Hunger Challenge Day Five
The Challenge: United Way of King County Hunger Challenge. April 20-24 2009 The rules: Eat breakfast, lunch and dinner spending only $12 a day for 2 people for 5 days. Can’t use food you already have or accept anything for free. My Personal Challenge on top of this challenge: I want to do this challenge with enough food leftover after 5 days to get something it the freezer. Day 5: Friday, April 24, 2009 Breakfast was a strawberry yogurt with an orange. Lunch was mac n cheese with hot dogs. I boiled the hotdogs, which isn’t something I do often. My mom cooked them in the microwave until they burst open, she was always afraid of under-cooking them. I can make a great cheese sauce from scratch. One tablespoon each of butter and flour, stir together and cook just long enough to get rid of the flour taste, add one cup of milk and a third cup or more of grated cheese. But I’m bad at boxed mac n cheese. I always make the sauce too runny. My husband says the secret is to melt the butter, add the packet then add just enough milk to get it as thin as you want it, not to follow the recipe on the box. Today’s mac n cheese was Compliments (IGA store) brand. But I didn’t have milk on my list, I didn’t even think of milk and I didn’t want to go back to the store. So water and margarine it was. The flavor of the sauce was alright, the florescent orange color was a turn off though. And I learned that I still don’t like hot dogs nearly as much as a good sausage or brat. Hot dogs remind me of my little brother, he loved him. He’d load them with mustard. Then I started thinking about other things he’d eat with mustard. Like grilled cheese and salami. So gross! I remember him eating his grilled cheese with salami and mustard sandwich as this red juice dripped down his hand. . . Then he opened his mouth, which even grossed out my dad. I might have mustard nightmares tonight. An early dinner was the rest of the mac n cheese, I didn’t eat too much for lunch once I started thinking about mustard and I had another orange before bed.
There is a sale on boxed frozen boneless skinless chicken breast once every three months of so. The box costs $26.20 for four kilograms. Just to compare, IGA, who wasn’t running this sale had a four kilogram box of boneless skinless chicken breast for $45 this week. So how could we have bought that box of chicken breasts instead of the stewing hen and other stuff? The stewing hen cost $12.52 and we also had $4.53 left over. That’s $17.05 right there we just need to save another $9.15. If I was getting the chicken I would have just drank tap water and that would have saved $4.33. I’d also have skipped the black bean marinade at $0.79. Those two change would leave us needing to save $4.03. We didn’t need 9 yogurts, cutting out 3 of those would have saved $0.99. I really didn’t need 2 bags of penne pasta, just buying one would have saved $1. We also only used 2 boxes of mac n cheese not 4, so we could have saved $1 there. We only ate 2 of the 4 salmon and could have saved $2 on that. Half the bulk wieners are still in the fridge so we could have saved another $1 on those. Also most the chicken bouillon and some of the rice are leftover, we could have spend $1 less on those too. With all those changes we’d have saved $29.16 which is a lot out of a $60 budget and more than enough for a $26.20 box of boneless skinless chicken breasts. Plus we got 4 serving of soup in the freezer for later. Read about my fourth day of the United Way Hunger Challenge. Want to talk to me about this challenge or freezer cooking? I'm on Twitter @FavFreezerFoods Return from Hunger Challenge Day Five to the homepage of Favorite Freezer Foods.  Custom Search
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