What We Ate, February 6 - 12

We’ve been eating mostly from our pantry and freezer for two months now.  This isn’t uncommon for us.  We tend to be on a very tight budget in the during the winter months.  Some years, the months from November through May have found us with no money at all with which to buy food.  Without our pantry and freezer, we’d be sunk during times like that. 

This year, we’re more fortunate than we have been in the past and have actually have money to supplement our pantry stock with fresh foods.  It’s made me a little casual about keeping up my pantry stocks and, this week, I found we were running low on several things.  

My grocery list this week included all purpose flour, peanut butter, black tea, a block of cheddar cheese, three tins of corned beef* and a bag of avocados.  I also prepaid for our month’s two Good Food Boxes. 

All that shopping brought our total grocery expenditures for February to $84.14: 56% of our month’s grocery budget.  We’re still doing okay but I’ll have to be careful to ensure that we don’t overspend in the coming weeks.

Here’s what we ate last week:

Monday:

• Breakfast – Rhubarb oatmeal
• Supper – Tomato Vegetable Rotini Bake, a salad of romaine lettuce, shredded red cabbage, celery, and onion with a red wine vinaigrette, rosemary and cracked black foccaccia, orange crème brûlée.

Tuesday:

• Breakfast – Scrambled eggs, toast, apples
• Supper – Salmon chowder from the freezer, cottage cheese and dill dinner buns, canned pears and blackberries

Wednesday:

• Breakfast - Applesauce bran muffins, canned peaches
• Supper – Mad Scientist Meatloaf (from the freezer), brown rice, Mennonite bean salad, pickled beets, Snickerdoodles.

Thursday:

• Breakfast – Rice pudding, canned pears and blackberries
• Supper – Vegetarian red bean chili over mashed potatoes, apple slices sautéed in butter and brown sugar and topped with yogurt

Friday:

• Breakfast – Almost whole wheat pancakes, applesauce
• Supper – Fried eggs and garlic sausage, vegetable hash, oranges.

Saturday:

• Breakfast – Oatmeal and pear butter
• Supper – Stir fried cabbage, carrots, onions, and sweet bell pepper (from the freezer) in a garlic black bean sauce, fried rice, pears canned in brown sugar syrup with ginger.

Sunday:

• Breakfast – French toast with maple syrup
• Supper – Slow cooker roast chicken, slow cooked carrots and potatoes, parfaits made with canned peaches, vanilla pudding, and lemon cake (from the freezer).

*For those of you not familiar with it, tinned corned beef is not deli meat in a can.  It’s cured, cooked beef that is finely chopped, combined with a small amount of gelatin, and packed like a loaf inside an oblong tin.  Known in Great Britain as bully beef, it was—with biscuits—the main field ration of the British army from the Boer War through to the Second World War.  It's a comparatively inexpensive protein, and a good pantry staple to have on hand.  I'll be making a blog post about it soon.
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This post is linked to the Eat From Your Pantry Challenge hosted by Coping With Frugality.