The Frugal Feeding

A few weeks ago, I decided to feed Adam and myself for $25 a week. This does not come without its unique challenges, since almost anything takes a good chunk out of the budget. Want that jar of peanut butter for $2.50? Congratulations, you have just spent 10% of your budget! So anyways, here is the week's menu plan:

Dinners
Lentil soup (no sense letting that Christmas ham bone go to waste!)
My special Southwestern Bean Dish
Beef Carrot Casserole
Baked Potatoes
Stir Fry
Spaghetti
(Friday nights, we eat out)

Lunch
I am experimenting with making bread because store-bought bread is so darn expensive. We have tons of leftover ham, and we also have cheese and any condiments you could wish for. We are set for sandwiches!

Breakfast
This family loves oatmeal. We have tons of it lying around. I also do pancakes, and this week, Apple Walnut Muffins will pop up somewhere.

A lot of this stuff is already in the house. I like to make gargantuan amounts of a single dish and freeze the leftovers. Here is what $25 bought me this week:



Cottage Cheese: $2.88
Sour Cream: $1.50
Chili powder: $2.99
Flour: $2.29 (I caved in and got the bleached because it came with coupons for other baking goodies. How do I live with myself?)
Lentils: 2 bags for $.99 each
Tomato Sauce: 2 cans for $1
Turkey bacon: $2.75
Bananas: $1.98
Carrots: $1.89
Potatoes: $1.54
Apples: $1.40
Onion: $1.04

I got to the end of the shopping excursion and realized I did not have enough money in the budget for coffee!!! I had an extra dollar left in the budget, so I bought one of those little Millstone 99-cent bags. It's good for a few cups. This is going to be a very. long. week.

Millstone coffee: $.99

Grocery Total before tax: $24.23

Hooray!

Cleaning the house made easy!- or at least more manageable

Howdy! In a nice irony, I am taking a break from cleaning the house to tell you exactly what I do to clean the house. Of course, if you had seen the mountain of dishes that I just tackled, you would understand why I deserve the break!

Speaking of mountains, that is pretty much how the whole apartment looks until I finally just up and clean the durn place. It is pretty intimidating to clean the WHOLE place in one day, but this is what I do to make molehills out of those mountains:

1. Turn on some good music.

2. Get a timer, set it for thirty minutes, and clean the worst room in the house.

3. When the half hour is up, go to the next worst room. It doesn't matter if room #1 didn't get spotless. Just go! Repeat steps 1-3.

I like this system because this way, Perfectionism will not keep me in one room for the entire day.  And the house ends up at least a little better than it was, if not completely clean. And I find that many parts don't even take half an hour! Sometimes I'll see how many rooms I can do in thirty minutes!

I just have a little apartment, so the half-hour time is perfect for me. I can get the whole house looking great in a couple of hours. For those fortunate to have a real house with more rooms, you could adjust the time to fifteen minutes. Or ten. Whatever it takes.

Well, I suppose it's time to tackle a new room. My husband's going out for a while, so I'm also going to surprise him some of his favorite tea. Shhhh.

Cheap Drink: Fake Arizona Tea

Of all the drinks in the world, one that is guaranteed to drive my husband wild is sweet iced tea (for further proof, click here). I made the following recipe for him, and he was absolutely delighted! The recipe says to use green tea bags, but I didn't have any, so I just used regular Lipton. I also halved the original amount of honey (that stuff is expensive!), but Adam never missed it. So here is how I made it:

ALMOST ARIZONA (GREEN) TEA

• 1 gallon water, boiled
  
• 2 tea bags
  
• 3/4 cup sugar
  
• 2 T honey
  
• 1/4 cup + 2 T lemon juice
  

Steep tea bags in hot water for 1 hour. Add remaining ingredients, and serve over ice.

Price breakdown:

• Water= free
• Tea bags= $.10
• Honey= $.28
• Sugar= $.13
• Lemon juice= $.37

Total cost= $.88

Cost per 8-oz cup= $.06

This is one of those rare occasions when I actually like doing math. Ohhhhhhh, yeah!

