed up this challenge.  It doesn't mean I won't be able to pay my electric bill.  Calculating out my costs isn't personal to me because the consequences aren't very dire.  Granted - I want to not go over my budget but if I do, all I lose is a little bit of pride. That's a pretty small price to pay in comparison to someone who doesn't have the leeway in their budget.

    Breakdown of costs:

    Hamburger Stroganoff:
    2 tbsp butter: 24¢
    1 lb local, grass-fed ground beef: $3.45
    8 oz onion: 40¢
    8 oz Bella Mushrooms: $1.67
    1.25 cups sour cream: $1.19
    1 tsp lemon juice: 4    ¢
    3 oz penne pasta: 19    ¢
    TOTAL: $7.18 for 4 servings
     

    Breakfast: Scrambled free-range eggs, bread, fair trade coffee and local organic milk
    Lunch: BLTs
    Dinner: Hamburger Stroganoff over penne pasta

    Breakfast:
    3 Eggs: 57¢
    6 tbsp milk: 18¢
    3 tbsp coffee: 33¢
    Bread: n/a
    1 organic local apple: 70¢
    TOTAL: $1.78

    Lunch:
    bread: n/a
    2.5 oz grass-fed bacon: 93¢
    6 oz tomato: 60¢
    1 tbsp mayo: 25    ¢
    TOTAL: $1.78

    Dinner:
    Beef Stroganoff - 2 servings: $3.59
    TOTAL: $3.59

    GRAND TOTAL FOR THE DAY: $7.15
    TOTAL SPENT SO FAR: $37.95

    Here are a list of the other wonderful bloggers participating in this project! If you decide to follow along on Twitter the hashtag is #EatOn30:

    Posted at 10:17 PM in Eat on $30, frugal, musings | | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

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    October 15, 2009

    Quick Day 3 Recap

    Just a quick recap for today - it's been a crazy day of work and I'm feeling under the weather.

    Thoughts on the food I ate yesterday:
    Bread is my friend.  Fills me up cheap.  But I'm not getting nearly the amount of fruits & vegetables I should be eating each day.  I can't afford them on this budget.

    Thoughts on the Eat on $30 Challenge so far:
    I'm really glad I'm doing this challenge.  But I'm already prowling the net for recipes to make when this challenge is over.  This isn't a way of life for me - that's something I'm trying to keep in mind.  Everything I'm doing is much harder for people who have even less money to spend and don't see an end in sight to their day-to-day challenge.

    Breakdown of costs:

    Breakfast: Scrambled free-range eggs, bread, fair trade coffee and local organic milk
    Lunch: Mushroom Barley Soup with bread
    Dinner: BLTs
    Dessert: Snickerdoodle Blondie

    Breakfast:
    3 Eggs: 57¢
    6 tbsp milk: 18¢
    3 tbsp coffee: 33¢
    Bread: n/a
    1 organic local apple: 70¢
    TOTAL: $1.78

    Lunch:
    4 cups Barley Mushroom Soup: $3.04
    bread: n/a
    TOTAL: $3.04

    Dinner:
    bread: n/a
    2.5 oz grass-fed bacon: 93¢
    6 oz tomato: 60¢
    TOTAL: $1.53

    Dessert:
    Snickerdoodle Blondies: 38¢
    TOTAL: 38¢

    GRAND TOTAL FOR THE DAY: $6.73
    TOTAL SPENT SO FAR: $24.65

    Here are a list of the other wonderful bloggers participating in this project! If you decide to follow along on Twitter the hashtag is #EatOn30:

    Posted at 11:16 AM in Eat on $30, frugal, musings | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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    October 13, 2009

    How the hell do you cook barley?!!

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    I've been lucky enough to grow up in a family where a lot of emphasis was put on eating healthy food.  My mom is a retired nurse and we were drinking 2% milk before most people had heard of it.  Granted, some of the nutritional advice of the 80s and 90s has turned out to be wrong (margarine anyone?) but fresh fruits and vegetables were always emphasized.  We had a garden and I grew up thinking vegetables were pretty tasty and could never understand why some of my friends thought they were disgusting.

    I'm also very lucky that I know how to cook.  My parents strongly encouraged that by praising me for making some of the most disgusting dreck I can think of.  Remind me some day to tell you about the weevil pudding.  They bought me cookbooks and helped me clean up the disaster of a kitchen I always seemed to create.  I grew up watching my mom cook.  Baking cookies for us, making us a batch of homemade playdo to squeeze through the garlic press, stirring the huge pot of spaghetti sauce that she made every summer to freeze - cooking was an act of love and this attitude transferred over to me.  Sure - my mom got busy between working the night shift and taking care of us but she had a repertoire of quick, easy meals that she pulled out when the need arose.

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    Because I loved to cook and was strongly encouraged to experiment in the kitchen, I learned how to cook a lot of stuff - quite a bit of it by messing it up a few times.  My parents either paid the cost for those messed up meals or I was able to absorb the cost of those meals when I was living on my own.  A lot of people don't have that luxury. When you have a limited amount of money to cook with, you can't take chances that it won't turn out.

    I also have access to blogs, TV shows, magazines and cookbooks where I can learn how to cook things.  I took several nutrition courses in college and have subscribed to several magazines that discuss health issues like this.  What seems like perfectly common knowledge to me is not to a lot of people.  I think assuming that our knowledge is known by everyone else is an issue that's at the root of so many of our problems in this country.

