Engineer eats efficiently for $2.50 a day (2016) by hwayne

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Sed ut perspiciatis unde.

For 46 days, I’m trying to spend less than $2.50 a day on food. This is an
account of the food, the costs, the science, and the fun of that experiment.

Why?

I love food and I love to cook. I love to study the science of cooking.
I’m very lucky—I’m not in a position that I have to strongly
limit my food expenses, but I have always wanted to see how well I could
cook and eat on a limited budget. It would encourage me to think about new
ingredients, new techniques, and new dishes. I love cooking competition
shows like Iron Chef, and enjoy cooking with limited
ingredients, or cooking with a lot of a specific ingredient that someone
dumps in my lap.

Okay, that’s only part of my inspiration. I used to have a huge box of
Richie Rich comic books that I bought from my friend for $3. In
case you’re not familiar with all of the employees of the Rich family,
their chef was Chef Pierre, the world’s greatest chef. One time, Chef
Pierre was kidnapped and held by a bunch of criminals. The criminals told
Chef Pierre that he had to cook for them—but they only had potato
chips and ketchup!. Not a problem for the world’s greatest chef! He
created food that was so delicious that the criminals quickly got
fat—so fat that they couldn’t get through the entrance to their
hideout! Chef Pierre then escaped by simply walking out unchallenged!
(After which, Mr. Rich’s security force swept in and cut all the criminals’
heads off.)

In any case, I always wanted to be that good, and be that
versatile with ingredients: so good that I could make a good meal out
of whatever’s on hand. I’d love to be on a cooking challenge show, and see
how well I could do with constraints and surprises, and with limited
ingredients (like whatever’s on a great sale, or your neighbor drops on
your doorstep.) I consider this my preparation.

Why $2.50 a day?

It seemed like a fairly challenging target; enough so that I’d have to
think harder and perhaps learn more. When I started this challenge for the
first time in 2014, a friend of mine noted that in nursing school, they
were challenged to eat on $5/day. (And record their nutrition and caloric
intake.) I estimated some of my meal costs, and decided that $2.50/day
would be challenging, but safe and still fun.

Play Along

I encourage you to try challenging yourself to make meals for whatever
price you care to choose, for whatever duration you choose, whether it’s
for 45 days, or once a week, or whatever. Please let me know what you do,
either by email at eliasen@mindspring.com
or on Twitter at @aeliasen.
I’ll share good recipes and recommendations on here. Also, share food with
others and donate to your local food banks!

Rules and Guidelines

I’ve set some rules and guidelines for myself to follow:

Have Fun! This is a fun experiment. I get to make
yummy food that I’m proud of and that I’m happy to eat! If I’m not having
fun and eating great food, I’m doing it wrong.
$2.50 a day. I could do this a lot of different ways, such as
averaging food costs over 45 days. However, I think that setting
an approximate limit of $2.50 each and every day is a stricter
constraint. (As an engineer, I find strict constraints freeing. It
reduces the number of possibilities you have to consider.) I feel I’ll
have to think a bit more and learn more with the stronger constraint. If I
have money left over after a day, I’m generally not going to let that “roll
over” to the next day. This doesn’t mean that I can’t make a big
batch of something that costs $10 to make, and then eat it for 4 days!
Be Safe! Maintain and track nutrition, get enough calories, and
don’t eat rotten food. (I would say “I’m not going to dumpster dive” but
after watching the fascinating Documentary Dive!, I
think that’s a valid approach!)
Share Food! I’m going to share the food I make with others.
That’s part of the fun. So I’m going to report my costs as single-person
costs here. That said, I’m not going to “cheat” by buying bulk
ingredients in huge quantities that I can’t properly preserve and use.
When I find good deals, I’m going to buy more for food banks, too.
Share Recipes and Techniques! That’s the point of this blog. I
hope if you have good recipes and ideas, you’ll share them with me.
Track and Minimize Waste. Food that I don’t use needs to be
factored into my costs. Plan meals to prevent spoilage. Learn to
preserve.
Gifts are Free! If someone gives me food (like the awesome
canned fruits my Aunt gives out for Christmas,) I consider it free. If
you have excesses of food, give them to your friends and neighbors.
Don’t make myself tired of my favorite foods. I don’t have a
membership to a Costco or other membership warehouse, and I’m not planning
to get one for this experiment. I used to have one, but with 1 or 2 people,
there was hardly anything in quantities that I could use in time.
(Especially when sharing a freezer between 4 guys in college.) I’m going
to buy what I can conveniently buy and store, (and not eat tater tots for a
solid month straight like I did in college. I loved tater tots before that
and couldn’t stand them for years afterwards.)
Be realistic. I’m not going to drive across town because they
have a slightly cheaper deal on chicken wings. I’m not going to spend all
day clipping coupons. I’m going to shop pretty much like I always have.
I will look into ways of getting food cheaper, though.
Be efficient. Especially with my time. Making big batches and
eating the same thing for several meals is one of the secrets of
efficiency. Spending part of a day making freezable food that will feed
you for weeks is incredibly efficient.
Keep on Sciencing! Yes, I’ve built my own sous vide cooking
apparatus. I made molecular gastronomy kits for my relatives for
Christmas. I buy sciencey cooking books. I will not apologize
for busting out the science or a cool apparatus.
Don’t burden others. If I want to go with friends to dinner, I
will! I will order whatever I’d normally order. I won’t make my friends
worry about my experiment, and I certainly don’t want people not to invite
me. I won’t be a food snob or a martyr. This is a fun
experiment.
Demonstrate Calculating Costs and Nutrition. I’ve developed an
awesome calculating tool and programming language called Frink that helps make calculations with units of
measure easy. Interspersed with this document will be calculations that
demonstrate how easy Frink makes it to calculate things!
Exceeding my budget is not failure. As an engineer, I know that
everything you try isn’t a success the first time. Every day, I’ll try to
analyze and point out how I could have done better, and can do better the
next time. In science, a negative result is every bit as important as a
positive result. To quote Thomas Edison, when asked why thousands of his
experiments on batteries didn’t produce a working result: “Results! Why,
man, I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that
won’t work!” –Edison: His Life and Inventions, 1910.

