Sunday, September 12, 2010

Brunch/Dinner Day 1

Okay. So it's the end of Day One and I'm not gonna lie...I will definitely be eating less in quantity and quality than usual. Also, I thought about food and money all day today, it was pretty annoying. I hope I don't totally lose my mind doing this!

Disclosure: I'm a Jew. This Saturday is
Yom Kippur so I will be fasting all day. So I don't have to save food for that day.


Today I tried to buy food for the week:
As I look at what I have for the week it is more or less healthy but it is also lacking in variety and certainly doesn't follow the food pyramid. I spent time at two stores trying to find cheap deals. More time than most people would have, maybe more than I would have if I was super busy with two jobs etc.
The Total: $24.27

San Francisco would turn over and die before it let a Walmart or Target in city proper so I figured my cheapest bets were bodegas and Safeway for sales. At Safeway I spent $10.76. I also am planning on using a bag of brown rice I already had which is $2.75 and a bag of red beans which I think was $3. I then spent $7.75 at a bodega to get some fruits. So I have less than $4 left in emergency money. A.K.A. Ramen money.

**Update: So I'm torn because my coworker Stacy thinks that since I bought a $3.99 tub of oatmeal that I should only count the amount that I'm using this week. Since its not like the oatmeal has too be eaten this week and in real life this product lasts for 30 servings.
She has a great blog where she is calculating such things: http://www.hellocupcakellc.com/

I guess I wasn't thinking correctly and thought that I had to only count my food as lasting for this week.  In that case, my oat is $3.99 with 30 servings:  So that is 13.3 cents per serving...
I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this information though...

What I ate today:
Brunch: For brunch (I got up at like noon) I made oatmeal and had one small gala apple. It wasn't the pancakes I was craving but it was okay. I didn't measure the amount of oatmeal I used but I did splurge for the big container of oatmeal (it has 30 servings for $3.99) so I know that I at least don't have to skimp on breakfast this week which hopefully was a good decision.
By the way as I was eating this I was watching Bravo and I paused. Can I watch Bravo? It seems too expensive to watch cable on a food stamp diet.

Brunch: 80 cents
about 1.5 cups of o
atmeal = 41 cents
gala apple = 39 cents


Snack:
45 cents
I ate a banana. I didn't take a photo of it, you know what one banana looks like I imagine. I ate it on the way home from the store because I was gonna eat my hand.


Dinner:

I hate Ragu sauce I think it's cheap and tastes like tomato soup. But it was 50 cents less than everything else. So I made sauce with cut up carrots and put it over whole wheat pasta. The whole wheat pasta was 4 for $5 and the regular was 5 for $5 so that was another sacrifice I made. The best news: I put half of what I made in a mason jar for tomorrow for lunch. The bad news: as I type this I'm so hungry! Confession! I already "cheated" I had the smallest amount of green beans left over so I added them to my sauce for tomorrow before they went bad. I'm not so sure its cheating though, I think you can have some leftovers from previous weeks even on food stamps but maybe I'm wrong.

Dinner: 86 cents
Pasta: One box is $1.25, I used 1/4 of a box
= 31 cents
Sauce: The jar was $1.49 I used 1/6 =  25 cents

The carrots were 49 cents a pound, I 1/2 of one = 20 cents

I also took some photos of what was cheap and within budget at
Safeway...but what I would not buy:

So. It's only day one and you can still join in on the hunger challenge! Read the blog! Give it a try even if for only one day!

2 comments:

  1. We really appreciate all your support and your willingness to take the Hunger Challenge! We look forward to your blog posts. Best of luck this year. Thank you!

    P.S.- Sounds like you have a smart co-worker :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. If thats srsly your diet your going to have a lot of health problems in the future.

    ReplyDelete