The form should be pretty straight forward where you list what you have purchased that you will donate, how many of each item, what the total retail value of the items are and how much you actually paid for them. There is also a place to upload a photo of the items you purchased.

For those of you that are just beginning to coupon and have decided to follow my basic guide on how to coupon when you don’t like couponing, I hope that you will add all the items that you purchase with your $20 of practice money and then continue thereafter.

While Penny Experiment was originally limited to food, I have decided to expand it a bit to include other items which food banks and shelters are in need of (so non food items from drug stores that are donated are fair game now). I made this decision because there is a great need for these items by a large number of local charities and I want to encourage everyone to pick up those items when they are free.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave a comment.

Once I made I home safely, I found that blog reader Samantha has sent me a bunch (and I mean a bunch – Samantha works at a newspaper and sent me all the extra inserts they were going to throw away) of Nature Valley Nut Cluster $1.00 off 1 coupons. It turns out that even without an eCoupon, the Nature Valley Nut Clusters are a $1.00 Moneymaker this week because they are triggering the Nature Valley Catalina Coupon. This is how the scenario works

Nature Valley Nut Clusters are priced at $2.49 each

They are part of the Safeway Buy 4, Save $4.00 instantly program. It turns out that you don’t have to buy in increments of 4, so if you buy 5 Nature Valley Nut Clusters, you get $5.00 off making them $1.49 each.

Use five $1.00 off 1 Nature Valley Nut Clusters coupons from the General Mills 8/8 Sunday newspaper coupon insert brings down the price to $0.49 each.

You pay $2.45, but you receive a $3.50 Catalina coupon back good on anything on your next purchase. That means if you buy another 5 Nature Valley Nut Clusters, use another 5 $1.00 off 1 coupons and the $3.50 Catalina coupon you just received, you can buy $1.05 of anything you want, get it all for free and receive another $3.50 Catalina coupon. Wash, rinse, repeat.

I ended up buying 120 packages of Nature Valley Nut Clusters:

And in addition, I picked up I bag of tortilla chips, 6 large cucumbers, 5 packages of Wacky Mac veggie spiral pasta, 8 bananas, 4 kiwis, 1 mango, 1 flower of garlic, 1 can of refried beans and 10 loaves of bread:

In all of these purchases, I didn’t pay a cent:

And all the food added up to $507.88 for free:

All this will be donated to local food banks. I am hoping to find a little time tomorrow as well to do a few more store runs to get even more free food fro local food banks.

It is hard to believe that I have reached the 100 day milestone. Even more surprising is that the eating well on $1 a day has gone so well that I don’t feel any desire to immediately change the way that I have been eating (or that my cooking didn’t result in mt poisoning myself in some way). It has become a routine and the fact that it has tells me that it is possible to do this long term if I had the desire. After thinking long and hard about all the comments that readers have made, I have decided to stop the current challenge at 100 days and focus instead on buying as much food as possible for food banks with the $1 a day. There are a number of reasons for this decision:

I Think I Succeeded: I think that even my sister will now admit that I was able to make meals that others would eat (at least from time to time) while staying under the $1 a day goal. I don’t need to do this another year to make the point that it can be done.

Change Of Focus: While the last 100 days have been focused on me and how I was able to do this, I would like to see future posts focused more how anyone that reads this blog can save a lot of money over what they are currently spending on food while still getting exactly what they want and also being able to give excess to their local food banks. I already know that I can do it — I am now interested in showing anyone that wants to learn that they can also do it.

I’m Not A Foodie: No matter how much I would like to be one, I am not a foodie. I still do not enjoy cooking much. Even though it has been a great experience and I have learned a lot (I would like to sincerely thank everyone that took the time to pass along suggestions and recipes), and my cooking skills have slowly but surely improved, I don’t think that I have much more to offer in this area. I would still be perfectly satisfied eating the same thing over and over again, but that certainly doesn’t make for very interesting reading.

