Life as an Experiment « American Family

Food Challenge

DAY 26:

Breakfast: Poptarts (easter egg hunt booty) and the last of the coffee.

Lunch: Leftover Hummus and baba ganoush from saturday

Snacks: Candy and junk from Easter.

I really thought we would drag out the food challenge a few more weeks. I was hoping for six weeks, but instead we stopped at four. Mr. A was willing to go a little longer, but the girls were increasingly growing picky about their dinners and the lack of fruit for snacks, despite the tasty snack items provided by some generous friends. The food we were eating was gradually getting less and less nutritious, so I can’t say I really blame them.

Yesterday afternoon, we went to the grocery store and stocked up on new food. I expected us to be a little more excited and greedy, but the whole thing was pretty low key. We bought mountains of fruit and veggies which the girls demanded I feed them as soon as we got home. I didn’t buy any meat (except for a couple logs of trail balogna that were marked down to $1 for Mr. A to take to work to eat on nights when he has to work late) because we still have some stockpiled in the fridge. Our first dinner was also unimpressive. It took so long at the store fondling produce, I just threw together some spaghetti and a side of spinach & tomatoes.

I don’t know if we really learned any big lessons. I learned that we don’t really depend very much on convenience food right now, I usually make our dinners from scratch. I only got irritated when I had to figure out what to cook on the weekends (when Inormally don’t cook elaborate meals) and when I was in the middle of big involved house repair / preparation projects. Then, the time it would take to cobble together something decent was extremely irritating. Woe is me.

Maybe we would have learned more if we had been more strict about not eating out. Restaurants were our biggest cheat, but we spent about half of what we normally spend for the family and we enjoyed the experiences a lot more. I think there was actually only one weekend where we didn’t eat out at all, so the level of hardship is questionable. I did discover that most of our weekend self-entertainment involves going out to eat, so without that crutch, Mr. A and I spent more time than usual staring at each other in boredom.

All in all, we saved about $300. A respectable donation to the food bank, I think. I am sorry we couldn’t offer more writhing and agony, but what can I say? We got bored and moved on to another bigger project (the house). I will try to write a little about that tomorrow.

Thanks for all the support and advice along the way. Even though it is going out with a fizzle, we enjoyed the food challenge.

Food Challenge: Last Days

We are growing very weary of the food challenge. If we were not spending so much time and energy getting the house ready to go up for sale, I would be more willing to try to cobble together meals from the odds and ends we have. M’s spring break was also making things harder because she is a bit picky and wants regular food instead of the weirdness she has been served lately.

While there is still a good amount of food in the freezer and cupboard, not much of it goes together well or easily. And today, I used the last of my coffee. That signals the death knells for sure. The question is, will we go to the store today or tomorrow. I have a lot going on today, so maybe we can linger for one more day. Plus, we got an infusion of junk food as prizes at my grandma’s easter egg hunt. Can we survive one more day on a dinner of only poptarts?

Day 21 (wed)

Breakfast: Oatmeal

Lunch: Can’t remember

Dinner: Chicken Fried Rice and other left overs.

Day 22 (thurs)

Breakfast: Cereal

Lunch: Can’t remember

Snacks: Candy (from friend). L had an apple.

Dinner: Vegetable soup. Much complaining about use of onions and lack of bread for any kind of side.

Day 23 (fri)

Breakfast: Eggs (purchased for easter egg dying because we ran out of the original stockpile. Yes, cheating is in full effect.)

Lunch: Plain pasta & carrots I think. Mr. A was off work and he ate soup and pasta.

Snacks: Granola & candy from friend.

Dinner: Pizza night. Used the dregs of the freezer cheese and half a jar of remaining sauce.

Day 24 (Sat)

Breakfast: Cereal

Lunch: Leftover Soup

Dinner: The girls went with my mom and Mr. A and I got take out gyros.

Day 25 (Sun)

Breakfast: Eggs. Easter Candy.

Lunch: Easter lunch at my grandma’s easter egg hunt.

