SNAP Challenge: Conclusion

Well gang I have some sad news to report. I can’t find my June receipts! They are all sitting together tucked away in a notebook or cookbook that I’m not able to find. I don’t know exactly how much we spent, but I was keeping a running total in my head. So I know we had like $10 dollars left to play with. I think we'll make a donation to the Jimmie Hale Mission. One of our local grocery stores has a system where you can "buy meals" for the soup kitchen. Easy peasy.

I will say that Dennis and I did not give up going out to eat and that I get free meals at work. Some people may not have that advantage, but we’re a young couple. We want to have fun, and we can. I am perfectly convinced that I could make the small budget work. Earlier this year we ate in most of the time and I was keeping us to a budget.

I got really panicked after the first week when Dennis and I went a little crazy. Automatically, $118 was taken out of our budget for my weekly vegetable box. I was not willing to give up that produce. I could have easily given more room in our budget by buying conventional produce from ALDI, but I just couldn’t do it. I believe in eating locally and I am working hard to get my diet as local as possible.

What ended up happening is that we ate very simple meals using up what I had on hand and in the pantry.

Sorry that I didn’t blog much about this challenge. Truly, our regular budget so closely resembles the proposed one that I was really just documenting what I normally do. For those who are merely stopping by to glance at my Food Stamp Posts, I encourage you to come back often. A year from now, my blog should be filled with month by month seasonal recipes. One of my main goals for this blog is to find recipes for two that use everyday ingredients. Sure, I definitely will play with cuisines and flavors, but I usually restrain myself to what I can do with my box. If I can afford to do it, then so can you.

Besides reducing the amount of meat you eat, eating seasonally is definitely the most food budget friendly thing you can do. You don’t even need a CSA box to do it; you can simply learn food schedules and buy accordingly.

I have been participating in the June Food Stamp Challenge issued by Katy at The Non-Consumer Advocate. To see more about this challenge, visit her blog where she updates daily on her progress.

SNAP Challege Update: Week Three

I think Dennis and I may come out even after all. I decided that the last couple of weeks, to stay under budget we’d just eat very simple meals. These are meals that I throw together with absolutely no recipes and using just what I have on hand. We bought some eggs, cheese, and fruit to supplement the box. Other than that, I was on my own. This is very rare for me. I usually have very detailed menus, using recipes that incorporate my local vegetables.

So Wednesday night rolled around and I had to figure out what I could make with on hand ingredients. I still had half a bag of red leaf kale and some pork sausage (left over from my Potato and Kale Soup). I took the eggs and cheese we bought, added some red onion, and made a frittata. I served it with some boiled potatoes mashed with Gorgonzola cheese (leftover from Polenta Squash Sauté), and steamed some broccoli that was just a few days shy of becoming completely wilted and rubbery. We even had some left overs to enjoy, which is rare for this Tiny Tables cook.

Here is the recipe I used for the first frittata I ever made. It’s scaled down to serve two. Perfect for Tiny Tables!

Thursday I found out one of my best friends was coming into town very briefly from Chicago. I got asked to cook, and I couldn’t turn down the request. As it was so last minute, I literally had no time to make anything elaborate. Nor did I want to break too much from the budget. I had some potatoes, cheese, bacon, and eggs; all the makings for another excellent frittata. I had some cucumbers and red onions that I sliced up and dressed with mustard vinaigrette. To finish it off, I cooked grits, made sweet tea, and a banana bunt cake.

This whole feast only required me to buy a dozen more eggs at the local convenient store. Everything else I had on hand in my pantry. Now I understand that some of you may not have a well-stocked pantry, but buying a bottle of vinegar here and some vanilla extract there will help you for impromptu moments.

Frittatas are a cheap and easy meal for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. I learned Saturday that people really enjoy them, and it feels much more substantial and luxurious than simply serving breakfast for dinner. Somehow eggs and cheese can take even the most random ingredients and make them have a cohesive taste.

Crab and Spinach Quiche

Broccoli and Cheese Frittata

I have been participating in the June Food Stamp Challenge issued by Katy at The Non-Consumer Advocate. To see more about this challenge, visit her blog where she updates daily on her progress.

SNAP Challege Update: Week Two

So, after busting this week’s budget (of which Dennis and I are both guilty of), I have decided that no matter what we’ll make a donation. Our budget so closely resembles the one stated by the challenge that the donation most likely would have been under $10. So basically I have decided to resume my normal budget and make a more substantial donation (as in, more than $8.26).

Last week I talked about budgets. So this week I will talk about seasonal menus. I am a firm believer that people really don’t understand that a big reason why it’s expensive to eat fresh vegetables is because they are buying vegetables that aren’t in season. Strawberries in Winter? I don’t even want to know what you pay for those tasteless things.

It takes a lot of work to find good recipes. A lot of the seasonal cookbooks I have found are created by these chef-types who have these ultra lush gardens in California where everything grows (endives don’t come in my box, okay!?). If I read the word micro-green one more time, I will scream. Where are the real recipes? They’re there, you just have to dig. I really recommend magazines, as they are really great about including recipes that are in season now. Some magazines are more user/family-friendly than others. You can go to your local library, kick back, and read away.