So from now on I will be using the $1 a day (and the excess that I have accumulated from the first 100 days) to buy food for local food banks. In addition I will be detailing exactly how I approach couponing and what I have learned about it over these last 3 months. I’m hoping that this will help answer many of the questions that people have had about how I was able to do this and encourage them to do the same.

Yellow Cherry Plum Smoothie

I couldn’t begin the last day of this challenge with anything other than a morning smoothie. I gathered up the rest of the yellow cherry plums that I had:

added a frozen banana and a few cubes of ice to make another delicious start to the morning.

This is definitely one of the things that I will continue to do on a daily basis as it has really made the start of my days a lot easier and given me more energy and focus in the mornings.

The afternoon was busy as usual and I went with the usual afternoon sandwich.

Roasted Stuffed Peppers

I decided to use the last two halves of the green and red peppers I had to make stuffed roasted peppers. I took leftover brown long grain rice I had and mixed in salsa:

Then added shredded cheddar Monterrey Jack cheese mix as well:

To prepare the peppers, I boiled them for 5 minutes and placed a light coating of vegetable oil on the outside. I then filled them with the rice, salsa and cheese mixture:

I placed them in the oven and roasted them for about 40 minutes:

The green roasted pepper came out delicious:

I was planning to save the red roasted pepper, but I couldn’t resist and had it as well:

Peanut Butter Banana Ice Cream

To celebrate, I thought that for a final treat, I would go out and buy myself a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream since I failed to get it when I completed the first month, but when I thought about it a bit more, I knew the perfect way to end the 100 days. I took the rest of the frozen bananas and began to blend them, then added a large spoonful of peanut butter:

And when I finished I had the perfect dessert, this is what it looked like:

Of course, I had to give my sister a taste of it and of course, she thought it was awful — I’m starting to think that she may be the one who is palate challenged since I find it hard to believe that anyone finds the peanut butter and banana combination anything but delicious.

I thank all of you that have followed along for the last 100 days and hope that you enjoyed reading about the experience as I had going through it (Time Magazine recently did an interview with me) and hope that the next phase focusing on how I was able to do it will be helpful and worth reading as well.

I would love to hear what all of you have thought about this adventure

Final Numbers

Goal: 100 days eating on $1 a day
Money Spent: $76.11
Retail Value of Everything Purchased: $1473.94

My friends know me far too well and this is not a good thing. Whenever one of them wants to do something that they can’t convince any of their other friends to do, they inevitably come to me knowing that I will think it is a great idea — well, at least until I realize what I have agreed to do.

A perfect example is a friend that asked me to run a half marathon. I, in my completely unfathomable logic, thought that this would somehow be a good idea (don’t even ask why — I have been asking myself that countless times and still can’t come up with anything short of temporary insanity). In fact, I thought it was a good idea for several days until I decided I better go for a run to start getting in shape for it.

A funny thing happened when I went running — mainly, I realised quite quickly that committing to run a half marathon was most definitely not a good idea. Usually your brain would be the one telling you this, but in my case it was much worse. It was literally my entire body screaming at me asking me what the hell I had done?

OK, I admit that the first few steps I was feeling pretty confident. I would say that at about step 6 is when the reality began to sink in. By the time I had gotten a mile into the run, I was ready to cough up a lung and I still hadn’t reach the hills. Suffice to say, it only got worse from there. While I did make it to the top of the hill, I was a pretty sad sight:

Me: (On a bench slumped to one side wondering if I was having a heart attack or simply that out of shape)

Woman: “Hey, are you OK?”

Me: (Looks at woman and grunts because anything else would have taken more energy than I had left)

Woman: “You don’t look so good. Would you like some water?”

Me: “Do you have a gun?”

Woman: What? (Completely confused by my question)

Me: “A gun. Do you have a gun?”

Woman: (Shakes her head “no” still obviously confused by my question) “Why?”

