Tuesday, January 11, 2011

$100 Challenge - Week 1

So I promised you all an update on Friday on how we did on our $100 challenge this past week. Well, it's been a busy week so I'm sorry but I'm updating this on Tuesday night, technically Wednesday now I believe.

Here's the breakdown of stuff.

We spent a grand total of: $36.81

Bear in mind we were using gift certificates for this first week so things might be a little higher next week BUT despite that I feel really good about this!!!

Our meals for this week:

Breakfasts (same every day not to exciting)
Cereal
Milk
Apple

Lunches
Ham or Egg Sandwich with gluten free bread (or regular bread for my husband)
Apple

Dinners (this is where things got a little bit more interesting)

Sunday - We didn't buy anything to make this recipe. Instead I dug through the shelves and used up what we had. Hoppin John is a pretty basic dish and for those of you who are superstitious, it's supposed to give you a prosperous new year! Here is the original recipe we worked from. I modified it because there didn't seem to be enough water and we had to omit a couple of things and I added gluten free ham but otherwise it's much the same. http://www.fromcowstoquinoa.com/2010/12/ring-in-new-year-with-vegan-hoppin-john.html

Monday - A simple night. Chicken, potatoes and carrots. - We had to buy carrots and chicken for this.
1) Preheat oven to 350F
2) Grease a casserole dish with olive oil (that's what we had).
3) Peel and cut up one potato per person and one large carrot.
4) Place potatoes and carrots in the casserole dish and drizzle lightly with more olive oil.
5) Set chicken drum sticks (bone in, skin on) on top of potatoes.
6) Put in oven and cook for 1 hour.

Tuesday - Gluten free Rice pasta with Classico gluten free tomato sauce and ground beef. We used up sauce and pasta we had already purchased. However we purchased ground beef for this.

Wednesday - Scrambled Eggs with Potatoes.
We use up groceries we already had in the house.

Thursday - A repeat of Monday's dinner because my hubby liked it so much and we still had some chicken left. :)

Friday - We went out for dinner at Wendy's but it was paid for by my husband's mother so it didn't hurt the budget. :)

Saturday - Cheeseburger Casserole. This was really quite good and found on the Bob's Redmill website. However, I didn't have Bob's baking mix so I used gluten free Bisquick which seemed to work pretty well. We omitted the onions (so the baby could eat it) and we didn't have tomatoes so we omitted those and served it with ketchup instead. Here is the recipe: http://www.bobsredmill.com/recipes_detail.php?rid=683

Snacks
We're lucky in this department because Christmas has left us an abundant supply of junk food. We froze cookies and are slowly eating them, we still have chocolate and we have frozen gluten free pumpkin pie to work with. We also have plain popcorn but that is getting less use than the chocolate at this point. . .

See you in a week for another update!

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