Day 1 – Tomato Soup and Two Toasted Cheese Sandwiches

The first day, not coincidentally, coincided with Ash Wednesday, the first
day of Lent. Since that’s typically a date of fasting, I’m having a single
meal. But one of my favorites—good old Campbell’s tomato soup and a
couple of toasted cheese sandwiches! And they were proper toasted
cheese sandwiches. Butter the bread on the outsides, fill them with good
cheese, and cook them in an electric frying pan at 350 °F for a couple
minutes on each side.

I forgot to take pictures, but you know what a toasted-cheese sandwich
and tomato soup looks like.

Measuring Ingredients

I’m not always going to remember to measure and weigh my ingredients, but I
did today, so I’ll describe the process briefly. A digital kitchen scale
is very very useful for many types of cooking.

I like my tomato soup made with milk, so I added 1 can of milk. Now, a
digression:

Ounces vs. Fluid Ounces

A quick digression: Ounces (and pounds and kilograms) are a unit of
mass. “Fluid ounces” (also written fl.oz.) are a unit of
volume. Don’t confuse them.

The labels on liquids and semi-liquids (like mayonnaise) is usually
indicated in fluid ounces (volume.) The labels on solids and canned goods
is usually labeled in ounces (mass.)

(By the way, if you think that a pound or an ounce is a unit of
weight, and not mass, that’s a common (but potentially dangerous)
misconception. Read the full discussion of this in this
Frink FAQ entry.)

Okay, back to the topic. I buy my milk by the gallon (volume) but the can
of soup is marked by the mass it contains. I wanted to measure
the volume of the can. The easiest way to do that, using just a scale, is
to weigh the can filled with water, and then weigh the can empty and
subtract the weights. This gives you the weight of water that filled the
can. Fortunately, our units of mass and volume are calibrated around water.

The following are all basically equivalent statements:

1 gram of water fills 1 milliliter.
1 gram of water fills 1 cubic centimeter, or 1 cc, or 1 cm³.
(That is, a cube 1 centimeter on a side. Note that this is the same as a
milliliter.)
1 kilogram of water fills one liter.
1 kilogram of water fills a cube 10 cm on a side (this is the same as a
liter.)
1 ounce of water fills 1 fluid ounce.
1 pound of water fills one (U.S.) pint. (a pint is 16 fluid ounces.)
The density of water is 1 kilogram / liter.
The density of water is 1 gram / cm³.
The density of water is 1 ounce / floz.

These rules make it easy. The can, filled with water, was 10.7 ounces
heavier than the empty can, so it contained 10.7 fluid ounces of water.
Since a gallon of milk cost $2.99, the total milk cost was $0.25.

I used up the last of a bit of fancy yummy shredded Tillamook Italian
3-cheese (mozzarella, smoked Provolone and Parmesan!) that I still had
open, so the cheese price was higher than some cheaper cheese that I bought
later. (Again, no waste!) We’ll call it $6 / lb. But how do you weigh
shredded cheese? You can’t weigh the cheese first and then put it on the
sandwich, because how will you know how much you’re going to need? I
weighed the cheese by weighing the plate + bread before and after putting
cheese on the bread and subtracting the difference. It turned out to be 58
g of cheese (total) for 2 sandwiches.

I even measured the butter on the bread! I didn’t remember until buttering
the last sandwich, and I didn’t want to get butter all over my scale, so I
weighed the butter dish + butter before and after buttering the last
sandwich. There was 16 g of butter for one sandwich (2 pieces of bread),
so a whopping 32 grams for 2 sandwiches. That amount surprised me. When
butter is $3.69 / lb, that comes to $0.26 of butter. Surprising. Hidden
costs like this can add up! I have to be careful not to miss them!

Thoughts

A big part of eating inexpensively is watching for stuff to go on sale.
Results that I can obtain today, I may not be able to obtain tomorrow!
Dollar Tree sells 41% larger cans of Campbell’s tomato soup (15.2 oz
vs. 10.75 oz) for $1.00. (Safeway’s advertised “everyday price” is $0.91,
making Dollar Tree’s offering 1.29 times as efficient.)
Look into house brands or giant cans of soup?
I can make huge batches of amazing soup much cheaper. Stay
tuned!
I’m using up existing food in my fridge for the first few days. My
costs should decrease as I start planning and buying better.
A good part of this exercise will be to develop and memorize “rules of
thumb” to estimate how much a portion of food costs.
Rule of thumb: A cup of milk costs about $0.20.
Rule of thumb: A stick of butter can cost around $1.00.
Rule of thumb: A tablespoon of butter costs about $0.12 (there are 8
tablespoons in a stick of butter.)
Where is the “cent” sign on my keyboard? My TRS-80 used to have one!

Day 1 Costs

Item	Cost
1 Bowl Tomato Soup
1/2 can Campbell’s Tomato Soup	$0.46
Milk, half of 10.7 floz	$0.13
Soup subtotal	$0.59

2 Toasted Cheese Sandwiches
4 slices white bread	$0.20
Tillamook Italian 3-Cheese, 58 g	$0.77
Butter, 32 g	$0.26
Sandwiches subtotal	$1.23

Homemade Kimchi (73 g)	$0.14
Daily Total	$1.96

Note: The half can of milk and half can of soup was because I wasn’t
eating alone! Again, the costs that I’m going to list here are for
the portions that I personally eat, even if I share the meal with others.
I also probably paid less for the tomato soup, but I don’t have that old
receipt.

I mentioned homemade kimchi here, but I’ll describe that another day when
I have less to write about!