Why this Christmas will be very, very different

Whew! A lot happened this last week! Since last Tuesday, I have

• Cleaned the entire house
• Been the hostess with the mostess at Thanksgiving-- and I didn't even burn the turkey!
• Gone on a two-day, fifteen-mile hiking trip. Yep, I am now painfully aware of EVERY muscle in my legs.
• Celebrated six months with my favorite husband!
• Decorated the house for Christmas
  

Speaking of Christmas, this will be our first Christmas away from home. My mind still hasn't grasped the fact that Christmas is not going to occur at my family's home. No familiar Christmas caroling. No familiar Advent rituals. No familiar Christmas fudge. That may be the worst part. I can't even find my stocking, which was supposed to be here with us. I don't even get to wake up on Christmas morning to find my now-lost stocking magically filled by Santa! I'm going to really miss all that coal! This is all very important to me, but this year will be different.

Basically, what is going to happen this year, is that I may actually be forced to discard the meaning I have attached to Christmas- warm, fuzzy traditions and time with the family- and really find the meaning in the Manger. Who'da thunk?

I'm excited about that.

Not to mention, I FINALLY get to have Christmas with Adam! Now, where is that mistletoe...

I need cheap beverage ideas!

When I got married, I knew in the back of my mind that I was marrying a man who loved drinking any kind of sugary, colored beverage he could get his hands on. However, I did not really spend too much time formulating a plan to deal with this habit, because I was a little more worried about wedding favors and how to transport all those bridesmaids from the airport. And now, here I am, six months after the wedding, bemoaning my lack of preparation in the drink department.

Just goes to prove the saying that "A wedding lasts a day, but a marriage lasts a lifetime."  (although I was happy to have my bridesmaids!)

My family has never been much of a drinking family. When I was growing up, we would maybe, just maybe have water with meals. Every once in a blue moon, someone would have milk. My parents weren't psychotically strict about liquids; nobody just really wanted to drink. I've never seen my dad ever drink anything with meals; I myself like to drink water (I will choose it over pop, even if the soda is free) and coffee, and even that is pretty intermittent.

And then there is Adam's family. When they were over at my place for the wedding, I got a kick out of watching them get out of the buffet line with their plates, find a spot to sit, put their plates down... and immediately make a beeline back to the kitchen to hunt down a drink. All. eight. of. them. Every. meal. If that's what floats their boat, then I'm glad. They'd probably outlast me in the desert any day.

I dearly love my husband, but I also have a hard time frittering money away on products that are so easily consumed. I don't mind putting down money for a more expensive (but quality) grade of ground beef because I can make that last forever. I DO mind buying a quart of egg nog for $2.50 and seeing it gone in two days. 

Any ideas for cheap drinks?

What are ya...

...Chicken?

And that is precisely what I prepared for the first time a couple nights ago! I'm not talking about chicken wings, or chicken nuggets-- this was an entire chicken! (allow me to pause and soak in your admiration). I've always been intimidated by the thought of cooking an entire chicken. That's a lot of meat! What if it turned out.. fowl? That would be a meal for the birds!

Putting aside my fears and bad puns, I chose the smallest chicken I could find and consulted the foremost authority on chicken: my mother. For years and years, she has prepared the chicken in a single fabulous way, as shown to her by a Jewish neighbor named Tina. Hence the name Tina a la Chicken. Although, now that I actually know French, I realize it should actually be called Chicken a la Tina. Otherwise, the implications are terrible. Anyway, the chicken recipe is super simple and requires the grand total of TWO ingredients: 1) kosher salt, and 2) chicken.

Soak the chicken in water for half an hour to draw out the blood. Then, cover the entire chicken with kosher salt and let it sit on top of a cookie rack in the sink (please wash your dishes first) for an hour. I was appalled when I heard this piece of news, because in my mind, any food should be either piping hot, frozen, or in the fridge. Otherwise, who knows what terrible botulism and E- Coli microbes will descend from the air with a shout onto your room-temperature fare! After an hour of exposure, I totally expected the chicken to crawl out of the sink by itself.

