The $0 Grocery Budget Video

I was watching a youtube video the other day titled something like "How I feed my family when I have $0 left for the week." Now this is just the sort of thing I'd like to watch. I was expecting a mom conjuring up meals from Worcestershire sauce, a tea bag, pickles and macaroni noodles. Instead, this mom went to her chest freezer and pulled out several frozen pizzas, jugs of milk, blocks of cheese, frozen juice concentrate, and several other items.

So in my mind, if I have frozen pizzas, milk, and juice, we have a meal. Her "demonstration" of how she manages to feed her family on $0 was faintly reminiscent of my teen self. After school, I would come home and open the refrigerator or pantry door, stand there for a half-minute and declare loudly, "there's nothing to eat." In reality, there was enough in our fridge and pantry for full meals and snacks to last many days, at all times.

What I think was happening with me in my hungry, younger days was that I didn't see that one perfectly satisfying food that was ready to pop into my mouth. We've become spoiled by the variety of colorful, interesting, and tasty options available to us in our stores and quick-serve restaurants. Plain apples and carrots in the fridge just don't have that magic for a lot of folks, especially teens and kids. And when you haven't years of cooking experience and know-how to transform the plain into wonderful, it really does look like there's nothing to eat, at least nothing you may want to eat in that moment.

The refrigerator section of our kitchen fridge/freezer seems small to me. We're always looking for space to squeeze in one more thing. So it's no surprise that it is rarely really empty, with nothing to eat. But when we're all out of quick to grab snacks, running low on fresh produce, or seriously lacking protein options, we may be feeling like we're living on a $0 grocery budget. So, I take a few minutes to survey what we do have, then brainstorm how I can refill those categories of foods. 

This week has felt a lot like that type of scenario for me. I haven't done a major grocery shopping in two weeks. In response, I've needed to scavenged the garden for early produce (lettuce, turnip greens, chives and their blossoms, rhubarb, and sorrel), paw through our chest freezer (and found several partly full frozen veggie bags -- spinach, broccoli, peas, corn), pull out the last of the canned veggies from the storage room (canned tomato paste, beets, and pumpkin puree), boil a couple of eggs and rescue an abandoned partial container of cashew butter for quick protein snacks, unearth 3 containers of baking milk in the freezer (just a teensy bit sour), and then finally, start the cooking and baking. 

I've found that by having a handful of emergency recipes in my figurative pocket, there are many possibilities for transforming odds and ends into tasty meals and snacks. Cream of anything soup works well for savory foods. I add a vinaigrette to drained, canned vegetables and call it a salad. Snack cake is a great use for small amounts of vegetables or fruits, pureed. Egg, cheese, and rice squares make great portable entrees for lunches or on the run breakfasts. And any odd pieces of fruit can be combined to make a decent fruit compote to have as dessert.

The youtuber woman did eventually produce some interesting snacks and meals for her family that weren't all pizza and freezer meals. And some of them looked easy and inventive. The title of her video felt misleading to me, though. In my mind, if I'm saying I need to come up with meals and I have $0 left for the week, that implies my fridge and pantry are about empty, and I have $0 in my pocket. But perhaps to a different audience, preparing a meal made from ingredients instead of opening boxes may be a novel experience. And being low on freezer or boxed meals may feel like there's nothing to eat.

I'm just rambling, I know. I would love to watch someone create meals from a more meager larder. I'll be waiting for a video like that to come up in my recommended videos feed.

Just a suggestion -- if you have a handful of unrelated ingredients and don't how how to put them together to make a meal, try a recipe search engine like Recipe Radar. Input the ingredients you do have, then scroll through the results and see if any of the recipes will work for what all you have one hand. And if you have a peculiar sense of fun, spend a minute or two entering oddball ingredients that you have to see what the search engine can come up with. It may just inspire your next meal.

Have a lovely weekend!