Frink Calculations

I mentioned before that I’ve created a calculating tool / programming
language called Frink which is
great for helping with physical calculations. I’m including some sample
calculations so you can see how easy Frink makes calculating costs. The
above calculations were:

milkcost = 2.99 dollars / gallon 10.7 floz milkcost
0.2499453125 dollar (currency)

cheesecost = 6 dollars/lb 58 g cheesecost
34800000/45359237 (approx. 0.76720867240337398) dollar (currency)

buttercost = 3.69 dollars/lb 2 * (272 - 256) g buttercost // Multiply by 2 sandwiches
0.26032183918790344732 dollar (currency)

An important thing to note is that you specify the units of measure in each
Frink calculation, and Frink automatically does the right thing with them.
It contains a large data
file of physical quantities, freeing you from having to look them up,
and freeing you to make effortless calculations without getting bogged down
in the mechanics.

Note that in the above calculations, Frink already knows about units of
measure such as dollars, gallons, pounds, grams, and allows you to
transparently mix those units of measure in calculations. For example, in
the cheese calculations, the cost was specified in dollars per pound, while
the cheese was weighed and had its mass specified in grams. Nevertheless,
you can transparently multiply these and Frink helps ensure the results
come out right.

Frink runs on your computer
(Windows, Mac, Linux) or on your Android device with the app Frink
Programming Language. You can use Frink in a web-based
interface. Give it a try! It’ll make you look smarter.

Day 2 – Cabbage Burgers: My Secret Weapon

I actually started preparing for this experiment a few days in advance, and
readied my secret weapon: Cabbage Burgers! These are also variously
known as “Krautburgers” (although that gives the incorrect impression that
there’s sauerkraut inside; it’s just cooked unfermented cabbage,) or known
as “Cabbage Rolls” or “Runza” or “The Best Food You Can Prepare in Advance
and Freeze.” They’re a bun filled with cabbage, onions, and ground beef.
They’re delicious, nutritious, filling, inexpensive, and they freeze and
microwave incredibly well, so you can make a giant batch and have cheap
food ready in minutes!

The previous weekend, I made a gigantic batch of these little delights,
using 4 pounds of ground chuck, 2 heads of cabbage, 5 onions, 13 cups of
flour, 13 egg yolks (which left me 13+ egg whites for breakfast for 4 days)
and a few other ingredients. It was a huge undertaking, but it produced 61
delicious krautburgers that went into the freezer and should provide about
30 meals! Each krautburger cost, by my estimate, about
~~$0.41,~~ $0.47 (see cabbage roll
cost update), and two of them make a good meal for only about
~~$0.82~~ $0.94! I’ve learned that making a huge batch will
last for weeks or months, and is as easy as making a smaller batch.

Because I’m going to be eating Krautburgers many times over the next 45
days, I’ll publish the recipe and the cost breakdown later. Update:
the recipe was published on day 13 and the cost
breakdown on day 16.

To combine my “Reduce Waste” and “Gifts are Free” rules, I ate half of the
orange that I got in my Christmas stocking (I’ve never cared that much for
most fruit, and I might have let it go to waste if not for this
experiment,) and 6 cherries that my aunt canned this year and gave as
Christmas presents. These were delicious! I also ate 1/8 of the pound of
asparagus I bought for $0.99 / pound. (Put in microwave-safe ventable
casserole dish, add 1/4 inch water, put the lid on, open the vent, and
microwave for 7 minutes.) Later, I had a bowl of vanilla pudding that I
made a few days earlier. A good day of eating, and quite cheap!

Personal Notes

I have to admit that I went to bed the previous night feeling rather
hungry. I expected this. The more I eat, the more I need to eat
to feel satisfied. The less I eat, the less I need to eat to feel
satisfied. My super-scientific hypothesis is that my stomach “shrinks” a
bit when I don’t eat. Since I had a semi-fasting day yesterday, I felt
hungry. And I found it hard to sleep. Hope I adjust.

It’s weird, but if I go to sleep hungry, I usually wake up not
feeling hungry. It was hard not to snack before bed, but I managed to pull
through.

About my usual eating schedule: I very rarely eat breakfast. Never have,
at least since college. I’m usually not hungry in the morning, I’m always
grumpy in the morning, (okay, I’m grumpy all day, always) and I’d
always, always choose sleeping 5 more minutes over spending time
eating! I’m usually fine with eating just one meal a day in the evening,
and maybe a snack later. Everybody’s schedule and needs are going to be
different.

Thoughts

A very inexpensive day! $1.48, far below my target! Planning ahead by
making a large batch of great krautburgers definitely pays off. I
didn’t feel hungry when going to bed, and I could have eaten twice as many
krautburgers and still made my target!
Krautburgers combine two of the great inexpensive “fillers”: flour and
cabbage. (Another is potatoes.) There’s not a lot of calories in cabbage,
but it’s delicious and filling, and figures in a lot of low-cost recipes.
In old prison films, prisoners only get “bread and water” or maybe
“bread and cheese.” Should I try this one day? Can I make bread cheaper
than I can buy it?
I’m glad I’m not addicted to coffee or caffeine any more. I never
drank coffee but I used to drink at least 4 caffeinated soft drinks a
day. A roommate of mine was once quite surprised that a majority of his
daily costs went to coffee. If you shop carefully, you can get a can of
soda for $0.33 or so, or it can be much more if you buy it from a vending
machine!
It’s not a stated goal of this experiment, but I have a few extra
pounds of fat around my gut that I don’t mind losing. I’m down about 2
pounds already, which isn’t unwelcome. Should I graph my weight?
I’m probably not at the calorie total I need to be sustaining
long-term.

