Day Twenty-Six

What I Bought on Day Twenty-Six

Summary Page

Today I decided to spend my dollar on tangerines—one for each remaining day of the project. So now I can have a tangerine every day without having to truck over to the Compare. Good news on that.

For Meal One, I had the rest of the Jiffy biscuit mix with scrambled eggs and a tangerine.

And for Meal Two, I managed to again pull off a meal that is a close proximity of an actual recipe.

What I Cooked on Day Twenty-Six

Thanks go to my friend Elizabeth, who lived in Japan for a number of years, for this suggestion.

When she saw the first week that I had cabbage and could get noodles or pasta pretty easily, she suggested I make yakisoba—Japanese fried noodles.

Took me a while to get back to it, but here it is.

I poached the chicken in salted water and then put the broth in the refrigerator to let the fat solidify, then skimmed that off the top and used it for the stir fry.

Chopped my carrot and some of the cabbage and the little bit of onion I had left, along with some garlic, and also added the remaining jalapeno that was left after Monday’s salsa. Threw that into the wok with the heated fat—garlic and onion first, then carrots, then cabbage, then jalapenos for just a second.

I cooked about six ounces of angel hair pasta, then added that after the vegetables were mostly cooked, then added some of the chicken that I had chopped up, and stir fried everything together. So basically like a lo mein.

[And note that I was going to buy packages of ramen and doctor those up with the fresh vegetables, because I thought it would be good to show how you can make a universal cheap food like ramen better for not that much more, but when I ran the numbers it was cheaper to buy a pound of pasta than to buy ramen. Ramen is pretty consistently 5 for $1, which is $0.20 per package. The packages are 3 ounces, so that’s 6.7 cents per ounce. I can get a pound of pasta for $0.87, so that’s 5.4 cents per ounce. A pound of pasta at the ramen rate would be $1.07 vs. $0.87 for what I got the angel hair pasta for. That’s a pretty significant difference when you’re working with a budget like mine.]

The actual yakisoba recipe has a sauce—usually soy sauce and/or Worcestershire and I’ve also seen recipes that use rice wine or sake in addition to soy and Worcestershire.

My version is just plain, no sauce, but it was still pretty good, and it made a good amount of food. I should get two or three more servings out of what I made today.

Which brings me to my main thought for the evening, which is that if you have only a tiny amount of food, you should make soup, because you would be amazed at how much soup you can get from a very small amount of ingredients (especially if you do the stone soup thing and make everyone else bring the food).

Another good option is to make a casserole—just throw everything together with some rice or pasta and a white sauce and a little cheese and some bread crumbs on top and you’re good to go. (Unfortunately, I can’t demonstrate the beauty of the casserole during this project because I don’t have ingredients to make a white sauce—no butter or milk or flour.)

The next great option is a stir fry—heat some oil and toss a few things in with some rice or noodles and soy sauce (if you’ve got it) and it’s all good.

So that’s what I did tonight.

Receipt Day Twenty-Six

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Day Twenty-Five

What I Bought on Day Twenty-Five

Summary Page

One thing I’ve discovered during the course of this project is that I’m pretty good at figuring out what my body needs and fairly quickly arriving at a level of equilibrium. However, the balance is precarious—any disruption in schedule or increase in physical activity or altered work load really knocks things off.

A few times I’ve eaten a meal much later than usual (Saturday and Sunday of the first week, then again Wednesday and Thursday of last week), and then this week had an extra few miles of walking on both Monday and Tuesday. A day or two after all of those things, I really felt like I needed more food. (And on all occasions, Jiffy mix came to my rescue.)

Also it’s become abundantly clear to me that one of the big reasons I don’t eat three meals a day (aside from my work schedule, which just works better with two meals) is because it’s very difficult for me to come up with even two unique things I want to eat in the same day. And usually I shop a couple times a week and make a few specific things and then work off the freezer and pantry for the rest, so I only have to think of maybe three meals a week to actually fix; the rest are staples that I can put together without much thinking, based on what I feel like at the time. Also I can eat whatever I want in whatever weird combination seems good to me and I don’t have to think at all about how the picture will come out and whether or not it will look like a good, healthy meal to people who’ve never met me before.

