THE $20 EXPERIMENT: DAY 4

Hello dear friends!  Welcome to day four of my $20 food challenge.  Today was all about making decisions.  Do I use the soup to make another recipe or just reheat it?  Do I use the last of the kale?  Do I use some of the oatmeal to make a thickener?  Use the tortillas?  My supplies are dwindling and now hard decisions have to be made if the food will see us through three more days.

What We Had For Lunch

Pot pie!  Made the decision to use the last of the meat, because well, I don't know how long meat stays good in the fridge, but it was definitely time to use it up.  I strained the soup through a fine mesh sieve.  The meat and vegetables went into the pan for the basis of the pot pie. I also added the remainder of the meat and one more potato to stretch it further.  This ended up being a meatier pie then I usually make. The next question was how to make a gravy without any flour or cornstarch for a thickener.  To get around that I ground some of the oatmeal in my electric coffee grinder.

It made a nice flour if I do say so myself.  To make the gravy I heated the broth from the soup to boiling and stirred in the oat flour  combined with approximately 3/4 C. water.  Whisked it like mad until it began to thicken. I set aside about  1/2-3/4 C. to flavor another meal.

I prepared the remaining Jiffy biscuit mix and patted it out onto a piece of waxed paper since I didn't have any flour to roll the dough out onto.  I patted it fairly thinly and had enough dough left over to make three small

biscuits for a meal for another day.  Here's how it all turned out:

And we had enough left over for a meal on another day, so that's one less worry.

The guys both ate two servings, it was a good and surprisingly tasty meal.

Dinner

Dinner was light fare, one of those quesadillas that I wrote about in the day 1 post, using 6 tortillas, a cup of beans, and a bit of cheese.  Since this is all of the fat I have left:

from defatting the soup, I opted not to use it to make the quesadillas this time.  I'll save it for making bean hash.

They burnt a little without greasing the pan, but tasted fine.

What I Have Left For The Remainder of The Experiment

I still have plenty of cheese, been using it very sparingly, like one swipe over the cheese grater for each time I use it. In the vegetable department I have about a pound of potatoes,  two carrots, about 1/3 of the can of fire-roasted tomatoes, 2-3 C. of the beans and about 3/4 C of the kale left.  We still have almost all of the oatmeal, no one wants to eat it,  we've just been skipping breakfast. There's also the three tortillas and three biscuits, 1/2 the bottle of barbecue sauce, two oranges and three bananas and two meals of leftovers; the pot pie and the dreaded beans and rice.  While trying to make room in my fridge for the chicken I'm canning I discovered that I had a head of Romaine lettuce I need to use soon, so I'm swapping out the taco shells for that, even in an experiment, I'm not going to waste good food.  The taco shells were 99 cents and the lettuce was 98 cents so it's a pretty even trade.  So it looks like I'm in a pretty good position to reach my goal of feeding our family of three adults on $20 for one wee with nothing from the pantry, I might add, except for salt and pepper, which I haven't even used very much and probably could have done without.

What I Learned So Far

I've learned that if you really follow portion sizes, a small bit of food can go a long way.  That I don't need sweets, I'm learning to love fruits.  That I'm glad I did this!  It's actually a very healthy way to eat (except for not having enough vegetables) , there's very little fat and sugar, and if I swapped out the tortillas for whole-grain ones, that would have been better too. There's also very little waste, just orange rinds and banana peels, which went into the compost, so it's good for the environment too.  So thank you Mrs. Shoes, for inspiring me with your comment to give it a try! 

Hugs
Jane