Day 2 Costs

Item	Cost
Krautburgers
2 Krautburgers (total 10.1 oz) (revised)	$0.94

Asparagus
1/8 pound asparagus @ $0.99/lb	$0.13

Vanilla Pudding
1/6 box instant pudding, Kroger house brand	$0.16
1/2 cup milk	$0.10
Pudding subtotal	$0.26

Homemade Kimchi (76 g)	$0.15
Daily Total	$1.48

Day 3 – Egg Salad and Surprise Salmon

Egg Salad Sandwiches

Egg salad sandwiches are one of my favorite sandwiches ever—they’re
rich and luxurious and filling. I always considered them to be rather
expensive and difficult, but they’re quite the opposite. They’re
especially cheap if you have cheap eggs (Albertson’s had a dozen eggs for
$0.99, which is considerably cheaper than the average $2.19/dozen.) And if
you have eggs that are already hard-boiled, as I did, it’s even easier.

(I didn’t actually boil the eggs, though. I steamed them in my Breakfast Machine, which I love. It’s a toaster that
can also cook 1 to 4 eggs, either poached/steamed, soft-boiled, or
hard-boiled. (There’s also a 4-slice, 8 egg model.) Fill it with the appropriate
amount of water (it comes with a cup marked with the right amounts of water
for hard, medium, soft, and poached eggs,) and push the button, and you have
perfectly-cooked eggs. This is good because I’ve never been good at getting
eggs cooked just right; I live at more than a mile above sea level, and
water boils at the lower temperature of 204°F (95°C), so none of
the “never fail” egg-boiling recipes you hear ever work right for me. A
“3-minute egg” is still basically uncooked.)

I made egg salad by mashing 3 hard-boiled eggs with 80 grams of mayonnaise,
a tiny squirt of mustard, and some salt and pepper. That’s it! I should
note most strongly that if you put anything else (like celery) into
your egg salad, you are a terrible monster. Also, egg salad is best on
plain old soft cheap white bread. (There’s also nothing more elegant and
delicate for your afternoon tea than an egg salad sandwich with the crusts
cut off!)

Each sandwich only used about 3/4 of an egg, (about $.06 at my good egg
prices,) $0.08 of mayonnaise, and $0.10 of plain old white bread, for a
total of $0.24 per sandwich. I had one and a half sandwiches, a few chips
that I still had open (I weighed them to see how much they would cost) and
felt like a king.

(By the way, I saw an egg salad sandwich at the grocery store for $4!)

Surprise Salmon

Today, I went shopping at Albertson’s, with a carefully-selected shopping
list based on their weekly advertisement. Since it’s a Friday during Lent,
I planned on making a fish dish. (I’ve never understood how eating fish
was in any way a sacrifice, though.) I had an interesting recipe for fish
chowder (which I’ve never made before,) which sounded filling (it had
potatoes and milk). Albertson’s advertised frozen tilapia, swai, and
pollock on sale for $2.99/lb. These fish can be somewhat bland, but that’s
a pretty good price for fish. This was my plan.

However, when I looked at the frozen fish, I saw that they had whole
frozen pink salmon for $1.99/lb! Salmon is one of my very favorite
fish, and that is a fantastic price for salmon, which is usually 7
to 10 dollars per pound, so I made the decision on the spot to buy a whole
salmon and eat plain salmon instead! (They had the same deal on whole
salmon a year ago, and I didn’t buy one, and I was sad for the whole year!)

2.25 pounds of salmon for only $4.48!

It was kind of scary, because the fish I picked was rather large (2.25
pounds) and frozen solid. I hoped I’d be able to cut it and save portions
for later. Luckily, a rough serrated knife sawed through the
completely-frozen fish quite easily, allowing me to separate it into
portions for freezing:

I’m not good at butchering whole fish, but a long, thin, flexible knife let
me remove the backbone and fins without much problem.

I prepared a couple of baked potatoes by first microwaving them (using the
“potato” button) and then brushing them with a bit of olive oil and kosher
salt and finishing them in a 400°F oven (for crispiness.)

While the potatoes were cooking, I brined and thawed the salmon in cold
water for 30 minutes with some sugar and salt. You know sometimes when you
cook salmon and the yellow, buttery-looking albumin comes out in blobs on
the surface of the fish? It doesn’t look great, but brining prevents the
albumin from leaking out and adds flavor to the fish. This is extremely
important when smoking salmon, too!

Since the oven was not at the right temperature for cooking salmon (I
either bake it low and slow or under a hot broiler,) I decided to pan-fry
the salmon using a technique that I learned from Eric Ripert that gives you
super-crispy, yummy skin. You dry the skin very well, and sprinkle the skin
with a bit of salt, pepper and a fine dusting of Wondra flour. Then
pan-fry, skin down, with a little bit of oil and butter, pressing the fish
down, cooking for 80% of the time on the skin side, and turning over
briefly to finish.

As you can hopefully see, the salmon skin was gorgeous and crisp. I had
salmon, 2 baked potatoes (with butter and sour cream, not pictured,)
asparagus, and a slice of lemon. The 6.25 ounce portion of salmon itself
only cost $0.77! Amazing! Oh, and that’s free dill from my aunt’s garden
on top of the salmon! Note the additional costs below.

