day four

(Click here for an explanation of the project.)

Here’s what we ate for $3.98 yesterday, January 5, 2011.

BREAKFAST

peanut butter & banana baked oatmeal $0.43
dollop of homemade blackberry jam (from our preserves)

LUNCH

We were all over the place, eating miscellaneous leftovers or skipping lunch entirely.
Krista slept through lunch (it would be impossible to explain my odd hours)
Jess ate seitan mole chili $1.30
Levi ate shahi paneer $1.56 (we’ll use this cost to calculate)

DINNER

vegan chipotle corn chowder $0.72

oven baked chickpeas $0.30

SNACKS

carrots $0.19
8 ounces yogurt $0.72
coffee with 1/4 cup almond milk (.06 for the milk and the coffee was free)

total $3.98

THOUGHTS:

– Hopefully you already saw our peanut butter & banana baked oatmeal recipe.

– I’ll be blogging the chipotle corn chowder recipe separately.

– Baked chickpeas: rinse and pat dry a can of chickpeas. Toss with a tablespoon of olive oil. Add your favorite seasonings (we used cumin, smoked paprika, salt & pepper). Bake at 450 degrees for 30-40 minutes. Crunchy and protein rich. We split a batch between the three of us for dinner, so the cost was a can of chickpeas divided three ways.

– We’ve been buying 32 ounce lowfat yogurt containers and portioning them into 8 ounce servings. We hope to make it to Trader Joe’s soon for their affordable big containers of organic yogurt, since it is best for dairy to be organic.

COFFEE. As we approached the very beginning of this project, I was at a loss as to what we were going to do about coffee. Generally we each visit a coffee shop at least once a week. Sometimes more. At home we usually alternate between buying from a local roaster (Olympia Coffee Roasters or sometimes Stumptown), the co-op (where we can get OCR which is all organic, and other organic/fair trade beans), and $6.99/lb beans from Fred Meyer.

We used up the last of the co-op coffee we had on hand by day 3. And we will still count coffee as free while we plow through this free sample of coffee we snagged awhile back at Coffee Fest.

earlybirdcoffee.com

(Sorry, guys, for not trying your coffee while it was fresh. It’s still good stuff.)

As for coffee making methods, we have a small collection of coffee contraptions, including: a Bialetti stovetop espresso maker, a toddy maker, a couple french presses, and a vacuum extraction coffee maker I still haven’t mastered. No, we don’t have a drip machine. And right now we are hooked on the Bialetti. Usually in the summer we live off of toddy.

So, right here and now I vow to calculate the cost of coffee per Bialetti cup once we run out of our free goods. It is going to be kind of a pain, but we will make it happen.

It is kind of incredible to realize that a soy latte usually costs us about $5, and by skipping that weekly latte we’re also paying for a whole day’s food.