Free Beer – Day 36: Eating Well On $1 A Day
After the coupon blunder, it seems that my luck turned the corner as I went on my first foraging trip (now allowed with the new rules).
I take a walk every morning and part of that walk is through a city owned park. Near the creek there are wild blackberry bushes and I decided to see if they were ready for picking. Along the way, I spotted a lemon tree overflowing with lemons on it (also on the city park land) and picked a few:
This is part of a continuing challenge to eat well while spending an average of only $1 a day on food. You can find the beginning and the rules of this challenge here
With three lemons in my bag, I headed toward the creek when I came across a scattering of half consumed beer, half eaten food and other things scattered on the ground. My guess is that a bunch of under-aged kids were drinking and eating in the park when they were spotted and they scattered as fast as they could leaving everything behind. Among the things left were 4 bottles of unopened beer:
While I am not a big beer drinker, there are certainly times when it is nice to have one, but the $1 a day food budget doesn’t really allow for purchases like that. So I claimed the beer bottles (and cleaned up the mess) and now have 4 beers to drink at some point.
At the river, I found plenty of blackberry bushes, but the berries are just beginning to come in and ripen. I did find a few, but not a whole lot at this point. This should provide some berries for me in the future as long as not too many others have the same idea as I do:
So my first foraging trip yielded me 4 beers, 3 lemons and a few blackberries for free:
I also decided that I needed to get some oil as the number one need on my list. I walked down to my local CVS store to pick it up and also three more of the Pure and Simple Power Bars:
The cost was $0.47 for the purchase, but while I used a $4.99 Extra Buck coupon that I had, I only received $3.97 in Extra Bucks back, so the actual cost to me for the oil and bars was $1.49:
The coupon gods must have taken pity on my for by coupon blunder because I also received a really nice bonus coupon of $5 off a purchase of $15 or more (it is the lowest one I have ever seen — most are $5 off of $20 or $30) which should get me some more free food to add to my stash in the next few days:
Breakfast
Now that things are a bit more settled, I am going to try my 4 to 5 meal routine again. I started off the early morning small meal with a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios:
It became apparent that I have absolutely no idea how to cook potatoes with the later morning meal. This, of course, is a huge dilemma since I have 20 lbs of them that were going to be a staple part of my diet over the next month. Tell me where I went wrong?
I hadn’t bought the oil from CVS yet, so I decided to get a bit creative. I took the Kraft Italian salad dressing made from olive oil and poured some of the olive oil from the top into the pan:
With plenty of oil in the pan, I thought I was going to get some nice hash browns using the last of the boiled potatoes that I had, but it didn’t quite turn out that was. I couldn’t get the potatoes to brown — they either burned to the bottom of the pan (even with the oil) or didn’t brown at all. In the end, I had to put salsa on them to salvage them.
My omelet turned out a bit better. I have been trying to come up with ways to use the Deli Creations food before it goes bad and decided to use the chicken and cheese to make an omelet:
Lunch
For lunch, I made a deli chicken sandwich on whole wheat bread with lettuce, tomato, Dijon potato salad dressing and a bit of pepper. I also cut up a carrot to make carrot sticks with cream cheese as a dip for it and some of the Wheat Thin toasted chips. I also had a glass of water with half a lemon squeezed (this should get me drinking more water which will be essential as the weather gets warmer):
Dinner
For dinner I made a chicken pasta salad. I boiled 1 cup of the veggie spiral pasta, lined a bowl with lettuce, cut up half a tomato and fried up the chicken from another one of the Deli Creations packs. I then added a bit of the Italian salad dressing on top:
I also did a lot of snacking throughout the day. One of my huge weaknesses is that if I do have snacks around, I eat them. When they are in shorter supply, I will limit the amount I eat, but when I know I have enough, my willpower isn’t very strong. I ate another one of the Power Bars, had a peanut butter and banana sandwich, snacked on more of the Wheat Thins toasted crackers and opened up the Nature Valley nut clusters (which won’t last long now that I have tried them). I even had a late night bowl of Cheerios. One of the things that I wanted to make sure is that I always had enough to eat during this challenge, but I need to be careful that I don’t start snacking just for the sake of snacking. I also went through 1.5 of the lemons making lemon water to drink throughout the day.
This is the current list of what I have purchased:
Money Spent $34.13
Money left to spend: $26.87 ($0.51 must be spent at CVS)
Retail Value of everything bought: $733.09
The Beginning ::: Day 37: Mail-In Rebates Are A Pain
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I too have found beer, although I have found it at the student off campus housing by the local university. I usually clean up all their cans for recycling and end up with some free un-opened cans of beer. But I don’t drink it, I instead use it in a tonic for the vegetable garden. Plants love beer. I saw the potato problems you’ve been having and seen in the comments the answer, your potatoes are too moist to fry, you need to remove some water. I don’t know if you use a microwave, but you can make a baked potato in one. It takes about five minutes on high (medium size). Wash and poke steam holes with a fork. After cooking, split to make sure it’s cooked through. if not, put back in for a minute and recheck.
I haven’t tried it yet, but I got this recipe from a friend (who claims great results). Apparently, you can’t just FRY the potatoes for hash browns:
Two potatoes (Russet)
A shredder
Olive oil (Or peanut oil, or vegetable oil)
Salt and pepper
Shred the potatoes (not on the finest shred) and rinse them off. Squeeze them as dry as you can with paper towels, wrenching them until you’ve gotten all the water out – this is the secret to making them crispy. (Bonus point: You have a ricer, you can use that to get all the water out.)
Put 3-4 tablespoons of the oil into the pan and heat it until it’s shimmering but not smoking on medium-high heat.
Add the potatoes in a layer across the pan – no more than half an inch thick.
Cook until they are GBD (golden brown and delicious) on one side, then carefully flip them over (in quadrants if you have to) and cook the rest of the way. This’ll take 3-5 minutes per side.
Sprinkle immediately with salt and pepper and serve!