Thoughts

I checked the weekly supermarket advertisements very carefully for
sales before shopping, and planned several meals to avoid waste.
The moral of this story is: read the ads, and plan your meals around
deep discounts.
The moral of this story is: don’t be afraid to adjust your plan based
on what you see at the store.
Much of the hidden costs of cooking salmon and baked potatoes is in the
olive oil and butter, as I was too lazy to walk 30 feet to grab some plain
vegetable oil for cooking. I’ll do better next time.
The butter and sour cream on the baked potatoes are more expensive than
the potatoes! I cut back a bit on them, but could cut back more and still
be happy. Are there other things that are good on baked potatoes?
The cost for potatoes calculated above is for the potatoes I had left
over in the pantry. I bought potatoes much cheaper ($3 / (10 lb)) today,
so I will do even better in the future on potatoes.
I thought potato chips would be too cost-prohibitive, but a small
amount of house-brand chips doesn’t cost a lot. I like my salt!
Whenever you’re cooking baked potatoes, cook a few extra and
refrigerate them. This lets you make fried potatoes the next day. Fried
potatoes are much quicker and better when the potato is already
mostly cooked! If they’re not cooked already, it’s hard to get the inside
of the potato cooked without overcooking the outsides.
I have to say that Albertson’s advertisements had at least ten times as
many great deals than the other stores, which made me decide to go there.
There were far, far more deep deals. The other grocery stores (King
Sooper’s and Safeway) didn’t even begin to compete on advertised bargains.
You’ll be impressed with some of the deals I got in the next days or weeks!
Almost every single thing on my receipt was on deep discount. The only
things not on sale were milk and butter.
Margarine is 1/4 the price of butter, but I’m sticking with butter.
(Partially to avoid trans-fats.) A bit of vegetable oil for cooking is
even more cost-effective.
Answering my questions from the other day, big “family-sized” cans of
tomato soup are actually more expensive per ounce than small
cans!
I had bought 2 dozen eggs a week ago for the amazing price of
$0.99/dozen, (they’re normally $2.19/dozen) and I was sad that they were
running out. However, I was surprised to see eggs at Albertson’s today
for the incredible price of $0.50/dozen! Yes! I bought 2 dozen. That’s
barely more than $0.04 an egg!
Eggs are amazing. If someone asked you, as an engineer, how
much you would charge to create an egg in a laboratory, how much would it
cost?
When buying whole fish, you have to assume some waste from bones and
fins and such. There wasn’t too much waste at all, but you have to factor
this into your costs. I still feel a little bad that I didn’t try making
fish stock from the bones and tail. I will next time. (Saving stock is
great for other recipes or the best ramen ever.)
I didn’t eat the salmon tail. I’ve hosted cajun food parties almost
every year for the past 20 years. The first year, I asked the butcher
to save me salmon tails, which I heard were good breaded and deep-fried.
They ended up just being all bones and basically inedible.

Day 3 Costs

Item	Cost
Egg Salad Sandwich (prices are for 1 sandwich)
3/4 Egg	$0.06
Mayonnaise	$0.08
2 slices white bread	$0.10
1 sandwich subtotal	$0.24
1.5 sandwich subtotal:	$0.36

Chips
Fritos	$0.08
1/2 oz potato chips	$0.09
Chips subtotal:	$0.17

Salmon
6.25 oz salmon at $1.99/lb	$0.77
Olive oil for cooking	$0.20
1/8 large lemon	$0.11
Salmon subtotal:	$1.08

Asparagus
1/8 pound asparagus @ $0.99/lb	$0.13

2 Baked Potatoes
2 potatoes, approx 12 oz total	$0.30
Butter, 3 Tbsp	$0.24
Sour cream, 2 oz at $1.69/(16 oz)	$0.21
Baked potato subtotal	$0.75

Daily Total	$2.49

The total of $2.49 is very close to my target! I would have never thought
I could have salmon on this budget, but it worked out wonderfully, and I
have several more portions of salmon in the freezer!

Day 4 – Pork Soft Tacos

How is it possible that one of the most delicious cuts of meat you can buy
is also one of the most inexpensive? Nothing is more luxurious than a
falling-apart-tender pork shoulder with its delicious mix of meat, fat, and
gelatin. The only trick is to cook it correctly, and that’s not even a
trick. Pork shoulder requires low and slow heat for a long time to become
tender. This is where your slow cooker (also known as a crock pot) comes
in. A slow cooker is almost fool-proof. In the morning, you can drop in
your roast with some onions, seasonings, and liquid, set it to low, and
come back 9 hours later for meat that’s as tender as any you’ve ever tasted.

I rub you, my delicious pork shoulder.

And that’s what I did. In the morning, I took out the crock pot, set it to
low, put in 3 chopped onions, took a pork shoulder and covered it with my
homemade spice rub, and set it
on top of the onions, and added hot water to cover. I then walked away.
(Okay, I came back to add water as it warmed up. More about that tomorrow
when I discuss the science of meat temperatures.)

Nine hours later, the house smelled amazing, the roast was tender, and the
crock pot was filled to the top with rich, delicious broth. Let me make a
very, very important point:

Save that broth!

I will repeat that:

Save that broth! I had 4 quarts of dark, delicious, flavorful pork
broth into which the fat, gelatin, meat juices, onions, and spices had
mingled. You can freeze this broth and make the most amazing ramen you’ve
ever tasted. Which I’m going to do soon.

The pork shoulder was 3.41 lb at $1.99/lb, and it will make several meals
of pork tacos. Shredding the pork for tacos is easy. Put some of it in a
bowl, and take two forks and shred it. It just pulls apart. The tacos had
shredded cheese (which I got for the very good price of $2.88/lb,) soft
flour tortillas, and shredded cabbage.

It’s a bit difficult to estimate the cost of the pork that went into each
taco until all the pork is gone (which will take several days.) Much of
the original pork’s mass went into the broth in the form of melted fat,
gelatin, and meat juices, so weighing the final pork isn’t enough to get a
cost estimate. I weighed all the other ingredients, though, and estimated
a final cost of about $0.51 per big yummy taco. I ate 4 tacos, so the
estimated total for dinner was $2.04, for a very satisfying and balanced
meal.

The tacos have all your major food groups: grains, dairy, meat, and
vegetables. Nothing more is required!

For lunch, I had one and a half egg salad sandwiches and some kimchi, like
yesterday.

