One bottle of Pepsi, one bottle of amaretto, one cheesecake. DONE. Breakfast of champions.

[apocalypsos]

The article linked in this Jezebel post, in which two food critics at the Post give themselves a challenge to create dinner for under fifty bucks. That's right, fifty American dollars.

Fifty bucks buys me two weeks worth of groceries. Three if I invest in Ramen noodles.

That's not even mentioning that, as the Jezebel post points out, the entire challenge suffers from the same thing a lot of these articles suffer from -- the recipes are always so damn complicated it's hard to find someone who can pull it off.

I'm reminded of the Top Chef episode from this season when the quickfire challenge was basically to make a quick meal in under fifteen minutes (IIRC) from the basic dried and canned goods you'd find in, say, my cupboards. You would think Padma had led all of the contestants' pets out into the kitchen and set them on fire. OH NOES! WE HAVE TO COOK LIKE EVERYDAY PEONS! They moaned, they whined, you expected at any minute that they were about to throw a tantrum.

I adore the uncomplicated cheap recipes in the comments of the Jezebel post. Because when I saw "fifty bucks for one dinner," all I could think was, "A buck for a bag of frozen broccoli, a buck for a bag of frozen cauliflower, a buck for a box of elbow noodles, and a buck for a little tub of butter. And that would feed me for a WEEK, if I were desperate."

Comments

[tinylegacies.livejournal.com]

How big of a chicken are you using to get that many meals out of it?

[harmonyfb.livejournal.com]

Just a regular baking chicken (they're pretty plump) - and I'm assuming two people eating smallish portions (for my family of five, we get supper, lunch for one or maybe 2 people, and shreds for soup out of a baking chicken.) The soup doesn't necessarily have to have much meat in it, because you've got all the good juices and stock from the roasting and the boiling of the carcass.

For more than 2, of course, you'll have to buy some additional groceries (10 lb bag of taters, 2 chickens or perhaps a pot roast, if they're on sale for a reasonable price, etc).

It's also helpful if you can stock up at sales and then freeze them (for example: buying turkeys when they go down to 29 cents/lb after Thanksgiving, butchering them and freezing them for eating over the next 3-6 months.) Whenever Publix has a sale on top sirloin ($2.99/lb one time! Cheaper than ground beef! But usually $3.99/lb) I buy one or two and put them back for future eating. If you slice them up and cook them, they're great over salad for cheap suppers (and one average-size top sirloin will feed all five of us with enough steak leftover for 2 lunchboxes.)

And making your own bread is tons cheaper than buying it - it takes a little work, but it tastes better, too.