100 DOLLARS A WEEK - Day 1 (What We Ate...)

A discussion with a friend earlier today led me to do some more arithmetic analysis on my budget, and it turns out that, assuming we eat at home for every single meal (which we do for the most part, though we do go out for dinner a couple times a month - which comes from the Entertainment budget), we are looking at 56 meals a week between me and the Man during the week, us and the Monsters during the weekend. That averages out to roughly $1.80 per person per meal. There are of course meals, especially make do breakfasts and lunches, that cost pennies, with the excess going to more extravagant meals in the evenings and on weekends.

And then Kay, who makes her own tofu and generally eats lots of meals I wouldn't mind crashing asked me if my budget includes alcohol, paper products, and cleaning products. The answer is yes and no. While the budget does include all paper products and cleaning products, I originally intended to pull out all alcohol related expenses and allocate them to the Entertainment portion of the budget. But then I decided that I would include the weekly bottle of ubercheap wine that I pick up while getting groceries, and exclude the beer and other liquor that the Man picks up separately and further allocates to the Entertainment budget anyway. Thoroughly uninteresting folk that we are, food and drink are our entertainment until we're in the position to travel again.

You may have noticed that, other than the one bottle of wine and the one bottle of MexiCoke for the boychild, I didn't buy soft drinks. Other than coffee, beer and wine, we don't drink a lot of flavored beverages in our household. For breakfast it's coffee. For lunch, water. For dinner, sometimes wine or beer, but often water as well. Once a month or so, I get a mad bubble craving, drink a couple of sodas in a row, and get it out of my system. The kids are also allowed a soda a day on the weekends if they like, but it's a thing that seems to figure into a lot of other peoples' food budgets that doesn't really apply to ours. 

So what did we eat today? 

For breakfast, the Man had a sunnyside up egg, some chorizo, and a little bit of leftover Spanish rice from our ribeye stew dinner. The kids and I, who weren't feeling a savory breakfast, had cinnamon raisin bagels with a schmear. Probably about $0.50 for each of us bagel eaters, and about $0.60 worth of ingredients for the Man. 

BREAKFAST FOR 4: About $2.10 total, $0.55/person.

Then the girlchild, who, believe it or not is the biggest eater of the lot of us, wanted a snack. The rest of us were fine to wait for lunch.

PRE-LUNCH SNACK: $0.50.

That California Roll I planned on making another day? That with a pot of miso soup was lunch. I used up all the surimi, half an avocado, and half the English cuke for the roll along with some rice, seasoned rice vinegar, mayo and seaweed I already had on hand. 

62 pieces of sushi altogether - half of them crab only
(or *k*rab, rather, for the kiddos...)

For the soup, I used half an onion, half a leftover turnip from last week, three garlic cloves, and a quarter cup of dwenjahng (Korean miso) to make miso soup. All tolled, the pantry items, pickled ginger, wasabi and everything...

LUNCH FOR 4: $7.20 total, $1.80/person.

Then, while forcing the kids to watch this great NOVA special on animal intelligence (which they actually ended up enjoying unlike half the documentaries I make them watch), I was ordered to make popcorn as penance for subjecting them to something other than Disney Channel or Cartoon Network.

It looked fluffier when I just popped it... :/

PRE-DINNER SNACK: $0.50.

As we're all out, I used the lull between the documentary and dinner during which we were supposed to go out for ice cream but didn't end up going because the kids were busy being assholes to eachother (definitely one of those *hurts me more than it hurts you* disciplinary moments) to make kimchi.

If you can believe this, the same place where I buy the five dollars in ingredients it takes to make a half gallon of kimchi sells five ounces of kimchi for five dollars.

HALF GALLON OF KIMCHI THAT WILL LAST A MONTH: $5.00.

And then finally for dinner, because the boychild requested it, we made lasagna with homemade pasta. If it were up to me, the lasagna would have been made with a decent no-boil pasta, but the process of making pasta was really as much a family fun activity as it was just a cooking exercise. In addition to the delicate texture and marginal money savings, another upside of homemade pasta is that it generally seems to be gentler on the digestive system, presumably because it's less processed. I don't get the same sluggish, weighed down feeling from fresh pasta that I do from dried.

At any rate, we used two links each of the hot and mild Italian sausages, half a pound of the ground beef, all of the mozzarella and ricotta cheeses, and made enough lasagna to feed us all with about three servings left.

Because I almost always like to have some produce with a meal, we ate the cantaloupe as a side.

DINNER FOR 4: $13.50 total, $3.30/person (with three servings leftover, the per serving cost is actually closer to $2 in the end)

As much as I love to cook, I don't spend anywhere near as much time in the kitchen on the weekdays as on the weekends. As a mother who doesn't care to take my kids to Disneyland or even miniature golfing, preferring rather to save up for a roadtrip or even a trip abroad, cooking what they love to eat - what they don't get during the weekdays - the way they want it cooked, is one of the few ways I do indulge them that they can appreciate in the immediate. 

Come Monday, it's a shared plate of breakfast for me and the Man, leftovers for lunch, and then perhaps a proper dinner.

Kimchi aside, we consumed $23.80 in groceries today - just under $6.00 per person on a Saturday. I think we ate pretty well, all things considered.

We'll be going up to OC tomorrow to help my parents pack, so dinner will likely be on their dime. But while a piece of the Type A part of me wishes my little experiment weren't being skewed by someone else paying for dinner, I'm told we're having my mom's homemade kahlbi. And about that I can hardly complain.

shinae