Fourteen To Go

The first meal is under our belts.

Well, not quite under.  That won’t actually happen for another twelve hours or so.  Maybe that’s more than you wanted to know.  I suppose that was a bad choice for an opening metaphor.  Let me try again….

We had our first meal of our $2-a-day experiment.  We started today, Sunday, and we will be done after lunch on Friday.  So far, so good.

I shouldn’t be surprised.  Jenny has never made anything that tasted bad, unless you count that one time, early in our marriage, when she accidentally used sweetened condensed milk instead of regular evaporated milk to make Alfredo sauce, leaving us with ravioli covered in what really amounted to a dessert topping.

But like I said, that was early in our marriage.  Jenny makes amazing meals, all from scratch.  Meatloaf, twice-baked potatoes, flank steak tornadoes, Thai chicken salad, homemade spaghetti sauce, chili, patty melts with mushrooms sautéed in stout, oven-fried chicken marinated in buttermilk, fish tacos with a mango salsa…I could go on and on and on, but I’m starting to get hungry again.

She’s taken the $2 challenge very seriously.  She even had me weigh out the amount of coffee needed to brew a pot so she could calculate the cost (about forty cents).  She left for Winco Saturday morning with her jaw set, clutching her reusable grocery bags—a woman on a mission.  She returned a couple hours later, her eyes glowing with triumph.  She was under budget by a little more than a dollar.

“They must have thought I was a nutcase,” she said.  I understood that to mean that she was talking to herself in the grocery aisles, but she is always talking to herself in the grocery aisles.  What she actually meant was that she had gone armed with a set of measuring spoons, carefully measuring out and weighing things from the bulk bins, like a teaspoon of yeast.  What she actually meant was that she had purchased one bay leaf.  One.  The cashier couldn’t even get it to register on the scale at the checkout, so she just charged Jenny four cents.

“She ripped you off,” I said.

The first thing she made was a loaf of no-knead bread, which we plan to use for peanut-butter sandwiches for our lunches.  She found the recipe online.  Total hands-on time to make is less than half-an-hour, but it has to rise over a period of eighteen hours, so don’t think you can just throw it together right before dinner.  The first attempt was a little flat, but we have high hopes for the recipe with modifications Jenny has already implemented for Batch #2.  The interior was soft and the crust was crispy.  Total cost, thirty-three cents.

For Sunday dinner she made a lentil stew, with carrots, celery, tomato, and onion, all served over rice.  I thought it was delicious.  Meredith said she wouldn’t ask for it again, but she ate it all, mainly because we said we would let her taste the homemade bread if she cleaned her plate.  Meredith’s objections aside, it was filling, nutritious and tasty.  Not only that, we have two containers leftover for lunch on Monday (for me and Jenny.  Meredith wanted peanut butter and jelly).  Total cost, just shy of two dollars.

I’m not sure if Jenny has used the bay leaf yet.