So this project, where I have to actually come up with two different things to eat every day, that I can get with a dollar, and that I would be willing to take pictures of and write about for all the world to see, has taken significantly more psychic energy than I had anticipated. I don’t think I really thought that through before undertaking this.

So bascially what I’m saying is thank god for steel-cut oats. I think I could eat those every day for the rest of the year and be perfectly happy.

As you can see from the picture, in addition to the steel-cut oats, I got chicken and a carrot today, but I didn’t actually cook them because I had two meetings that took up most of the day and am dog-sitting for a friend and lacked the energy to return to my house and clean up my kitchen and cook the chicken leg.

So for one meal, I had a beautiful bowl of steel-cut oats and for the other, I had some pasta with the remaining tomato sauce along with the remaining spinach .

What I Ate on Day Twenty-Five

I wasn’t going to take a picture of the pasta because I’ve already taken a picture of pasta with tomato sauce and spinach, but after eating a little bit of it I decided it looked pretty good, and tasted pretty good too (I think the spinach helped) and maybe it deserved its own picture.

Receipt Day Twenty-Five

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Day Twenty-Four

Summary Page

So far Jiffy biscuit mix is in the lead for the lessisenough gold medal for maximum value — a mere $0.50 for all those fabulous carbs.

Meal One was a soft-boiled egg and a tangerine and some tasty, sodium-laden Jiffy biscuits.

Meal Two was the remains of the tortillas from Monday, a small amount of salsa from Tuesday, and some black beans and cabbage, also from Monday. Still a little bit of beans and a lot of cabbage left.

Hope to have a more exciting food report tomorrow, but for now, feel free to occupy yourselves with my treatise on corn.

Receipt Day Twenty-Four

You Call It Corn…

Back during my formative years, there was a commercial on TV all the time (I think for Mazola margarine) with the catch phrase, “You call it corn. We call it Maize.”

It was one of those commercials you couldn’t get away from and for some reason the slogan just seemed funny—not quite in the same league as “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV,” but along those lines. And my friend Sue, who is the master of the pithy phrase, used it as a sort of code to represent any large cultural difference. (The best example I can think of was when I was making approximately $20,000 a year and looking for a new job, and my father sent me a book called Rites of Passage at $100,000+ with advice on job-changing for corporate CEOs. He knew I didn’t make anywhere near $100,000, but he thought the book had good information, so he sent it. And it did have good information, and it was useful, but some of it was just funny because it was so not what I was dealing with. I was talking to Sue about it and she said, “You call it corn, we call it maize.” I said, “Exactly.”)

So I was reminded of this cultural chasm (involving corn, no less) when I noticed the multiple comments regarding the cornmeal mush discusison, with several commenters suggesting that cornmeal mush and grits are the same thing. And one person who was clearly offended by my sense of humor (for the record, the thing about people in Michigan was just a joke, I wasn’t trying to dis anyone in Michigan, I swear), accusing me of being stupid for living in the South and not knowing what grits are.

I do in fact know what grits are, and I also know what cornmeal is, and grits and cornmeal are not the same thing.

So herewith is my public service announcement concerning ground corn-based products.

Cornmeal is ground corn.

Grits is dried and ground hominy. (Hominy is soaked and dehulled corn.) Sometimes these are called “white grits” or “hominy grits.”

There is a ground corn product sold in the bulk aisle of my local Whole Foods called “yellow grits.” I spoke about this with a friendly Whole Foods staff person yesterday, and he told me that those yellow grits are a coarser version of cornmeal. This apparently is what many people think of when they talk about grits.

(And, after getting a comment stating that grits are polenta, I need to clarify here that polenta is made from ground cornmeal, and is not grits by a different name — though I think that polenta could safely be called cornmeal mush by a different name. Polenta is cornmeal, grits are not cornmeal, therefore grits are not polenta. Nor is funchi, which is also ground cornmeal, but gets a special mention for having its own song, which I will definitely be singing the next time I make cornmeal mush.)

In my experience living in the South, when people say “grits” they mean hominy grits. However different regions have different names, and different people may mean different things when they use the same words.

Here’s what Bill Neal had to say in Bill Neal’s Southern Cooking, in the version I have, published in 1986 by the University of North Carolina Press.