Dinner: Leftovers from lunch (still at Gma’s house)

Food Challenge Casualty

Conversation with M today:

M: Mama, can we make a delicious and nutritious fruit salad?

(Seriously, that is what she said verbatim.)

Me: No.

M: But why not????!!!!

Me: Because we don’t have any fruit.

M: Can’t we buy some? We just need some oranges and apples and bananas and pineapple! It would be delicious AND healthy.

Me: No. We aren’t buying groceries this week. No fruit for you!

M: *sigh* I miss fruit.

Today was Mr. A’s birthday, a fact I completely forgot until he reminded me this morning.

(What can I say? I have been really busy with the house stuff!)

I took the girls to the grocery store to buy ice cream and some much needed butter (vital to make homemade hot fudge) and bananas to satisfy Mr. A’s birthday dessert request. At our local grocery store, they have a lot of samples of fresh fruit and cheese. You would have thought the girls were starving if you saw the way they were double fisting their toothpicked samples.

The thing is, we still have a good amount of food, but none of it is convenient and we are really tired of most of the choices we have available.

Food Challenge:Day 19

Breakfast: Coffee for me. I think the girls had oatmeal?

Lunch: Hotdogs for the girls. Sadly, I ate so many oatmeal cookies in the morning I forgot to eat lunch until around 2:30. Then I tried out the beets & sour cream again and found it so disgusting I threw it away (I think the problem was the canned julienned beets. Blech.). I finally ate a baked potato with sour cream and felt very unsatisfied.

Snacks: The girls ate dry Special K cereal. Also, we ate a lot of oatmeal cookies. In the afternoon, a friend brought over a bag of candy and other treats, so we ate some of those too. (Thanks ML!)

Dinner: Whole roast chicken, carrots, peas, mashed potatoes and gravy. The potatoes were not good because we didn’t have any butter. Ditto on the carrots.

Food Challenge: Day 20

Breakfast: I think the girls ate rice, but I don’t know for sure what else they may have had. I am sure you will be surprised that I had coffee. And two cookies. And a cadbury egg. And a caramello bunny. Ahem.

Lunch: Leftover chicken & mashed potatoes.

Snack: Cheerios snack mix. Also, because they are apparently dying of scurvy or other vitamin deficiencies, the girls ate an entire bag of craisins.

Dinner: Mapo tofu. Rice. Broccoli which was the last fresh veggie besides carrots and cabbage in the house. Surprisingly it was still not to wilted after almost 3 weeks.

Dessert: Breyers natural vanilla ice cream with homemade hot fudge and bananas. I caved and let Mr. A have his request because I didn’t buy his present yet.

Doing my civic duty.

This weekend, I watched an episode of Oprah from last week with Suze Orman. It is no secret, I generally like watching the crazy that is Suze. Her advice tends to support my own conservative financial nature. But on this episode of Oprah Suze kind of jumped the shark.

On this show Suze actually recommended that everyone live on only 50% of their take home income. The logic seemed to be if you get laid off, you will have to live on even less, so we may as well all get used to living as close to the bone as possible.

WTF? Now, I am not going to argue that the economy isn’t bad. It is. I know that a lot of people are getting laid off. I know it is scary.

BUT!!!!!

MOST people are NOT getting laid off. In fact, more than 90% of people are still working. If ALL of us cut back our spending by 5o%, then a shitload of people WILL get laid off. All those retail workers, restaurant workers, people who depend on taxes from purchases to pay their salaries, and on and on and on. If everyone who watches Oprah slams closed their wallets, the economy is going to go from bad to worse!

To be clear, I am not advocating that we should be going into debt to keep the economy afloat (I will leave those proposals to the government!). But for those of us who have secure employment and steady income and are not at risk for layoffs or salary cutbacks, shouldn’t we just keep moving along at a steady and responsible financial pace? We should keep socking away some savings (with the goal of 8 months take home in the bank) and not run up any debt, but if life doesn’t go on as normal for us, how can we ever expect things to get better?

