Day 3: Baking Bread

Money spent: $3.48

  (Olive oil spread - $2.49
  Cucumber - .$99)

Total amount in food eaten: $3.63 ($4.63 including cereal!)

For breakfast, I ate some delicious organic cereal (Mesa Sunrise).  Mike purchases this in the bulk bags rather than boxes and stores it in plastic cereal containers.  He mixes it with raisins and we eat it with banana slices and almond milk.  (>$1, not my $$$!)

Lunch: I brought leftover fajita salad to work today and ate it cold with some fresh tortilla chips.  MMMM it was so good cold – I kinda mixed everything together into a chicken/sour cream/mushroom/onion glop and ate it like dip. ($0)

Mike met me at work and I was feeling pretty hungry.  I’d tried a free sample at WF the day before, which was just butter/olive oil spread on some whole grain bread with cucumbers.  I couldn’t get it out of my head, so we stopped by WF (Mike needed to pick some stuff up anyway) and I got the spread and some cukes for $3. 

I also dropped by my place and picked up some packets of yeast I had along with some other random foods I wouldn’t touch for the last few months – lentils, plain oatmeal packets, some canned white beans, and sugar (he won’t keep any in his place and I’m not thrilled by white sugar, but it’s pretty necessary for baking and I figured if I had it I might as well use it).

I made the following when we landed at Mike’s place:

1)    Cucumber sandwich.  You cannot imagine how good this is!! I just covered one side of an English muffin with the olive oil/butter spread (I don’t usually eat butter but I made an exception since it’s so tasty on this sandwich), sliced about 1/6th of a cucumber into small disks, and put it all together.  Great snack to tie me over since I was cranky. ($.16 + $.40 + $.05) =  $0.61

2)    Quinoa Chicken

It looks a little gruel-y, but it was amazing...

This was dinner.  Last night I chopped some organic chicken into chunks and put them in a ziplock with chopped onions, garlic, and cumin.  I cooked about a cup of quinoa and added a little salt and garlic all-spice to the water (it takes around 20 minutes).  At the 7 minute mark, I threw the chicken into a heated saucepan with some Braggs Liquid Amino Acids (basically soy sauce, but better for you) and cooked it ‘til it was JUUUUST undercooked – about 4 minutes.   I then removed it from the heat For some reason, the quinoa was a little soggier than I’m used to, but when I tasted it, it was SO yummy that I didn’t care – Mike and I actually preferred it.  I love pasta, and it kind of had that doughy semolina-like consistency.  I chopped 3 mushrooms and threw them into the chicken pan with ALL the quinoa, and cooked this mixture for about 2 minutes.  Totally filling and so delicious.  ($2.79 + $.43 + $.20) = $3.42

3)    Oatmeal bread.

Yup.  I made bread.  It’s such an easy recipe and SO cheap.  I used almond milk instead of regular milk (last time I made this I used soy milk and the bread was VERY dense but amazingly delicious).  The only reason people probably don’t do this all the time is because you need to give it about 2 and a half hours of time to rise (one hour in a bowl and another hour and a half in log-form in the bread pan)– but I just prepped the dough (10 minutes and 7 cheap and easy to find ingredients) and let it rise while I went about the rest of my night.

I didn’t have bread pans at Mikes, so we walked to the housewares store on 42nd St and I got 2 aluminum pans for $1 (which was the only thing I had to buy to make this bread!!!).  This bread is also vegan if you sub olive oil/butter spread for straight olive oil!  ($.50 for me, about $2.00 for you!)

Oh my god, it smelled amazing...

I’m noticing, with all the attention I’m paying to how much I eat, that I’m hungry a LOT more than I thought.  I’d been snacking on sunflower seeds I got for free from a gig a few weeks ago to get me through these hunger-spells, but I don’t love them and I found out tonight that each serving is a whopping 64 grams of fat (and 33% of the DV for saturated fat).  Yick.  I’m very sensitive to hunger – when my blood sugar crashes, I tend to get uncontrollably cranky and irrational.  I know when it’s happening and I’m able to tell the people around me that they shouldn’t take me seriously.  It still sucks, though.  I think that’s why I’ve spent so much money on food in the past.  I need to be rational to function, and I need food to be rational, so I just buy whatever is closest to me and sounds good in the moment.  One of the perks and drawbacks to NYC living – you can get ANYTHING on a whim.

Mike’s making me an awesome smoothie right now.  Mmmmm…. Dessert.

Frozen raspberries, almond milk, Young Living power fiber (vanilla flavored), and flax seed oil. Tastes very yogurty and no need to add ice since the raspberries are frozen! (and cost me NOTHING ‘cause Mike bought/had all the ingredients)