Me: “Because at this point, shooting myself is the only way I am ever going to feel better. You don’t even have to take my body down the hill. Just shoot me here, bury me and put me out of my misery.”

Unfortunately, nobody was willing to have mercy on me and put me out of my misery, so I actually had to make it down the hill as well. By the time I made it back home, I could barely move and every muscle in my body ached.

Now, you are probably wondering what this has to do with eating well on $1 a day. Absolutely nothing except that I was so exhausted after the run that even if I had wanted to make myself some dinner, there was absolutely no way I could have actually gathered up the strength to get out of the chair, let alone make it to the kitchen. I think tomorrow is definitely going to be a rest day.

Blackberry Yellow Cherry Plum Smoothie

The day started off so well with a blackberry and yellow plum cherry combo morning smoothie. That was the last of my blackberries (I still have quite a few yellow cherry plums to use), so another stop to forage on my morning walk is in order (assuming that I will ever be able to walk again which at this point looks to be a pretty big assumption)

Tomato Cucumber Pasta Salad

I needed to use up the last of the whole wheat pasta and since I had leftovers of tomato cucumber salad I made, combining them made perfect sense:

Because I was in no shape to do much of anything once I came back from my run, I ended up snacking on random things I still had left around. I finished off the carrots I had, made myself a peanut butter sandwich and had a bowl of Apple Cinnamon Cheerios. Not a very good way to eat at night, but at that point my body wasn’t very happy with me and wasn’t going to let me do anything except the simplest of meal making tasks

This is the current list of food I still have
This is the current list of what I have purchased:

Goal: 100 days eating on $1 a day
Current Money Spent: $76.11
Money Left to Spend: $23.89 ($0.85 must be spent at CVS)
Retail Value of Everything Purchased: $1473.94

The weather has been a lot cooler than usual which has meant that the garden which I had planned to use to supplement the food that I purchased with coupons has taken a lot longer to produce food than I thought it would. Had this been the only issue, I probably would have been enjoying the fruits of my labor for a couple of weeks, but that has not been the case. Once again I find myself on the losing side when it comes to nature.

One would think that the area where I live didn’t have much wildlife at first glance, but they would be wrong. There is a skunk family that regularly makes visits into the yard in the evening, possums that I have seen on more than one occasion and raccoons that I see wandering the street when I take evening walks. And that doesn’t even mention the damn squirrels who I am convinced have made it their life mission to deprive me of as much naturally grown food as possible.

While my cooking may not be up to par, the animals obviously think that the stuff in the garden is wonderful to eat because they have no intention of letting me have any of it. I have been staring out the window salivating more times than I care to admit knowing that in another day that the veggies I have growing will be ready to pick only to wake up the next morning to find that the animals were thinking the same thing and were a day faster.

The attempts to keep them out of the garden are so numerous that I could probably write a book about it if it weren’t so humiliating. After trying everything and still having the animals find ways in, I moved onto the next logical step: if I wasn’t going to get to eat any of the food that the garden was producing, then they sure as hell weren’t either.

I started to pick the tomatoes and other veggies at the first signs that they were beginning to ripen. I figured that picking them that soon would mean that I would end up throwing them away, but to my surprise, they did eventually fully ripen and all of a sudden I have this to add to my stash of food I can eat:

I consider this a huge enough victory over my wildlife nemeses that I went out and shouted at the top of my lungs to the squirrels and other animals to let them know that they weren’t the only ones that were able to eat what was growing outside. I was going to make sure that I claimed my small victory and let all the animals know it. Of course, this didn’t seem to phase any of them in the least bit as they just looked down upon me with contempt. Unfortunately, I do believe that it convinced all the neighbors that they have a lunatic living on their block….

