Friday
seafood casserole (made with frozen cod fillets that had been camped out in my freezer for far too long, frozen peas, pasta, cream of mushroom soup, some lemon juice and herbs, all topped with cheddar cheese and garden chives)
spring green salad (made with garden watercress, baby sorrel, and baby chard, dressed with a citrus vinaigrette and topped with chopped, roasted almonds)
scratch blueberry coffee cake, using frozen blueberries bought at Dollar Tree a while ago
Saturday
refried beans and oven-baked corn tortilla chips
coleslaw
leftover blueberry cake
Sunday
chicken (from 2 leg quarters) in gravy over baked potatoes, topped with plain yogurt
steamed carrots
Oatmeal Scotchie Bars
Monday
bean burger patties, topped with mozzarella cheese
brown rice topped with marinara sauce
sauteed cabbage, onions, garlic, tomato sauce
French bread with soybean spread
Oatmeal Scotchie Bars
Tuesday
pizza sandwiches
cole slaw
cookies
(plus a plain hotdog for my husband, to boost calories in his dinner)
Wednesday
baked beans with hot dogs (no buns)
fresh-baked bread and butter
kale and onions
carrot snack cake (using this recipe and substituting 1 cup of grated carrot and a handful of raisins for the pureed pumpkin in the pumpkin-spice version, and using a combination of cinnamon, ginger, and cloves in place of the allspice)
Thursday
tomato soup (made with canned tomato paste following the directions found in the comments in this post)
toasted cheese sandwiches
parfaits made with canned cherry pie filling (Dollar Tree) and homemade vanilla yogurt
Friday
hamburgers in buns
oven-roasted potato wedges
oven-roasted onions
steamed carrots
rice pudding, using the leftover brown rice from Monday's dinner
As you can see, we're still using items that we've had for a while while incorporating some of the cheaply-purchased "new" ingredients. I'm trying to serve two to three bean-based dinners, as beans are such an inexpensive source of protein and are good for cholesterol numbers. And you may have noticed, we served carrots and cabbage 3 times each this week. You gotta love those cheap veggies!
Breakfast every day has been overnight, crock-pot steel cut oats. I make a batch once every 3 days and we eat the leftovers, reheated on the other days. There is also bread for toast, plus yogurt, eggs, and some untraditional breakfast foods that household members find (my daughter had ramen this morning for breakfast). Lunches are leftovers, sandwiches using bean spread, peanut butter, and occasionally egg salad, yogurt, bananas, raisins, juice, cole slaw, carrot sticks, microwaved potatoes with cheese, and quickly made concoctions such as soup. Snacks are primarily any of the breakfast or lunch foods, plus popcorn made on the stove, cocoa (with a homemade mix), cinnamon toast, or sometimes nuts.
I am back to baking bread. I have calculated that when I bake 5 loaves at a time, each loaf costs about 50 cents (including electricity). The least expensive commercial bread I can buy is 80 cents (with my Senior discount one day per month). Last month, we went through 8 loaves of bread. At a savings of 30 cents per loaf, we're saving $2.40 each month by baking our own. My homemade loaves are denser but weigh about what the cheap loaves of bread do. The bonus -- on bread-baking day, the kitchen is a bit warmer than usual, very welcome right now as we've turned our thermostat way down for spring.
That's our humble week of meals. What's been on your menu lately?