If you were to come over to my house right now, you’d see stacks and stacks of cookbooks from the library. I have a very weird system worked out. When looking for recipes, I only look for recipes that are in season. Most of the time, I am looking for certain ingredients. Certainly I take note of recipes that sound good for other seasons, but I don’t write them down (unless they just sound too good to be true). This is so I don’t end up like my mother with folders of recipes never tried. However, when a new season rolls around I check out the cookbook again and look all over again. Eventually, I will have a nice base of recipes that I can go to season after season. My boyfriend still talks about my turnip, potato, garlic, and apple mash. But we will not enjoy this tasty treat again until late Fall. Until then, we’ll just be stuffing ourselves silly with tomatoes, eggplant, and squash.

Eating seasonally really will cut the amount you spend on produce, thus making it more affordable for those on a tight budget. Some produce is always cheap (onions, potatoes, celery, bananas), but you should compare the price of Asparagus in November versus the price in May. A dollar here and there does make a difference when on a small budget.

I have been participating in the June Food Stamp Challenge issued by Katy at The Non-Consumer Advocate. To see more about this challenge, visit her blog where she updates daily on her progress.

Snap Challenge Update: Week One

This last week was crazy for Dennis and I. It was one of those weeks where we had opposite work schedules. We did go out for BBQ Tuesday, but other than that – we’ve been eating up leftovers. I cooked the old faithful Thai Stir Fry (chicken with squash, carrots, and broccoli) and he enjoyed leftovers while I cooked up a little pasta.

Let's talk about budgets. Very important when you have limited funds. So how do I work our budget? I pretty much do all the math, and Dennis just participates. So starting in January we decided it was time to start cooking more at home. Until that point, we had been going out a lot. You know… early love bird stuff. So I started saving grocery receipts as part of my “get organized” resolution. Well for about six weeks I kind of let us go free for all. I’d pick recipes that went along with my Grow Alabama box and I’d cook them all up.

This is when I realized that a budget was needed. We’d leave having spent $100 for about a week and half of groceries. And the next week would be similar. Did I forget to mention that I was spending $120 a month for a weekly supply of vegetables? On top of that we were shopping at ALDI, a super discount grocery store. I had assumed the weekly cost would be about $30-40 a week to get anything to supplement the box. But we were tripling that estimate. We could have eating out that week on a similar budget. I knew this couldn’t continue.

However, I will be quick to point out, that a lot of the expense at that time was buying a bottle of vinegar (or whatever) for the first time. It will last you months, but you still have to fork out $8 for that recipe that needs 2 tablespoons. I now have a well stocked pantry of oils, vinegars, spices, and wines.

Afterwards, I took all the receipts I had collected and compiled them together in a notebook (organized by category). So every week after that I would look at the recipes figure out what I had to buy and literally add it up (leaving room for tax). Sometimes, a recipe would get pushed back because I needed to wait until I had a little extra money to buy that $10 bottle of walnut oil. This is a very detailed, nerdy way to do it. But it works for us. Dennis now just hands the receipt to me as we walk out of the grocery store. Then I get to go home and scribble down prices in my notebook. Since I shop at ALDI the prices don't really fluctuate, so there is never any needed to update a price. If the price does change week to week I over estimate for that item. For example, if milk ranges between $1.80 to $2.29 I'll typically just play it safe and price it at $2.50.

I don't really break down my budget too much at this point. It's just whatever I need for that week's menu. I do always set aside at least $5 for fruit. This usually gets us some bananas and one or two other items (typically on sale). I usually suck it up and buy the meat in the huge family packages. It is way more than Dennis and I could (or would) eat in one week. So I usually flash freeze them and pull out what I need when I need it (this further stretches the budget).

Since I spend $120 on the box, Dennis spends $120 on whatever we need to supplement. So basically, I look at both of our schedules (work, activities, etc) and figure out when we’re both free for meals together. There are usually one or two pantry meals (pasta or burritos) and then the rest utilizes vegetables. But for this month, we’re cutting down $20 at least. We really want to try to just eat very simple meals so our donation can be larger. Honestly, we’ll rely a lot more on our pantry to get us through. But we’ll be fine.

I am working on next week’s Menu. So I will post all the fun details.

SNAP Challenge

For the month of June, I have joined Katy from The Non-Consumer Advocate and others to bring awareness to the challenges of living off of food assistance programs. Ironically enough, my food budget is lower than the government's maximum supplemental allowance for two people. I only recently increased our budget when I signed back up for Grow Alabama.

I talked it over with Dennis and we decided to give this challenge a go.

Hopefully I will be more diligent about posting menus and their cost. Something I claimed I would be doing anyways. Currently, Grow Alabama is not covered by SNAP. But last I heard, they were trying. But for this challenge, I'll say that if I can spend $120 dollars on vegetables (that's including the delivery charge) then others can certainly spend $120 dollars on vegetables from their local market. One of the pillars of the challenge is try to cook nutritious tasty meals that don't contain an excess of processed foods.

According to Katy's research. The government would give a family of two a maximum of $327 dollars. But the average is $101 a person. So that's $202 for the two of us. Dennis and I decided that anything not spent within that amount will be donated to a local organization that fights hunger in Birmingham.