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    I think the food blogging world is a fantastic place and full of some of the most wonderful, helpful people in the world.  But I also think it's easy to get caught up in the belief that what we know is known by everyone.  There are so many people who don't have any idea how to cook or any idea what kind of food is healthy.  I was at the Fellini Krogers one day and I saw a woman buying breaded fried okra.  I overheard her telling her daughters that vegetables are healthy.  Far too many people would rather mock her for being stupid, rather than try to understand that with the knowledge she had, she really was trying to do the best she could to put healthy food on the table.

    Another example - lamb shanks.  One of the cheapest cuts of lamb and one lamb shank will flavor a whole pot of beans.  But I know how to soak dried beans.  I know that lamb is tasty because I've had it before.  I know what to do with that strange knobby piece of meat to make it taste good.  I know these things because someone taught me how.  That's so easy to take for granted!

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    My husband grew up in a very country family.  I'll admit that I was shocked the first time I went to a family dinner.  I remember asking him where the vegetables were and he laughed and laughed at me.  "Honey - there were tons of vegetables there!" And when he explained them all to me, I got it.  There WERE tons of vegetables there.  They were just all fried, drowned in bacon fat and covered in processed cheese.  But they were healthy because they were vegetables!  He had never eaten a green green bean.  When I mentioned that I loved peas, he readily agreed.  His favorite dish was canned green peas, mixed with velveeta, cream of mushroom soup and covered with buttered Ritz cracker crumbs.  Now he plants peas with me every spring and when we harvest them, we eat the first crop straight from the vine.  But he had to learn that snap peas from a vine were completely different than peas from a can.  

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    There are several groups out there that are doing their best to teach low income families how to cook with whole foods and how to eat nutritiously.  In a perfect world, every state would have these programs.  But until then, a lot of people are just getting by the best they can.

    Thoughts on the food I ate yesterday:
    I love No Knead bread.  So cheap and makes better bread than I can buy most places.

    Barley is a wunderfood! $1.19 a pound for organic barley.  It's cheap - bulks up readily, tastes great. 

    Turkey feet look pretty gross bobbing up and down in a stockpot but I love what bird feet do to a pot of stock.

    Thoughts on the Eat on $30 Challenge so far:
    It's amazing how much I can crave something that I can't have.  I usually keep a small bag of jelly beans from Earthfare in my office.  They have no artificial colors in them so they're ridiculously pricey, so they're out for this week.  Naturally, they're all I can think about.  I want a damn jelly bean and I want it now!!!

    I almost killed my husband when he changed the end cost of the turkey stock THREE TIMES!  Eat on $30 - you were almost responsible for the death of man!

    Breakdown of costs:

    I made a huge pot of turkey stock on Saturday.  I'm going to count it as I use it in recipes.

    I also cut off a tablespoon of butter to use as spread for bread or other minimal uses.  I'm going to just count the cost of the whole tablespoon here and when it's gone, I'll count another one.

    Breakfast: Chorizo scrambled free-range eggs, bread, fair trade coffee and local organic milk
    Lunch: Hamburger patty and leftover veggies from yesterday + 2 oz cabbage
    Dinner: Mushroom Barley Soup with bread
    Dessert: Snickerdoodle Blondie

    Turkey Stock:
    8.5 lbs of turkey carcass: $4.72
    1 lb turkey feet: $2.50
    8 oz onion: 40¢
    1 lb organic carrots - $1.04
    TOTAL: $8.66

    Mushroom Barley Soup(see below!)
    2 tbsp butter: 24¢
    10 cups turkey stock: $3.60
    2 containers Bella mushrooms: $3.34
    10.5 oz organic carrots: 68¢
    5 oz organic celery: 95¢
    12 oz onions: 60¢
    6 oz organic barley: 45¢
    TOTAL: $9.86 or 76¢ a cup


    Breakfast:
    3 Eggs: 57¢
    1/2 oz Chorizo: 44¢
    6 tbsp milk: 18¢
    3 tbsp coffee: 33¢
    Bread: n/a
    1 organic local apple: 70¢
    TOTAL: $2.22

    Lunch:
    1/2 lb hamburger: $1.73
    2 oz sautéed cabbage: 11¢
    TOTAL: $1.84

    Dinner:
    4 cups Barley Mushroom Soup: $3.04
    1 tbsp butter: 12¢
    bread: n/a
    TOTAL: $3.16

    Dessert:
    Snickerdoodle Blondie: 19¢
    Sweet precious wine: 72¢
    TOTAL: 91¢

    GRAND TOTAL FOR THE DAY: $8.13
    TOTAL SPENT SO FAR: $17.92

    Mushroom Barley Soup

    This freezes well and tastes even better the next day.

    2 tbsp butter, divided
    2 1/2 cups onions, chopped
    1 cup celery, chopped
    1 1/2 cups thinly sliced carrot
    2 8-oz packages mushrooms, sliced
    1 cup pearl barley
    10 cups chicken stock
    3/4 tsp salt (this depends on how salty your stock is)
    1/2 tsp dried thyme

    Heat 1 1/2 tbsp butter in a large skillet over medium-high heat until it bubbles.  Add the carrots, celery and onion to the pan and saute 5-6 minutes until they start to lightly brown on the edges.  Add mushrooms and saute until they soften, about 5-6 minutes.  Set aside.  In a large saucepan, melt the remaining 1/2 tbsp butter over medium-high heat until bubbly.  Add barley and stir constantly until it brown a little, between 6-8 minutes.  Add stock to barley and add vegetables to pan.  Add salt and thyme.  Simmer 20 minutes and taste.  Add more salt if necessary.  

    Makes about 13 cups

    Please click here for a printable recipe!

    Here are a list of the other wonderful bloggers participating in this project! If you decide to follow along on Twitter the hashtag is #EatOn30:


    Posted at 08:00 PM in easy, Eat on $30, frugal, musings, recipes | | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)

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