4/30/10--Breakfast and dinner

Simple breakfast this morning--oatmeal with a little brown sugar and some raisins. With a little milk. (155 cal, 2g fat). I also made some crackers using this recipe to eat for snacks or pack with lunches. The recipe calls for a mixture of whole wheat and all-purpose flour, but since I don't have any whole wheat flour I substituted some bulk seven-grain cereal I'd gotten for making some multi-grain bread. (I have plenty of the cereal to make the bread too, later on.)

I had thought of packing lunch and dinner, and not going home in between the various things I had scheduled for today. But part of what I was planning required the chicken I was thawing, which was still frozen this morning. Actually, it's still kind of icy even now. So I'll probably start using the chicken tomorrow. Anyway, I changed my mind (or rather, hadn't made another decision by the time I needed to run out the door to go to my voice lesson) and didn't pack anything. So after spending some time on campus trying to work on my thesis, I came back to my apartment to eat a lunch/dinner sort of meal.

I'd gotten an idea while I was on campus. I used half of half of the french bread loaf I had left. I cut it in half and spread it with some mayonnaise mixed with dried basil. For the past two years, I've grown fresh basil on my balcony, and had forgotten I had dried basil at the back of my collection of herbs and spices. Due to my plans to move, I didn't plant a garden this year, and I've already been missing having basil around. The dried stuff isn't quite the same, but it works! So. Bread spread with basil mayonnaise, which I then topped with shredded cheddar and monterey jack cheeses and broiled. While it was cooking, I pulled a little bag of last summer's green beans from the freezer and cooked them in the microwave, then sprinkled them with salt, pepper and garlic powder. Some of the jello I made last night rounded out the meal. (Estimated total 555 cal, 28 g fat)
The green beans tasted a little freezer-burned, so I don't think I'll want to use them straight again. Next time I use some, I'll cook them into something with enough flavor to cover. The broiled bread and cheese was fantastic! I'm toying around with the possibility of eating a little of the lemon ice cream I made yesterday morning before I dash off again, or putting together some snack I can eat while I'm off gallivanting around tonight. I've gotten in the habit of getting strawberry limeade from Sonic to drink while I'm on long, late drives, but I need to avoid that and find another way to keep myself alert while I'm driving home tonight!

4/29/10--Dinner

Okay, so here's the dumb thing. As soon as I finished writing my previous post, I started getting really hungry. Like by declaring that I wouldn't buy (almost) any more food for a month, my stomach decided it was going to starve. A quick reminder to my stomach: one of the main reasons for this is that I have too MUCH food in the house! Got that, stomach?

Okay then. Despite the astounding amounts of meat in my freezer, I think tonight I'm going meatless. I have some bread that I made on Sunday (which I thawed yesterday) that I want to eat before it goes bad. Also, I have some bananas that I need to eat before they get brown and sweet and gross. So, tonight I am making french toast with my homemade french bread, with syrup and sliced bananas. But I did move some chicken from the freezer to the fridge to thaw.

First, though, I am making some Jello. I have a packet of strawberry Sugar-free Jello, and I will put in slices of banana and strawberries, so that I can use both before they go bad. (Produce has a tendancy to go bad before being used around here.) I can use the jello as snacks and desserts.

I made a 1/3 recipe of the french toast mixture, but because my french bread loaf has such a small diameter, I cut five slices. I have about half the loaf left. The french toast, syrup, and banana came out to about 683 cal, 16 g fat (nutritional information estimated from recipes, labels, and www.nutritiondata.com)

Oh my, it was delicious!

Beginning.

I have decided to give myself a food challenge. I will spend the next month eating (for the most part) only what is currently in my kitchen. I have made this decision for a few reasons:

1. I have been eating way too much fast food lately, which is bad for me and bad for my budget.
2. I am planning to move far away as soon as I finish with school (mid-to-late-June, most likely), and I have a LOT of food in my freezer that needs to be used before I move.
3. I need to reign in my spending overall.

The second point does not refer to pre-made frozen meals. No, what I've got in my freezer is a lot of meat, especially chicken, quite a bit of zucchini and peach slices I froze last summer, and many other odds and ends. Not everything in there will be edible; some has been in there long enough to be quite freezer-burned by now, I expect. In my cupboards, I have a lot of rice and beans. I know how to make my own bread and pasta (and am learning to make tortillas), so hopefully I have enough flour for all of those items for the next month.

I qualified my goal by saying "for the most part", because I know that the milk I currently have will not last an entire month, and even for the sake of a challenge I cannot make myself use dried milk powder for everything. In order to allow myself to buy fresh dairy and produce as needed, I have purchased a $20 gift card to one of the nearby grocery stores. Not the closest one, the one whose cheddar cheese I like the best. I've got my priorities. However, for the next month, that $20 is all I will be allowed to spend on food.

Because I know that being held accountable for goals is the best way to make sure I keep them, I am keeping a record of what I eat and spend. And naturally, I am doing so in a publicly searchable blog. Hey, that's how these things work in these days of the internet, right? Also, although this challenge is more for tightening the belt on my wallet than on myself, I think I will also log calorie and fat content (as available), just because.

Right. I'm ready for this. I think.