sarah's blog

Yesterday I was already getting sick of all the ground beef so by today I just couldn’t eat it again. I was temporarily discouraged but rallied and decided to do some baking. Here’s what we’ve been able to make from our kitchen in the past two days…

Breakfast yesterday: Took some leftover millet cereal to work. Cup of coffee.

Lunch yesterday: Leftover peas, leftover rice and red beans. Grapes for a snack and then leftover pasta salad. (I’m trying to eat at lunch and then again around 3pm because I was finding I got tired in the afternoons and too hungry by the time I got home)

Supper yesterday: John got creative with the ground beef and also used up the rest of the frozen mixed vegetables to create a spicy beef and veggies on rice dish. Brownies for dessert.

Today was another unusual food day but I guess even if I don’t use stuff from my own kitchen, if I get free food elsewhere it helps the bottom line.

Breakfast: Cup of coffee and a donut courtesy of Tracy.

Lunch: Went out to Moxie’s because it was Tracy’s last day. Would have had leftover yam fries and battered fish from the lunch but I left them in Tracy’s car for the second half of the work day and we voted it wasn’t worth the risk. I made a batch of granola, recipe courtesy of Adrianne, to take to work for Tracy’s goodbye party in the afternoon. There were lots of snacks so I filled up on spinach dip and real fruit popsicles and there will still be plenty of granola left to munch on next week.

Supper: As I said before I just couldn’t bear to eat the last of the ground beef with John so he made a hamburger for himself and I split the last of the baby bok choy with him.

After supper I rummaged again and discovered I had cornmeal. So naturally I whipped up some cornbread muffins. I used a recipe from my Betty Crocker cookbook but there were plenty of good ones online too.

I have also found during this process (and even before) that if there’s something you want to make and it always seems to be made with one ingredient you don’t have, googling “____ recipe without ____” can bring up all kinds of recipes that fit the bill. For example, tonight I looked up a recipe for lentil carrot soup because, well, I happen to have both those things and we like soup. I kept finding recipes with onion (which I do not have and from now on will stock up on before I do something like this) in them so I did my googling trick and got advice someone had given to a person trying to make lentil carrot soup for a guest with an onion allergy. Problem solved.

Another trick I use all the time is to google a substitute for whatever I don’t have for a recipe. For example, don’t have buttermilk, a search for “buttermilk substitute” will give you all kinds of replacements you’re guaranteed to have. Just make sure you pay attention to what kind of recipe you are using it for because a good substitute for an egg in a meatball recipe will not be the same in a brownie recipe.

Two more days and we will have made it a week buying only the items I listed in my previous post. I don’t think the coffee cream will make it and I know for a fact John is out of bran cereal but I am already so proud of how much we were able to make by just getting creative with what’s there.

I’d like to thank my co-worker, Sheldon (you’ll see his face 53 seconds into the video) for sharing this with me and thereby completing my induction into the computer geeks club.

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