What's Cooking?

More real grocery bills

Well, on a good note, I haven't really been to the grocery store since the beginning of the month! That's probably more because of lack of time as opposed to any real will power.  I have three 'bills' today - one is for Easter, which was a very low key affair at our house this year, one is for a last-class party and the munchies for that, and the last one is the real grocery bill. So I guess I have been to the store, but not for grocery shopping - and I LOVE grocery shopping, so this is a good thing! To be honest though, I did go out for lunch twice last week, after months of good behaviour and packing my lunch. One day was soup from the local awesome soup place, called Spoon Lickins, and the other was a slice of deep dish Hawaiian pizza from the local awesome pizza place called Vinnie's. Both cost less than $5.00, but that's about $9.50 added to my food bill this month.

I spent $44 on Easter candy for my three kids and I. No toys, no bikes, no new wardrobes -- Mr. Bunny is trying to support sustainable holidays and support the very poor people in the world. At least that's what he told me, and I told my kids. I had $50 budgeted for Easter, and I stuck to it. 

My after class party was $14 worth of goodies, and that was too much, really. I just wanted to make sure I got at least one tart of each kind, so I had to buy two packages. My prof's husband made us a chocolate cheesecake though, so the tarts weren't actually needed. I've frozen them and I'll pull them out next time I need some sort of treat somewhere. 

The grocery bill came to $52, and there was some stocking up in there as well. I'll have to figure out what exactly I've come into this challenge with - I've said it before, but I have a very well stocked pantry and freezer. When I separated from my husband I had this media-induced fear of going hungry and I think I've pretty well succeeded in making sure that won't happen!! But I'll save that for another post. $52 for groceries is the important point to remember.

2 more real grocery bills

Okay - two more grocery bills. One was a March 31 last minute run to the grocery store before class. Remember the first rule of grocery shopping on a budget - DON'T SHOP WHEN YOU'RE HUNGRY. Ugh. More on that in a bit. I spent $46.67 at the store, but $17.87 was paper products and household products, which means I spent $28.80 on food. I also had $2.58 in gas receipt coupons, so that brought the total down to $26.22.  Now, the problem with shopping hungry is that I spent $2.33 on cut up vegetables with dip. So essentially I spent $2.33 on what amounts to one carrot and one stalk of celery. I could buy pounds of either carrots or celery with that much money!! But I was soo hungry, and they looked so ... green. And orange. Stupid.

The second rule of shopping is to leave the kids at home, or school, or something! I swear I spend twice as much when they are shopping with me. Today we took a trip to the Farmer's Market in Sarnia, Ontario, and we had a really great time! It helped a lot that the first person in the door gave the kids a sample of cinnamon honey - they thought that was pretty cool. We spent $14.50 at the market, and that was actually a good part of the trip. The kids went crazy for the giant Golden Delicious apples we bought, we at all the cheese curds in the parking lot, and the little beignets ... oh my, the beignets. The troubles came up when we got to the grocery store. I was a bit tougher today, and didn't give in to too many demands, but at least half the bill was junk food they picked out. I spent $19.80 at the store today, and had no coupons to reduce the cost.

Samosas made from Egg roll wrappers

Okay, so these were not traditional samosas. There's a story here, as usual.  

I had to make supper for the kids, and I decided to make something from some leftovers in the fridge. I dug around for a while, and the leftovers I came up with were: some wonton (egg roll) wrappers, one barbeque chicken breast complete with sauce, some corn, a few peas, half an onion, a couple of sorta dried out carrot sticks, and one large-ish baked potato. Now, before you really start to worry, all of this stuff (with the exception of the carrot sticks) was cooked either yesterday or the day before. The carrot sticks -- well, I'm not sure about those, but they looked almost okay.

I put all this fridge 'stuff' together, added some curry powder and garam masala, and came up with samosas. These were really yummy but ended up a bit on the spicey side, which was fine with me but not so much for the kids. At any rate, I froze the leftovers, and hopefully they'll reheat well and I can eat them for a quick and cheap lunch. 

I've included a 'recipe' here, but this is pretty flexible. More potatoes would have been really good in this, and the meat could have been left out entirely. I tried both baked and deep fried versions, and honestly, reach for your deep fryer! They were way better than the baked version. And as far as shaping them, I'm really no help to you at all. If I can find a link on how to shape them I'll add it here.