Thoughts

Next time, make sure to warm up the tortillas, cheese, and cabbage
before putting the pork in the taco. It’ll all come out warmer and nicer.
Save a little of the pork broth to reheat tomorrow’s pork shoulder in,
just as gently as your crock pot cooked it. Don’t boil or microwave it!
The pork and broth comes out of the crock pot quite hot. Before I put
it in the refrigerator or freezer, I put it into a container (a ziploc bag
for the pork roast and tubs for the broth) and cool them in a cold water
bath in the sink. (Add ice to make it even faster.) This reduces the
time that the food spends in the so-called “danger zone” between 40°F
and 140°F where bacteria can grow. (I’ll write more about food safety
one of these days.)
Plan your pork and broth usage so that you’re done eating it within 3-4
days, unless you freeze it.
The cabbage was quite hard. I’m thinking of salting a bit of the
cabbage before adding it to the tacos tomorrow. This rapidly softens the
cabbage, (and makes it delicious!) as I’ll describe when I describe how to
make kimchi!
Some fancy pork tacos these days are made with kimchi instead of raw
cabbage. Try that?

Day 4 Costs

Item	Cost
Egg Salad Sandwich (prices are for 1 sandwich)
3/4 Egg	$0.06
Mayonnaise	$0.08
2 slices white bread	$0.10
1 sandwich subtotal	$0.24
1.5 sandwich subtotal:	$0.36

Homemade Kimchi (76 g)	$0.15

Pork tacos (prices are for 1 taco)
0.5 oz cheese at $2.88/lb	$0.09
1 6″ flour tortilla	$0.08
Cabbage	$0.02
Shredded pork (revised)	$0.24
Onion	$0.04
1 taco subtotal:	$0.47
4 taco subtotal:	$1.88

Daily Total	$2.39

Wow! ~~Very close to my goal, but 5 cents over.~~
Update: The price of pork was recalculated
after the pork was done, bringing me back under budget. Some of the
costs that I’ve charged to this meal are actually in the 4 quarts of broth
that are going to be used in future meals. Saving the broth effectively
makes these future meals cheaper or free! I’m not going to try to do
“creative bookkeeping” here, but track my costs honestly and
conservatively. I consider today a success.

Day 5 – Meat Science (and French Toast)

Breakfast/lunch was french toast and fried potatoes. As I mentioned on day 3, whenever you’re baking potatoes, make
another one or two for fried potatoes the next day. Fried potatoes are
much quicker and better when the potato is already mostly cooked!
If they’re not cooked already, it’s hard to get the inside of the potato
cooked without overcooking the outsides. The fried potatoes cost $0.12 for
about 4 ounces of potatoes.

French toast is easy, and contains two inexpensive ingredients: eggs and
bread. (And a little milk and sugar.) It turns out that each slice of
toast uses 1/2 of an egg, so the total cost per slice was $0.10. I had two
slices. Breakfast/lunch cost $0.32.

Dinner was exactly like day 4—more delicious pork tacos! I believe
that I greatly overestimated the amount of pork that I used on day 4, so I
may go back and revise the cost of these meals after all the pork is gone,
and I can divide the cost of the pork by how many tacos it made.

Since I wrote about the pork tacos on day 4, as
promised, I’m going to drop some meat science on you!

Meat Science!

A pork shoulder, uncooked, is a rather unruly chunk of meat. It’s a mix of
intermingled muscle and fat. As you may know, whenever muscle connects to
fat, or muscle connects to bone, there’s some connective tissue (commonly
known as gristle when not cooked correctly) which is unchewable and
not good eats. However, when a pork shoulder is slow-cooked for 9
or more hours at low temperature, you can eat every single bit of the
shoulder, and it’s smooth and delicious! The connective tissue is no
longer a problem. What happened to it?

The connective tissue is made mostly of collagen, a tough protein. You can
think of collagen as a three-stranded rope, which it strongly resembles.
It’s a helix of three strands wound around each other. When you cook
collagen above about 145°F (63 °C), the three strands begin to
unwind from each other. Each strand is gelatin. Gelatin is an interesting
protein that can hold up to 10 times its mass in water. However, there’s
not much water originally in this gelatin strand. With enough time and
moisture, these gelatin strands will absorb water from the surrounding
cooking liquid and muscle fibers (which squeeze out their own moisture as
they heat up.) This makes a rich gel that keeps the meat moist and
delicious.

Breaking down collagen into gelatin and making the gelatin absorb water is
a process that takes both heat and time. Collagen breaks down into
gelatin and absorbs water well at temperatures around 174°F
(79°C), which is the temperature that a good slow cooker on low setting
should hold. Collagen will break down and absorb water at even lower
temperatures, but it takes significantly more time.

(My slow cooker gets significantly hotter than this, eventually boiling (at
the altitude I live, that’s 204°F (95°C)) at the edges even on the
low setting, so I like to start cooking with just enough water to cover the
roast, and add more water as it gets too hot (as measured by a probe
thermometer) eventually filling it to the top so I have lots of good broth.
Starting with a small amount of water is smart because a crock pot heats
quite slowly. (My simple crock pot heats at only 215 watts on low and 335
watts on high.) Before your crock pot reaches 140°F (60°C), you are
in the so-called “danger zone” where bacteria can grow. You thus want to
start with hot water to minimize time in the danger zone.)

Note: Collagen also holds muscle fiber to muscle fiber, which is why you
can shred individual fibers of the pork shoulder apart with a fork after
breaking down the collagen with long, slow cooking. This further
tenderizes the meat, and holds moisture in the gelatin between muscle
fibers.

So Why Don’t We Cook All Meat This Way?

Cooking a pork shoulder at 174°F to 190°F for 9 or more hours makes
it moist and luxurious. This is a cut of meat with lots of collagen, which
turns to gelatin, which holds liquids in the meat and keeps it moist and
tender.

However, if we tried to cook a lean piece of meat (without much connective
tissue) this way, we would absolutely murder it and turn it into a dry,
tight brick. As meat gets much warmer than about 140°F (60°C), the
muscle fibers and connective tissue contract and squeeze moisture out,
making the meat very dry. A piece of lean meat cooked at these
temperatures for this amount of time would be tough and dry, especially
because there’s no gelatin to hold 10 times its mass in moisture in the
meat.

(For comparison, beef is a nice medium-rare at 131°F (55°C) and
lean pork is “done” and no longer pink at 145°F (62.7°C).)