And for the record, I find Oprah’s fake concern about the economy to be patronizing and annoying. (Oprah the queen of excess who even planted a rose garden specifically so she could have roses that coordinated with the rooms in her house!) Does Oprah really think she is making us feel better by not having a real Favorite Things show this year? We all know Oprah’s favorite things are not cheap. Is OPRAH going to live on 50% of her income? I bet she isn’t.

Food Challenge: Day 15 (the day things started getting weird)

Breakfast: Mr. A let the girls choose their own breakfasts and they selected rice, dill pickles and chinese pickled vegetable. I stuck to coffee, because pickles for breakfast sounded gross to me.

Lunch: L had Malaysian ramen noodles. I ate the rest of her ramen and had beets with sour cream. Note to self: Beets and ramen not a great combination.

Snacks: Dry cereal. Apple.

Dinner: Red curry beef & veggies (carrots & potatoes) with rice.

Food Challenge: Day 16

Breakfast: The girls had cream of wheat. I had coffee.

Lunch: I took the girls out for Ethiopian for lunch. I am really afraid the only Ethiopian restaurant in town is going to go out of business due to the economy and a long term construction project that has made parking there a nightmare. I used two weeks lunch out budget (but that is OK because I only had starbucks last week.)

Snacks: I made blondies. We seem to still have plenty of flour and crisco, so cookies are an easy snack to have on hand.

Dinner: We were at my aunts house and she ordered pizza. Mr. A stayed home and had cereal.

Food Challenge: Day 17

Breakfast: The girls had oatmeal. I had coffee.

Lunch: Mr. A and the girls had macaroni w/ red sauce & frozen mixed veggies. I made myself tuna helper.

Snacks: L ate croutons.

Dinner: We cheated. After spending all day doing hard yardwork, neither Mr. A nor myself felt like trying to scrounge dinner out of the odds and ends in the cupboards. We went out for tacos.

Food Challenge: Day 18

Breakfast: The girls had cereal I think. I had coffee.

Lunch: Tater tots and hotdogs.

Dinner: Mr. A made chicken & bean burritos for us.

Snacks: I made oatmeal cookies for tomorrow too.

Food Challenge: Day 14

You know all those times over the past couple years when I said I was decluttering? It appears I may have decluttered a little TOO much. I am trying to find stuff to use to stage my house and it appears that we own only a very small number of trinkets tchatchkes crap that has no purpose beyond sitting around collecting dust decorative items.

So for the past few days, I have been shopping. I swear, I am actually hemorrhaging money over here and it isn’t really that much fun. And still, there are more things I would like to have. For example, why don’t we own any coffee table books? Shouldn’t we have a couple with pictures of China or San Francisco? And why don’t I own any flower pots? Answer: because when the flowers died in them, I threw the pots away.

I even went scrounging around the basement and all I found there was an ugly buddha statue (no), some Cambodia wedding dolls (no), a wooden mask that I think is from Hawaii (no) and what appears to be an ashtray carved from some kind of rock (Uh, no.) I had to suppress the impulse to give all those items away to goodwill too. Actually, I am going to give most of that stuff away, but right now I have bigger priorities.

As for the food challenge, we are still plugging away at it. We are mostly out of fresh fruit (except for apples), but we have some frozen stuff. We are down to a head of cabbage, two heads of broccoli and a ton of carrots in the veggie drawer. And a bag of potatoes. We still have a bunch of meat and some canned and frozen stuff left that should probably help us make it at least another week.

Breakfast: Coffee. Based on what is missing from the fridge, I am guessing the girls ate banana sticky rice.

Snacks: L ate goldfish crackers and raisins. M ate some goldfish too. Tonight I made cookies, so we will have some tasty but unhealthy snacks on hand tomorrow.

Lunch: L would only eat part of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I had that and some canned ravioli.

Dinner: Turkey sandwiches (from the turkey I made about a month ago and froze), canned beets, cooked carrots.

Food Challenge

Food Challenge: Last Days

Food Challenge Casualty

Doing my civic duty.

Food Challenge: Day 14

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