We have been cruising along on this food budget challenge for a couple of weeks now and it's been going well, except for 1 dining out roadblock on Day Thirteen I talked about HERE.
The last 2 days, the whole premise of only purchasing foods from stores that accept EBT and cooking every meal really began to cramp my style!
Wednesday I was feeling quite ill....nothing life threatening but sick enough that I wasn't able to throw together a made-from-scratch or even a semi-homemade dinner. Yes, we had plenty of ingredients for making a meal in the house.
But that would require some one else here to go into the kitchen and cook.
The teen doesn't cook. He can make grilled cheese and reheat stuff in the microwave and have I mentioned that he hates leftovers?
The DH 'can' cook....a bit.....but he chooses not to, given an opportunity(like this one)to go into the kitchen and whip up dinner. And he won't settle for a bowl of cold cereal or a peanut butter sandwich for dinner.
So we failed the challenge on Wednesday when DH hiked up to Subway and bought subs after I took to my bed.
In the past year, I have gone from a freezer packed with tv dinners and other preprocessed/packaged 'food' to a freezer packed with meats and veggies in their natural/raw state which I use to make the dinner magic. There is not alot of foods here anymore that are shortcuts to making a meal(outside of dehydrated milk or potatoes, canned soup, boxed mac & cheese and some Jello).
In a situation like this one above, having a couple of tv dinners or a frozen pizza would have saved us from resorting to Subway. The processed frozen food would have taken a bigger bite out of the food stamp budget for the month compared to only buying 'real' food with the food stamps, but in the end if a dinner emergency happened we could have eaten w/out resorting to less desirable fare if we had no cash available to spend on pre-made, hot, ready-to-eat food that is not covered by EBT/food stamps.
Seems to me that if you are on food stamps and you are the lone cook in your home, it might be wise to keep a couple of spare pre-made dinners in your freezer. Even better though, would be to make ahead a double batch when you cook/make a meal and freeze half. This way, if you are 'indisposed' and you have someone there who can at least turn on/turn off an oven or microwave, you can have them pop that homemade 'convenience food' meal and avoid spending your precious cash on fast food. I usually have something I pre-made in the freezer to heat and eat but I got caught without one this time.
So on Wednesday we struck out to the tune of $15.75. I need to think about how I am going to handle this in regards to my budget. Perhaps I need to add the cost of this fail to my donation check to the food bank.
I figure I need to have a penalty here....
Which brings us to Thursday, which was a much better day for the Food Stamp Challenge at our house.
Dinner consisted of pulled pork sandwiches on rolls and coleslaw.
I had leftover boneless pork ribs, from the cookout when the relatives were visiting, that I had cooked as 'just in case we need more food for teens that dropped in at dinnertime' food. We hadn't eaten them, so I shredded the meat, made up a small pot of our secret family North Carolina style barbecue sauce, threw in the meat and heated thoroughly. Spooned the 'cue out onto the leftover crustini rolls I bought last week and topped each one with the pre-made coleslaw from the grocery store that DH picked up on the way home from work.
Food budget spending for this meal....coleslaw $1.69 , rolls already figured in last week $0, meat $2.38(bought last month on sale), ingredients to make the sauce from the pantry $.40=$4.47.
On Thursday #2 son and I also ran some errands on the way to his guitar lesson. I had wanted to hit up the Bakery Outlet but they don't take EBT, so I had to pay almost retail for some bread and bagels. I found a BOGO sale on both at the local market so I have 2 bags of bagels and bread to the tune of $7.98.
This just about killed me since I could have possibly gotten all this at the bread outlet for $4.00...if I wasn't limited to only stores that accept food stamps!
We also stopped by my favorite local discount/close-outs store that carries food items. I had found this great little product there last month & picked up 1 bottle then......
It's a cold press EVOO that's grown, harvested, pressed and bottled in the USA(California)in a GLASS BOTTLE! and at the low price of $1.99 a bottle!
Ok, it might not be the best quality of Olive Oil but PA does not have much olive growing and olive pressing going on so this is a good deal here.
I had wanted to get a quantity of these for my stockpile after trying the 1 bottle I bought.....but I can't.
Because this close-out store does NOT accept EBT....so I have not been able to buy any food items there in June!
I am hoping there are some bottles left in the store come July.
If not, I've missed out on a food opportunity, just like anyone who lives around here and has to use EBT all the time to eat would have.
I tell ya, that sucks!
And it's starting to annoy the beejeezus outta me!!
'Spending' for Day Sixteen and Seventeen...$12.45 * +penalty of $15.75 for the Subs*
Spent to Date....$155.21
June Food Budget Left....$255.51
Days of Challenge Left....13
Sluggy