“Stew meat” that cooks a long time in stews or chilis is usually something
like pork shoulder or beef brisket with lots of collagen. You won’t
improve your stew by putting in filet mignon or ribeye steak. But pork
shoulder or beef brisket are actually made better by long, slow,
moist cooking at temperatures that would tie leaner meats into tough knots.

I’ll write more later about the two major proteins in meat, and why
breaking one down protein (myosin) is good, and breaking the other protein
(actin) down is bad, and how you can have the best of both worlds with the
right cooking technique. (Hint: it’s called “sous vide”.)

Thoughts

I’ll write more later about how surprisingly much energy it takes to
heat water, which is one of the hardest substances in the universe to
heat.
I actually ate the French toast without butter nor syrup to save a few
cents. The secret to keeping it moist may be to undercook the eggs
slightly, which is what happened.
I ate the potatoes without Sriracha sauce nor Mae Ploy sweet chili
sauce, which I usually like on anything. I’ll have to calculate
what a small amount of these costs. These are two sauces that are usually
surprisingly inexpensive at Asian markets.
Another reason that Sriracha is surprisingly inexpensive is that the
founder, David Tran, is
unbelievably awesome and just cares about making great hot sauce. Read
that article and you’ll be a fan too.
Note to self: Next time I’m at Taco Bell, “liberate” some free
sauces. I actually had a ton of sauce packets that I recently threw away
because some had been creased and started to leak.

Day 5 Costs

Item	Cost
French Toast (per slice)
White bread, 1 slice	$0.05
1/2 egg	$0.04
1 tablespoon milk	$0.01
1 slice subtotal	$0.10
2 slice subtotal:	$0.20

Fried Potatoes
Potatoes, ~4 oz	$0.10
Vegetable oil	$0.02
Potatoes subtotal	$0.12

Pork tacos (prices are for 1 taco)
0.5 oz cheese at $2.88/lb	$0.09
1 6″ flour tortilla	$0.08
Cabbage	$0.02
Shredded pork (revised)	$0.24
Onion	$0.04
1 taco subtotal:	$0.47
4 taco subtotal:	$1.88

Daily Total	$2.20

Again, I won’t know the pork cost per taco until all the pork is gone, so I
may revise these figures. The pork cost for day 4 was almost certainly
overestimated, and I’m easily back within my budget today.

Update: The price of pork was recalculated
after the pork was done.

Day 6 – The Best Damn Ramen that You’ve Ever Seen

After shoveling heavy snow and breaking ice for almost two hours at very
cold temperatures, I had 3-inch-long icicles of sweat hanging from my hair,
and I was ready for a shower and a huge hot bowl of ramen noodles!

Luckily, as you may remember from day 4 when I made
Pork Tacos, I saved the delicious broth from the slow cooker, which is the
secret for the best ramen you’ll ever have:

That broth paid off. It’s rich and thick and delicious. So rich, in fact,
that I diluted it to half-strength. The 4 quarts of broth that I saved
will go quite a long way.

The other secret ingredient for making ordinary ramen extraordinary is your
refrigerator’s friend, Bok Choy! I hadn’t used Bok Choy much in the
past, but it’s an incredibly tolerant and long-lasting vegetable. It will
stay fresh in your refrigerator for far longer than you’d ever expect.
Just buy a big head for about $1.00/lb and break off what you need. (Baby
bok choy is beautiful and cute, but it costs about 5 times as much in my
local supermarket. You may be able to buy it cheaper in Asian
supermarkets, which may have 10 different types of little bok choys,
sometimes in huge bags.)

Long after cabbage and lettuce and other vegetables have wilted or molded
in your fridge, the Bok Choy will still be good. Chop it into pieces, and
boil it in your broth for about 7-10 minutes. It maintains a very nice
crisp texture even if you under- or over-cook it, and it absorbs the flavor
of the broth, making it quite delicious. 3.2 ounces of bok choy cost
$0.20.

After the bok choy cooked, I boiled a packet of cheap ($0.16)
chili-flavored ramen in the broth for the usual couple minutes. I then put
it in a giant bowl (29 fluid ounces!) and, for an extra bit of flavor and
protein and richness, I cracked a raw egg ($0.08) into it, which cooked in
the hot liquid.

That was unbelievably delicious and rich. Look at that broth! That’s
nothing like your usual ramen-seasoning-packet broth, and there was more
than twice as much of it! There was even broth left over after re-filling
my bowl partway. More than two pounds of hot, delicious ramen soup in my
belly made me feel a lot warmer.

While I ate my ramen, I watched a Simply Ming episode in which chef Ming
Tsai makes elaborate, super-expensive ramen with a new Japanese Iron Chef.
They used A-5 grade Kobe beef, smoked maitake mushrooms, dried scallops,
mussels, and many more super-expensive ingredients. I’ll bet I was every
bit as satisfied with my delicious bowl of ramen that cost about $0.54.
(For this price I could only buy about 1.5 grams of A-5 kobe beef. For
comparison, a U.S. dollar bill has a mass of about 1 gram.)

By the way, I forgot to account for the cost of the spice rub that I put on
the pork shoulder in day 4, which made the broth so
delicious, so I’ll account for it below.

Making Spice Rub and Buying Spices

Tiny little jars of commercial spice rub for cooking meat are incredibly
expensive (maybe $4 for a 1.75-oz jar) and meat takes a lot of
rub! I make my own spice rub with some inexpensive ingredients I have in
my cupboard. I usually make a fairly large batch and have some left over,
because it’s good to sprinkle on anything from meat to fried or baked
potatoes to vegetables. The proportions for my spice rub are somewhat
like:

Spice Rub (very) approximate recipe

3/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup chicken bouillon powder
1 tablespooon garlic powder
1/2 tablespoon cumin
1/2 tablespoon black pepper
Every other spice you like including:
- Cayenne pepper
- Paprika
- Chili Powder
- Onion Powder

Brown sugar is relatively cheap. A good rule of thumb is that it’s
$1.00/lb, or about twice as expensive as white sugar. A cup of brown sugar
costs $0.50. I’m going to wildly overestimate the total cost of the big
batch of rub that I made as $1.50, about half of which went into the broth
(and I have half left over.) Since there’s enough broth for about 8 huge
bowls of ramen, I’ll call it $0.10 in spices per bowl.