Yellow Cherry Plum Smoothie

I will need to use of the last of the yellow cherry plums over the next couple of days because they will be too ripe if I don’t use them up soon, but they still do make for a great tasting smoothie:

Spinach & Tomato Pasta Salad

I have plenty of the whole wheat pasta left over and need to use up the rest of the veggies I have left, so I put together an easy spinach and tomato pasta salad:

Tomato & Cucumber Salad

I decided to use a cucumber and a couple of yellow tomatoes from the garden and mixed it with a the rest of the store bought tomatoes I had to make a tomato and cucumber salad. I added a half an onion, fresh garlic and then topped it with some Parmesan cheese. I then used small amount of the Italian dressing to give it a bit of flavor:

I love these types of salad and it always seems to taste that much better when you are using ingredients that you have grown on your own and managed to salvage from the jaws of all the critters determined to outwit you (oh, how I wish the squirrels were outside watching while I was eating it…)

This is the current list of food I still have
This is the current list of what I have purchased:

Goal: 100 days eating on $1 a day
Current Money Spent: $76.11
Money Left to Spend: $23.89 ($0.85 must be spent at CVS)
Retail Value of Everything Purchased: $1473.94

I swear that the food gods are looking down upon me and simply having the time of their life thinking up ways to torture me more with food each passing day…You will see what I mean in a moment.

Yellow Cherry Plum Smoothie

The day started off well with my usual morning smoothie, this time using the yellow cherry plums:

Cinnamon Banana Oatmeal

It continued on a positive note when my nieces had liked the cinnamon banana oatmeal enough that they asked for me to make it again — this time I made sure that there was plenty for both me and the girls.

Apple

After finding the apple tree, I was on the lookout for more apple trees on my morning walk. The searching paid off when I came across a red apple tree:

I picked one apple to see if it was ripe and compare the taste to the other apple I found:

As with most days these last couple of weeks, I was on the go so I made myself a peanut butter sandwich and decided to take the apple that I picked to eat as well. I was driving along’ munching on the apple (which actually tasted really good and I was already planning in my mind to head back there to pick more) not really paying attention when I looked down and saw a larva squirming out of the center of the apple.

As soon as I saw it and it registered that I probably had eaten at least a few of his compatriots, I jumped hard enough that I am surprised the car airbags didn’t deploy. This is not a good thing to do when you are driving a car on a public road because not only does it make you look insane (I don’t even want to think what anyone who saw me driving in the car was thinking as I jumped around in my seat spitting out apple in all directions), it’s also pretty darn dangerous (luckily I managed to get to the side of the road without hitting any other cars) While there have been a number of readers that have mentioned that I should get more protein from time to time, this is not exactly how I would like to go about doing it in the future…

Spanish Rice

In the evening, I decided to try and make an easy Spanish rice dish. I took the leftover long grain brown rice that I had, and mixed it with salsa. Then I topped it with a fried egg on time.

For how simple it was to make, it actually turned out to be pretty tasty (then again, how can you go wrong when you have salsa?)

This is the current list of food I still have
This is the current list of what I have purchased:

Goal: 100 days eating on $1 a day
Current Money Spent: $76.11
Money Left to Spend: $23.89 ($0.85 must be spent at CVS)
Retail Value of Everything Purchased: $1473.94

I made a decision today. I have been thinking about how I want to end the 100 days of this challenge. At first I thought it would be good to use the rest of the money I had and create some pretty impressive meals the last few days. Upon further reflection, however, it seemed like a pointless venture.

For one, my cooking skills would likely turn those fancy meals I had in mind into total disasters. Even more importantly, there really is no reason for me to so. While it is nice to know that I have been able to build up a decent amount as a reserve so that I could use the current money I have on hand to buy most things that I would want at this point, I’m pretty satisfied with what I have been eating. Yes, a bit more variety would be nice now and then, but to have a huge variety the last few days would make the last days were completely separate from the rest of this challenge which is not something that I really want to happen.

Instead, I have decided to forgo any more shopping trips and see what I can create with what I currently have since I have plenty. While this may result in some repetitive meals and not a lot of flair for the last of the 100 days, I think it is a much more realistic representation of how the entire challenge has worked and the way I feel most comfortable ending the 100 day goal (and maybe I’ll be able to pull out one or two decent meals from what I have as well).

