Eat on $60 - Day 5

Thursday of the Eat on $60 challenge was a BAD day right from the start.  I wasn’t doing as well with the money as I hoped to, I was REALLY tired of eating leftovers, and I was fresh out of coffee.  That all adds up to one cranky Betty, and I weighed the shame of quitting against the delicious freedom that would come from it.  Largely due to the fact that I am a good Jewish girl, the guilt won out in the end.  But I’m not going to lie–it was a close call.

I wish I could say that I was a good person that day, and that thoughts of all the poverty-stricken people in the United States helped me to realize that my teensy tiny sacrifice would be worth any short-lived pain I was experiencing.  I wish I could say that, but I can’t.  I tried every trick in the book to remind myself of how fortunate I am, and to feel grateful for having never personally dealt with hunger.  Unfortunately, altruism just wasn’t on my mind.  I felt like a miserable failure, but I didn’t particularly care.  Like I said, it was a bad day.

It was also a bad day because I walked right out of the house without breakfast, probably due in large part to my lack of caffeination.  Right as I got onto the interstate, my stomach started grumbling and I knew what I had done.  There was a string of expletives, believe you me.  I racked my brain for options, but I knew in my heart that the fast food breakfast was the only thing that would keep me even CLOSE to on-budget.  So, with many a grumble, I headed to McDonald’s and got two sausage McMuffins with egg for $2.50.  I ate one for breakfast and put the other in the office fridge.

Breakfast

Betty – McMuffin ($1.25).  Total – $1.25

Jason – energy bar ($1.08).  Total – $1.08

For lunch, Jason got leftover soup while I cleared out a few mix-and-match items that were hanging around from earlier in the week.

Lunch

Betty – baked potato ($0.20), broccoli ($0.43), chicken salad ($1.13).  Total – $1.76

Jason – soup ($0.92), Nutella cake ($0.79).  Total – $1.71

For some reason, I wasn’t really snacky.  I was super busy at work, so I guess part of it was that I didn’t have time to think about noshing in the afternoon like I usually do.  Jason had an apple ($0.41) and Fig Newtons ($0.37), for a snack total of $0.78.

By the time dinner came rolling around, I was all kinds of pissy again.  Nothing was appealing to me, and the text that I got from Jason while he was walking the dog didn’t help my motivation (it said something to the effect of “OMFG it smells good at Fritti”).  I thought about bagging the whole challenge, getting in the car, and indulging in a lovely Neopolitan style pizza.  I even had a $25 Fritti gift certificate, as if to coax me into submission and justify my failure.  Just when I was about to give in, I saw some bacon out of the corner of my eye, left over from a pound that I had previously bought on sale.  I took a deep breath, regained my perspective, and opted to make grilled cheese and bacon sandwiches for dinner.  Between the two slices of bread ($0.14), two slices of cheese ($0.50), and three slices of bacon ($0.90), the sandwiches came out to $1.54 each.  We added baked potatoes at $0.20 each, just to make sure we were full so that temptation wouldn’t rear its ugly head in the form of dessert.

So, dinner was $1.74 each, and it was actually quite comforting.  My total for the day was $4.75, and Jason’s was $5.31.  Our final daily number ended up at $10.06, which is the lowest it had been all week.  However, by the end of Day 5, we had spent $54.98 for the week, leaving us with just over $5 for two people for two more days.  It wasn’t looking good, but I was determined to stick with it to see just how far over our $60 budget we would go.

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Posted in In the kitchen
Tags: $60 project, Budget, Eat on $30, In the kitchen