“In cooking, corn had two forms: the first was raw or cooked green corn; the second was dried corn processed in one of two ways—either ground or soaked in an alkali solution. Ground corn is essentially cornmeal; the coarsest cracked corn was parched and eaten plain, especially on long hunting trips. My father carried this to school wrapped in a piece of paper as a recess-time snack in the 1930s. With some elaboration cornmeal became breads, fritters, and dumplings. Hominy comes from soaking and dehulling the dried corn. The Cherokees cooked hominy whole with pumpkin, beans, and walnuts. A hominy drink, Gv-No-He-Nv, was their symbol of hospitality. Dried and ground, hominy becomes grits.” [pp. 24-25]

“In the southern United States, grits refers to the ground product of hominy… To produce hominy, dried corn is first soaked in an alkali solution to facilitate removal of the hulls. The East Coast Indians leached wood ashes to obtain lye. The natives farther west and through Central America relied on lime from limestone. After soaking, hominy can be cooked as a whole grain. The Mexican soup ‘pozole’ is an authentic remnant of native hominy cooking. More often, in the southern United States, hominy is dried again and then ground for grits.’’ [p. 30]

I’m taking Bill Neal as the final word.

When I’m not eating for a dollar a day, I make grits with a little bit of butter and some sharp cheddar cheese and a dash or two of Worcestershire sauce. (Not sure if that’s a traditional recipe, but I learned it from My Friend BG, known to her legions of admirers as MFBG, and she grew up in Wilson and her daddy was a tobacco farmer and that’s as Southern as you can get. So it’s authentic enough for me.)

MFBG heads to Greensboro to get her grits, from the Old Mill of Guilford. She says those are the best around. I believe her.

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Day Twenty-Three

Summary Page

One of the reasons I set up this project so I didn’t spend money up front to get a larger quantity of food then work off that is because it’s hard for me to predict from one day to the next what I’m going to feel like eating. Often I think I’m going to want one thing, but then when I wake up (or even as the day progresses), I decide that’s not going to work and I want something else. This is why strategies that involve planning meals in advance and relying on large, infrequent shopping trips don’t tend to work very well for me.

What I Bought on Day Twenty-Three

The last two days I’ve had higher than usual levels of exercise—usually I walk two to three miles a day doing errands and things, but Monday and Tuesday I walked closer to four to five miles each day. Yesterday after I was about two-thirds into my walk, I thought “Hmm, I think I probably should have ridden my bike for this.” I thought I was probably going to be hungry today from the extra walking, but at that point there wasn’t much I could do about it.

I felt okay for the first part of the day, and had another round of black beans and scrambled eggs and tortillas with salsa for Meal One. But I was definitely hungrier in the afternoon than I have been, and decided it was time for an infusion of carbs.

So I headed back to the land formerly known as South Square and visited my friends in big box world at the local SuperTarget. Picked up a refill of pasta, along with a can of tomato sauce.

I was actually planning my post about how lame my meal was, pasta and a can of plain tomato sauce, but then when I got home realized I had a tomato left from yesterday and also about half of the small onion I bought, plus some garlic.

What I Ate on Day Twenty-Three

So it was still sort of a lame dinner, but it was a large amount of much-needed carbs and also a little little bit of fresh vegetables. The plain canned tomato sauce will not be making the permanent recipe list. (Though it was actually quite good with the curry powder in the Curried Eggs over Rice, and also not bad when I combined it with Italian-style tomatoes, so maybe it just depends on what I do with it. But not so great on its own with plain pasta, even with some vegetables thrown in.)

I still have beans left and a few tortillas, and eggs, and now some pasta, and also most of the cabbage. I think I’ll finish up the tortillas tomorrow, and then try to build off the pasta and cabbage and maybe fill in with some fruits and vegetables. (Though if I’m still hungry tomorrow I might go for another round of the Jiffy biscuits—those definitely give you maximum volume for $0.50.)

I’m pretty much on target spending-wise. I was up $0.24 going into today, and spent $1.11, so I’m still up $0.13. Feel like I’m in pretty good shape.

Receipt Day Twenty-Three

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Day Twenty-Two

What I Bought on Day Twenty-Two

Summary Page

Today I went for some veggies to liven up my black beans and tortillas— jalapeno, tomatoes, and a teeny tiny onion, combined with the garlic and lime I had on hand to make a very close proximity of my usual salsa. (The only thing missing was black pepper, which I can live without.)