I did a bit of foraging on my early morning walk and picked up some more blackberries:

I also came across an apple tree. I only picked one because I think the apples still need a few weeks to ripen, but wanted to give it a try to see:

Blackberry Banana Smoothie

The old standby that will continue to be made long after this challenge is over:

Cinnamon Banana Oatmeal

Since I have decided to use up much of what I already have on hand, I decided to make myself some oatmeal since I haven’t had any in awhile and still have plenty left. I opted to make cinnamon oatmeal with a small amount of brown sugar in it. As I was cooking it, I wondered how some of the frozen bananas would taste mixed them in as well (these were sweet enough that I probably didn’t even need the small amount of brown sugar that I had used). When it was done, I topped it with some fresh blackberries:

And then an amazing thing happened. My two nieces ran into the kitchen wanting to know what I was making because it “smelled really good” and both wanted to know if they could have some. Seriously, I could feel tears welling up in my eyes. While this challenge has given me a lot to think about when it comes to my image, I would still like to believe that others view me in a somewhat manly light.

I decided to tell the girls it was the spices that got in my eyes. A grown man bawling in the kitchen because two little girls think what he made smelled good doesn’t quite paint the manly picture that I had in mind. It goes without saying that I had no problem giving the girls most of my meal and they happily devoured it (they even said it “tasted better than it smelled” which brought an entirely new round of spices in the eyes excuses…)

Grilled Cheese Sandwich

I had very little time in the afternoon since I had a ton of errands to run. I threw together a grilled cheese sandwich and decided to give the apple a try. It was right on the verge of being ripe, but not quite. It lacked juiciness and was a bit tart, but it was farther along than I would have guessed when I picked it. The apples on that tree should be quite good in another couple of weeks.

Spinach Salad

By the time I got home, it was well past dinner time and even though I was hungry, I didn’t want to eat (or make) a full meal right before I went to bed. I opted for a spinach salad which would allow me to use some of the food I still had on hand: tomatoes, shredded carrots, raisins and the rest of the apple. It was surprisingly good and put enough in my stomach so that I could fall asleep quickly without feeling overly full.

This is the current list of food I still have
This is the current list of what I have purchased:

Goal: 100 days eating on $1 a day
Current Money Spent: $76.11
Money Left to Spend: $23.89 ($0.85 must be spent at CVS)
Retail Value of Everything Purchased: $1473.94

I have been seriously considering whether to continue with this challenge or end it at 100 days taking into account the many comments that all of you have made. One of the things I have been experimenting with is buying for the food banks as part of Penny Experiment while at the same time as documenting this challenge. It has turned out to be a lot more difficult to do than I had anticipated. It isn’t so much actually physically doing each, but the time it takes to record each of them separately on the blogs causes some time issues. I am still working on it to see if I can find an acceptable solutions.

I did have 300 boxes of cereal that needed to be delivered to the food bank, so I recruited my nieces helped me with the preparation and then loading all boxes into the car:

And this is what the car looked like with the 300 boxes inside:

We had a lot of fun loading up the car together and the girls did a great job taking box after box from the house to the car, so we decided that a memorial photo was in order:

When I arrived at the food bank, the place was swamped with people getting food. Since it was so busy, I simply helped to unload the boxes and let everyone get back to work. It seems that even since I started doing this that the need at the food banks has increased…

Blackberry Smoothie

There is still not a better way to begin a day than with a fruit smoothie

Spinach Cheese Scramble

After delivering the 300 boxes of cereal, it was in breakfast / lunch limbo (which of the two should I prepare). Since I have only half a loaf of bread left and plenty of eggs, I opted for a quick spinach and cheese scramble topped with salsa:

Pasta & Cheese

For some unfathomable reason, I decided that it would be a good idea to try and create a more healthy mac and cheese dish using whole wheat pasta and cheese:

I quickly learned why there isn’t a small bag of grated cheese in those packages of mac and cheese — because when grated cheese is placed into pasta, the cheese doesn’t melt evenly:

Even worse, it doesn’t taste very good. While I have struggled with cooking throughout this challenge, I have learned two extremely valuable lessons. If you have created a disaster, 1. throw bacon or 2. salsa onto it and it will probably be salvageable. Since I didn’t have any bacon, I went with the salsa option:

and the hypothesis was once again confirmed — and it was surprisingly good considering how poor it tasted without the salsa.

