United Way Hunger Challenge Shopping DayPlans Change, Work With It.
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. Monday, April 20, 2009 The first two days he’ll be back home to eat and sleep after about twelve hours of work and two hours of travel. So I just pack him a big lunch and he has dinner at home. The last three days he’ll be further away so I have to pack all his meals. He’ll either be home Friday night or sometime Saturday morning. Luckily the company he works for tries to get hotel rooms with kitchenettes and has a few houses the guys can stay at near some of the dealerships when they work putting together large farm equipment. Now, when my husband is far from home like that he gets a meal allowance. That allowance is $20 per day and is not taxable. Of course he has to be so far from home and work so many hours to get it but he will actually make $60 just on that allowance this week for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. And our budget on this challenge is $60. The catch is that eating out is expensive so we always try to pack him something. Sometimes, in the smaller towns, the kitchenettes don’t even have a fridge so everything we pack has to be ‘shelf stable’. But we generally budget so that we both eat for $10 a day or less and that way, while he’s working on the road, food is basically free for us.
So with hubby on the road I had to change our original menu slightly. The tuna and chicken salad sandwiches were out because mayo doesn’t do well in the back of a tuck all day and the last thing we need is to get sick. I simply doubled up on some of the other meals like the veggie salad with chicken and the salmon with brown rice. I also packed hubbies lunch with Sunday’s leftovers and invited a friend to shop with me and have lunch for this challenge. So I’m still feeding two people for the whole challenge. We started shopping at Extra Foods on Monday morning and I just learn a few weeks ago that they open at 8 am and do markdowns around the store for the first hour or so. I had assumed they opened at 9 am and did give much thought to when markdowns happened before. We went straight to the produce section. I got lucky because the $1 a bag salads where marked down 50% for a fast sale. We also got a marked down loaf of bread and some black bean marinade for .79 cents. The juice mix I bought in the bulk containers range up wrong and I paid nearly twice what I should have, but I didn’t catch the error until the next day. I also opted to spend the whole $60 this week. Extra Foods IGA Co-Op Nutters (Lost receipt) Overall Total: $55.47 And it looks like I’m going to have some leftovers after the five days too. 
The first day of the challenge my husband had pasta with meat sauce for dinner. The second day he had avogolemono soup for lunch. He got home around 10:30 pm and had some quick hot dogs in wheat bread for a light dinner. He packed his suitcase and I packed the food. Knowing he's staying somewhere with a fridge made this challenge much easier. Wednesday morning he was on the road by 7:00 am and I packed him quite a bit for the next few days, see picture above. He has two meals of penne pasta and meat sauce, 2 salmon and brown rice(I decided to cook the rice for him since he wont have time), 2 salads with black bean chicken and dressing, 6 slices of wheat Texas cut toast, 3 yogurts, 2 boxes of mac and cheese(only one pictured), 6 hot dogs, some butter, the juice crystals and I even gave him a chocolate muffin. The chocolate muffin was a big deal because I love chocolate and he just doesn't quite have the same passion as me for it. You think that might make the other guys jealous as they have their over-priced hamburgers at the only bar in town after all the restaurants are closed? Read about my original Meal Plan for 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 Shopping Day to the homepage of Favorite Freezer Foods.  Custom Search
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