Cheap & Cheerful Meals: A Car Picnic for Lunch Saving $$ Compared to a Restaurant Meal

My "new" kitchen dish towel from Value Village.
The same towel is listed on eBay for $19.98, but still has tags.
This towel couldn't have been washed more than once, it's
in that good of condition.

Friday

Friday

split pea and garden vegetable soup

tossed garden salad

rhubarb-blackberry pie

Saturday

Saturday

bean burritos

sautéed kale and onions

mixed fruit cup

Sunday (no dinner, just snacking for those who were hungry, see below on what we did this afternoon)

Monday

Monday

egg cups baked in ham slices

roasted pumpkin cubes

tomato-basil soup

roasted purple potatoes

I grocery shopped in the AM, hitting a few stores. I was bushed when I came home, but still had usual Monday chores. By dinner prep time, eggs seemed the simplest to make. The tomato-basil soup was canned tomatoes pureed with some onion, garlic, and lots of basil. I topped each cup with Parmesan cheese, because yay! I bought more Parmesan this morning. Leftover soup was reheated with cabbage, diced carrots, TVP, olive oil, and celery leaves for a cabbage soup at lunchtime later this week.

Tuesday

Tuesday

toasted cheese and pizza toppings sandwiches

carrot leaf soup

apple chunks in caramel sauce

Just cooking for three tonight. I had thought I would make pizza, but that sounded like too much work. So I went with toasted cheese sandwiches that were topped with pepperoni slivers, diced green pepper and onion, thin-sliced tomato, and a sprinkle garlic powder. These were so delicious that I think I'll make them again this coming weekend. The carrot leaf soup was made with some of the carrot leaves from harvesting carrots this week. I'm trying to use all of the leaves as well as the roots. Leftover soup was used in lunches.

Wednesday

Wednesday

chicken fajitas in homemade flour tortillas

apples in caramel sauce

garlic green beans

Our first harvest of apples are going wrinkly, so we're using them every chance we get. We also have a jar of homemade caramel sauce that needs using up, so apples and caramel sauce have been on the menu 3 times this week. My daughter made the tortillas and there were leftovers to use in lunches the next day to make bean burritos.

Thursday

Thursday

chili

scratch blackberry coffee cake

tossed salad of radish greens and roots, mache, carrot leaves and roots, red lettuce, and lentil sprouts

We're enjoying the mache in salads. It's flavor is slightly nutty and it's texture is a bit more firm/succulent than young spinach. It's delicious and I plan on growing an even larger patch next fall.

Breakfasts

steel cut oats, toast, homemade yogurt, frozen blackberries, apples, eggs, potatoes, scones, milk, Toasty O's cereal

Lunches

carrot leaf soup, cabbage patch soup, roasted pumpkin, potatoes & onions, bean burritos, fig-applesauce, egg salad sandwiches, apples, popcorn, peanut butter, homemade bread, scones, raisins. We are low on cheese right now, so no cheese with lunches. I'm waiting for a sale or coupon for the cheese. For baked goods we had sugar cookies, cupcakes, and pie, all scratch made.

I'm cooking hot lunches several days per week as a way to warm up that part of the house, as well as whoever is eating with me that day. We had our furnace serviced one week ago and are now using it every day, but we're trying to hold off on using it a lot, when the house just needs a little heat to take the chill off. 

On Sunday, the day we all went to the matinee of the play my daughter is in, we had to drive down early for my daughter's call time (when she has to be at the theater, usually about an hour before curtain time), having just one car between the four of us. My other daughter made brown bag lunches for all of us to eat in the car while waiting for curtain time. She packed egg salad on homemade bread, homemade eggnog scones from the freezer, raisins, and apple chunks in caramel sauce. My son and daughter-in-law had a birthday party to go to around noon, so they met up with us at curtain time. My actor daughter was able to get 4 comped tickets. We needed to buy one additional ticket, which we were able to get a discount as seniors. The play was Clue, and my daughter plays the French maid. It's a comedy and was hilarious.

That's what was on our menu. What were the highlights of your meals this past week? Do you make hot lunches in the cooler months? Are there any foods/dishes that warm you up more than others?

Wishing you a wonderful weekend!

Our October Cookies Making Me Happy

Earlier this week, one daughter baked the cut-out sugar cookies
and made orange frosting for us to decorate our pumpkin face cookies.

I bought this pumpkin-shaped cookie cutter from a Hallmark display in the grocery store in 1982. There's even a date on the back of the cutter that indicates it was made in 1982.

There's also a price on the back of the cutter. I paid 75 cents at that time. To give you an idea of what 75 cents could have bought in 1982, a first class US stamp was 20 cents, so I could have sent not quite 3 letters or cards for the cost of the cutter. A first class stamp is currently 60 cents, FYI. What else could I have bought for the cost of this cutter? About 2 pounds of apples, or a little more than a loaf of bread (59 cents on average), or about a dozen eggs.

I remember that fall season the year I bought this. I remember shopping in the local grocery store buying cuts of banana squash for 17 cents per pound. Banana squash are very large, and stores used to cut these large squash into 1 to 2 pound portions and wrap in plastic film to sell alongside the other produce. I haven't seen cuts of squash sold in a grocery store in a couple of decades. But this was something done back then and made for a very inexpensive vegetable. I also remember that generic canned products were relatively new then. The cans were labeled in plain white with bold black lettering, "green beans," "dog food," "luncheon loaf" (spam), and there was even "beer." I was on a tight budget, so I actually tried and regularly bought the generic green beans (not the beer, though). The manufacturers of generic canned goods saved costs on advertising and marketing and passed those savings on to consumers. Their quality was inconsistent. Sometimes the product was pretty close to name brand, sometimes it was rather poor. I often found twigs and blemished beans in the cans. But this I overlooked for the savings. 

The year I bought this cookie cutter I also bought my first, very own Jack o' lantern pumpkin as an adult. I carved the pumpkin on October 31, then cooked and pureed it on November 1 to use in a pumpkin sheet cake for a birthday party for a friend's one-year-old later that week.

Shaped cookie cutters are a great value for seasonal celebrations. The same cutter can be used to make special holiday cookies every year for many decades. My pumpkin cookie cutter has seen 40 autumns. At this point, that works out to under 2 cents per year to own and use this cutter. I have my mother's heart-shaped cookie cutter, which she bought in 1958. That's over 60 years ago. I use it every year to make her favorite Valentine cookies. Someday, I'll pass my pumpkin cutter on to one of my kids and they can make our family's October cookies and get that same happy feeling I get making these each fall.