It’s Day 7 of the Food Stamp Challenge for most people, but since my family and I spent the entire day on Sunday with my side of the family and my parents provided a day’s worth of meals for us, I thought it made more sense to skip a day of the Challenge and pick it back up today.
Before I talk about how we did today, I need to go back to Saturday when I did finally sneak out of the house during Anna’s nap for a quick run to the grocery store. My husband was home working on projects around the house (the list of things to do seems never-ending sometimes) so it worked well for me to throw a list together and go to the store. Since we’ve already eaten $20 worth of food and I set my food stamp budget at $50 for the week (the maximum for my family would be $102), I had just under $30 left to spend. While visiting my family, we also made a trip to the nearest Kroger-chain grocery store and picked up eggs, cole slaw and a few clearance items to round out our purchases.
Here’s what I bought:
If you look closely, you’ll see that our dog, Chevy, was very interested in our grocery purchases. 🙂
I was pleased that I was able to squeeze in milk, eggs, four types of meat and fresh produce into our budget. I forgot to pull out the Kraft natural cheese cubes and the head of lettuce when I was taking the photograph, but they were also part of the $31 purchase.
Our meals today and tomorrow are based entirely around these groceries, and we’ll have plenty of items leftover for future meals as well. Also, I was able to squeeze in a can of baked beans, a jar of peanut butter and two cans of soup to donate.
Here’s what we ate today:
Breakfast: oatmeal with strawberries and milk
Lunch: peanut butter and banana sandwiches, orange juice
Snack: yogurt, fruit, cheese cubes
Dinner: brats on hamburger buns with ketchup, sautéed summer squash and zucchini
Here’s what’s on the menu for tomorrow:
Breakfast: banana-strawberry smoothies, toast, orange juice
Lunch: BLTs, sautéed summer squash and zucchini
Snack: yogurt, fruit, cheese cubes
Dinner: BBQ chicken sandwiches, pasta salad, cole slaw
(I’ll be cooking a double portion of dinner and delivering dinner to a friend who just had a baby.)
Items left over for future meals:
One box Suddenly Salad pasta salad
Entire package of short ribs
Cucumber
Dozen eggs (on sale for $0.69)
Half package of hot dog buns
Most of a package of bacon
Most of a 10 lb. bag of chicken (on sale for $3.90!)
Partial tub of oats
Partial tub of yogurt
Half a loaf of bread
Since we are likely moving in the next couple of months, we are going to quickly switch gears once the Food Stamp Challenge is over to a Clean Out the Pantry Challenge. I don’t expect to have any trouble coming up with lots of ideas of what to eat at first since our pantry and freezer are stocked right now, and we could have easily completed the Food Stamp Challenge with $50 worth of groceries purchased in past without stepping foot in the store.
Now that the Food Stamp Challenge is drawing to a close, I’d love to hear how the rest of you fared. If you care to share, please leave a comment below.
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