This is the current list of food I still have
This is the current list of what I have purchased:

Goal: 100 days eating on $1 a day
Current Money Spent: $76.11
Money Left to Spend: $23.89 ($0.85 must be spent at CVS)
Retail Value of Everything Purchased: $1473.94

I gave up three days worth of food for a girl today — and not just any girl, but my former high school love.

If you have ever faced the situation where you were going to meet an old high school flame that you haven’t seen in years, you already know exactly what I was going through. It is a combination of curiosity and anxiety that can’t be fully described in words and hovers between huge anticipation and total terror on the day the meeting is going to take place.

Of course, there is always the desire to put the best foot forward to show that the choice she made in high school wasn’t a total regrettable event that she would rather forget about — which can be difficult when you have publicly admitted that you are willing to buy tampons to get peanut butter and you play imaginary basketball games in hospital corridors. Add on that you are homeless, without a car and don’t own a cell phone (even if all are by choice) and it’s pretty difficult to pretend to be anything other than you really are…

When I saw my sister later in the evening, I instantly got the third degree on how the meeting went with her wanting to know all the juicy details (even though there weren’t any)

Sister: “So, how did it go?”

Me: “Good.”

Sister: (Shoots the evil sister eye at me because she knows that I know that she wanted more than a one word answer) “Details?”

Me: “What do you want to know?”

Sister: “Did she fall in love with you again?”

Me: “She’s married.”

Sister: “Well that ruins everything.”

Me: “No, it’s all good. She seems happy and I would never wish anything less for her.”

Sister: “No, it’s disappointing because it gives me one less thing to give you crap about.”

Me: “That has never stopped you before…”

So I went through all the details and answered all my sister’s questions until she was satisfied that I wasn’t keeping anything from her.

Sister: “So was it worth seeing her again?”

Me: “Yes.”

Sister: “Even though it meant giving up three days worth of food?” (because I purchased a cup of tea that cost $3)

Me: “It was a small price to pay to catch up with an old friend.”

If you have old friends that you have lost contact with, I would highly encourage you to make the effort to reconnect. It is well worth the effort.

I also made an additional cereal buying run for the local food bank purchasing another 190 boxes of cereal:

This brings the total to 300 boxes (my nieces helped me bring it all inside):

Yellow Cherry Plum Smoothie

After receiving the yellow cherry plums, I had to give them a try in a smoothie. The inside are sweeter than the other cherry plums I have foraged, but the skin still has a bit of tartness that made the smoothie quite refreshing and delicious:

Since I knew it was going to be a long morning buying cereal, I poured myself a quick bowl of the Apple Cinnamon Cheerios before I left.

Toasted Cheese with Pasta Salad

By the time I did get back, I was ready to eat again. I made myself a quick toasted cheese sandwich and ate the rest of the pasta salad I had left over.

Beef Spinach Pasta Salad

I was exhausted by the end of the day and didn’t have the energy to make anything so I defaulted to the leftover beef stroganoff I had. I added some fresh spinach and tomatoes to it and chowed it down. It wasn’t the best tasting meal (although definitely not the worst), but it accomplished the purpose at hand was to quickly fill me up:

This is the current list of food I still have
This is the current list of what I have purchased:

Goal: 100 days eating on $1 a day
Current Money Spent: $76.11
Money Left to Spend: $23.89 ($0.85 must be spent at CVS)
Retail Value of Everything Purchased: $1473.94