As it turned out, the only interesting thing that happened was that I talked to my dad on the phone for a few minutes (who- I am just now realizing the irony- was feeding his chickens at the time). When the hour was up, I put the chicken in the oven at 350 degrees for an hour. About a half hour into it, I realized I had placed the chicken upside down (not resting breast-side down-- whoops!) and fixed that. I also sliced a lot of onion and tossed it in the pan. And here is where I feel very strongly that marriage has interfered with my memory, because if I had remembered how awesome those chicken onions are, I would have scrounged up every onion piece in the house and thrown it in the pot. Yes, those tender, flavorful onions are that good. You will want to make the chicken just so you can have those scrumptious onions!

The chicken turned out fine, albeit a little salty (I was a little overzealous with the kosher salt). We feasted like royalty. The next day, I cut the remaining chicken into cubes, coated it with buffalo sauce and blue cheese, and made sandwiches that my Buffalonian husband found delightful. Two hearty meals for $3! And there's still a little left over! Now that's something to crow about!

Christmas is Coming, and the Goose is Getting Fat...

I promised myself I wouldn't even start thinking about Christmas until after Thanksgiving- it's kind of nice to enjoy one holiday at a time!- but then I started panicking... er, thinking about the huge list of family and friends to give gifts to, and I realized that I need to jump on that as soon as possible.

This Christmas, I am determined to handmake as many gifts as possible-- not only because it should be a bit easier on the wallet, and not only are handmade things a little more from the heart, but also because it helps with getting away from the sheer materialism that is so apt to rear its ugly head at Christmas.

So... do you have any good ideas for homemade gifts?

I will let you know what I come up with!

What can YOU buy from Wal-Mart for $.02?

This is what put me out two cents yesterday. (Notice how happy the pumpkin on the right is!)

 Adam and I could hardly believe our eyes when we walked into Wal-Mart and saw the sign advertising giant pumpkins for one cent each. I really wanted them for the seeds (roasted pumpkin seeds make an incredible snack), but the thought of letting all that good pumpkin meat go to waste was unthinkable. 

Jack O' Lantern pumpkins are not really recommended for cooking, but if you add 25% more sugar, it does the job well enough. I made pumpkin bread the other day with a Jack O' Lantern pumpkin (back when they were worth one hundred pennies!). To be honest, it tasted more like zucchini bread, lacking that deep pumpkin-y flavor, but it was delicious nonetheless!

So, on to the kitchen to make some very cheap pumpkin puree!

As I got ready to steam the pumpkin, I ran into a little problem: I do not own a steam basket. Nor do I intend to spend more money for more stuff that I don't have room for. No matter, teh internetz told me to put little foil balls in the bottom of the pot in lieu of a steam basket. Problem number two: there was no foil in the house! So, I rummaged around the kitchen and the recycling bin, and came up with this:

Works for me! Then I cut the pumpkin up into large chunks, set it on top of my "steam basket", and let 'er boil for about thirty minutes, till it was easily pierceable by a fork.

 Then, the skin came off, it jumped in the blender, and....

Pumpkin puree that gets a thumbs-up from me! I made about eight cup's worth, plus the puree that went into the pumpkin bread.

The First Post Ever!

Having spent a king's amount of time finding some sort of name that Blogger would actually accept, I am very much inclined to keep this brief. 

This will be the third blog I've ever started. The first time, I was a silly high-schooler. The second, I was in college, and in an emo mood most of the time. This time, I am still in college (I liked being a senior so much that I decided to do it again), but I am much older and wiser (I'd like to think, anyway), and interested in writing a quality blog. I have been married for five months to my Prince Charming, and I look forward to having many adventures together. Let this be the chronicle of those adventures of the domestic sort. Yay for life!