Update on the Hurley's

Well, nothing extraordinary has happened since the last post, but in more mundane affairs, we've decided to cut back on our food budget, to practice being poor. Our current criteria is that whatever we eat has to be less than $1 per serving. Tricky, but not impossible. We're starting the third week, and here are a few of the recipes that have already become affordable stand-by's:

Split Pea Soup
split peas $0.76
1/2 large onion $0.58
2 carrots $0.16
a little butter
salt and pepper
Total for the pot is $1.52, and we got at least 4 servings out of it, so that would be about $0.36 per serving. Whoopee! Also, this recipe is reallly good.

Spaghetti
can o' spaghetti sauce $0.96
link of Italian sausage $0.58
1/3 lb of spaghetti $0.37
frozen veggie on the side $0.50
Total $2.41, at least 3 servings, so $0.80 a serving. I estimated on the amount of spaghetti I actually used. If you leave out the sausage, it comes to $0.61 a serving.

Pretty much any reasonable recipe can be converted to $1 per serving if you take out enough meat and add enough rice or beans to up the number of servings. If you buy those big giant bags of rice and beans, the rice comes out to $0.21 a cup dry, and the beans are $0.19 a cup dry, which is pretty affordable even in great quantities. Examples of recipes that are likely to be cheap: beans and rice (someone let me know if they have a good recipe), fried rice, very ricey casseroles, bean-based soups, etc. Sometimes I add corn muffins or biscuits on the side to make life more enjoyable.

One last observation: breakfast, it's expensive. Now, my husband eats a LOT of cereal, so those boxes don't last more than 5 servings. Add to that the 3 cups of milk in each bowl, and you can see the problem. So one bowl of cereal for Matt is $0.78 of milk and $0.50 of cereal, for a whopping $1.28 (assuming milk is $4.18 a gallon, and box of cereal is $2.50). And then you have to keep milk stocked, so you have to drink it quickly before it goes bad, which can result in additional loss. Instead we make pancakes. We found this nifty "complete" pancake mix, where all you have to do is add water, which is nice at 5:30 in the morning, and you aren't required to make a certain amount of batter because you can't figure out how to add half an egg. So instead of $1.28 a day, I buy a box of mix for $1.50ish which lasts 3 to 4 weeks, and all I have to do is put the pan on to heat up while I mix the batter and I have 2 or 3 pancakes in a few minutes (I haven't actually timed it; I'll see if I can remember to do that tomorrow morning) and I can get Matt's lunch together while the pancakes are cooking.

So there you are, my thoughts on frugality.