Salsa Fresca / Fresh Sauce

For Meal One, I had the sixth round from last week’s purchase of sunflower seeds and steel-cut oats—six good meals for $1.03. Not bad. And that was the end of both of those. Not sick of them yet, so I’ll probably get more before the project is over.

For Meal Two, I cooked up some eggs and heated the black beans and had eggs and beans and salsa with yesterday’s tortillas. I also polished off the cornmeal muffins, which were mostly crumbs by this point, but still tasted good. And a naranja for dessert. (See, this project is even expanding my vocabulary—that’s an orange, for those of you who don’t speak supermarket espanol.)

We’re coming into the home stretch—only eight days left. I’m trying to strategize the best way to work through what I have so as to not have anything left at the end, and what to get that will be just enough to get me through. Have a few things I’m thinking about, but it changes daily so I think we’re all pretty much in the dark about how it’s going to turn out.

Receipt Day Twenty-Two

Day Twenty-One

Spring in Durham

As you can see, it did in fact snow here today but it was just snow, no ice, and was mostly melted by the afternoon. The streets were clear and the stores were open so I was able to get out and spend today’s money. In case anyone was worried about that.

What I Bought on Day Twenty-One

Summary Page

Today was a big day—it was fresh tortilla day! La Superior Supermarket, my friendly local independent Latino grocer, in addition to having a butcher shop with good prices on meat, also has an in-store bakery and tortilleria. And the best part of the tortilleria (well, other than the smell, which is definitely the best part of the tortilleria) is that you can walk up and ask for a dollar’s worth of tortillas and they weigh it out and give you this pretty little package. And no one looks at you funny or anything.

I also bought a small cabbage for $0.77, so that I could make a bare-bones version of a recipe my mom sent a few weeks ago out of Bon Apetit magazine. (She didn’t send it for the project, she just sent it because she made it and said it was good and thought I would like it.)

The recipe is for Crispy Black Bean Tacos with Feta and Cabbage Slaw. My version is Crispy Black Bean Tacos with Feta and Cabbage Slaw.

What I Ate on Day Twenty-One

It was good and I have a lot of food remaining from what I cooked, since I went ahead and cooked all the rest of the black beans I bought on Day Two (which was just under a cup and a half, dried).

I was thinking about saving them and using them the last week but then wasn’t sure that I’d get everything timed right to be done with it all the last day and decided to work through them this week rather than waiting.

For Meal One, I had steel-cut oats and toasted sunflower seeds, and I also had some Jiffy cornbread muffins along with the tacos for Meal Two.

When I was at La Superior, the guy in front of me bought this giant (and I mean giant) bag of roma tomatoes for $5. I think they were $0.69 a pound. I’m hoping to get up there again later in the week to get some onion and tomato and lime to make a little salsa to eat with my black beans.

I have a little more than half of the tortillas left (I had a couple as snacks when I brought them home, then three tacos, then one more after I was done with the tacos, then another one more after I was done with the first one more—they were good, and it was a long walk up there) and since I have eggs, I’ll be able to have some wth scrambled eggs and black beans. I also might be able to do an enchilada thing if I get a can of tomato sauce.

But not sure what my schedule is going to be or what I’ll feel like as the week goes on. We’ll have to see how it goes.

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Day Twenty

Summary Page

Day Twenty has blissfully little to report.

I didn’t buy anything and went with the standard steel-cut oats and toasted sunflower seeds  for Meal One and leftover millet with chickpeas and spinach for Meal Two, along with an orange and some muffins from yesterday.

That was the last of the millet, and it wasn’t terrible, but I’m not sad to see it go.

However, we have an interesting twist to the story, which is that it’s snowing right now. And I’ve been working through things so as not to have anything remaining at the end, which means that I don’t really have much on hand at this point. (Specifically I don’t have much in the way of grains–the pasta and rice are both gone, and I used all the millet in the recipe with the chickpeas and spinach. I do have steel-cut oats, one meal cooked and probably one more serving not yet cooked, and a very small serving of cornmeal.)

Not quite sure what my backup plan is if the stores are closed tomorrow. A day of black beans?

Hmmmm…