Dinner was pork tacos again. I definitely have overestimated how much the
pork cost, so I’ll revise the above calculations when I’m done. There’s
still enough for a few more pork tacos.

Buying Spices

By the way, a good way to buy spices more inexpensively is to go to what
Walmart calls the “Hispanic Foods” aisle. This is especially true for
bouillon powder. Walmart sells a giant jug that they call “Knorr Hispanic
Chicken Granulated Bouillon, 35.3 oz” for $4.98. This is a fraction of the
cost of bouillon in the spice aisle. I use this in a lot of
recipes, and it lasts me many months.

The “Hispanic Foods” aisle of your grocery store may also contain other
spices much cheaper. I usually get cumin, chili powders, and
other spices in this aisle, usually under the “Órale!” brand. These
spices come in bags instead of jars, and cost about 1/3 what they do a
couple aisles away.

Another great place to buy inexpensive spices in bulk is Indian markets.
These often have bags of spices like cardamom, cumin, coriander, cinnamon,
mustard seeds, sesame seeds, and a wide variety of chili powders for
drastically lower prices than you can find them elsewhere.

Thoughts

Since the cabbage for the pork tacos has been somewhat hard, I salted
some cabbage and let it stand in the fridge for several hours. This
softened the cabbage (and made it tastier.)
Rule of thumb: 1 pound of brown sugar costs $1.00
Rule of thumb: 1 pound of white sugar costs $0.50
Rule of thumb: 1 cup of brown sugar costs $0.50
Rule of thumb: 1 cup of white sugar costs $0.25
Rule of thumb: 1 tablespoon of brown sugar costs $0.03
Rule of thumb: 1 tablespoon of white sugar costs $0.015
Learning these rules of thumb has been very helpful for me to estimate
food costs in advance and avoid blowing out my budget. I can
already estimate the cost of a meal more accurately and quickly in my head.

Day 6 Costs

Item	Cost
The World’s Best Ramen
Broth, spices	$0.10
Bok choy, 3.2 oz	$0.20
1 egg	$0.08
Ramen (1 pkg)	$0.16
Ramen subtotal:	$0.54

Pork tacos (prices are for 1 taco)
0.5 oz cheese at $2.88/lb	$0.09
1 6″ flour tortilla	$0.08
Cabbage	$0.02
Shredded pork (revised)	$0.24
Onion	$0.04
1 taco subtotal:	$0.47
4 taco subtotal:	$1.88

Daily Total (revised)	$2.42

A few cents over budget again, but I’ll recalculate when all the
pork is finished.

Update: The price of pork was recalculated
after the pork was done, bringing me just back under budget!

Day 7 – Colcannon and Pork Pancakes

Breakfast was a bowl of quick oatmeal. I can count on one hand the number
of times I’ve eaten oatmeal in my life, but it was very good (once you
add brown sugar.) Total cost: $0.16.

Containers are starting to sprout strange new labels:

That gigantic container cost less than a much smaller can of Quaker brand
oats. ($2.99)

For lunch, I had a hot dog on a bun. Unfortunately, the purchase of these
hot dogs (Oscar Meyer Classic Bun-Length, my favorite) predated this
experiment, so they weren’t the most cost-effective. I have newer hot dogs
that cost 1/3 the price. A hot dog was $0.32, and a bun was $0.16, for a
total of $0.48 for a single hot dog. (I have cheaper hot dogs that I could
eat on bread for a total $0.15, less than 1/3 the price.) However, my
rules for this experiment are that anything I have to throw away, I have to
charge myself for, so chow down, wide load.

Colcannon

It’s sort of funny how upset I get when I see something in an advertisement
that’s much cheaper than I just paid for it. For example, last week I
bought 10 pounds of potatoes for $2.99, which I thought was a pretty good
deal. But yesterday I saw the same bag at the same store for $0.99! That
made me sad. I started thinking, “well, I could still eat 8.3 pounds of
potatoes a day at the old price. Or 25 pounds a day at the new
price.” At this moment, I became enlightened. If I were ever hungry, I
could eat a bunch of potatoes. The only thing I’d have to be wary of is
spending too much money on stuff like butter, sour cream, or sauce (Mae
Ploy sweet chili sauce is really good on boiled potatoes!)

So how could I make a bunch of ready-to-eat, delicious long-lasting
potatoes? The answer came from a recipe I’ve made for many a St. Patrick’s
Day party: Colcannon.

Colcannon is an Irish dish (in Irish Gaelic, cál ceannann, meaning
“white-headed cabbage”,) made with mashed potatoes mixed with cabbage.
Other variations use kale, leeks, onions, and scallions, in addition to
possibly ham or bacon.

Since a stick of butter costs around $1.00, I decided to try to use the
cabbage to keep the mashed potatoes moist, and eliminate butter or cream
entirely. I boiled/steamed some cabbage with water and salt, and saved the
cabbage water. This got added to 3.5 pounds of mashed potatoes. The
result was still far too dry, so I added 2 cups of milk (which was probably
a bit too much.) This made 4.5 pounds of finished Colcannon, all for the
price of $1.96! I’ll have this ready to eat with any meal.

Colcannon, or, Life Discovered on Jupiter’s Moon Europa

By the way, a big
potato ricer makes making mashed potatoes immensely easier and more
repeatable. A potato ricer is basically an extruder press that you put
boiled potatoes in and squeeeeeeze them through little holes.
(It’s like a Fuzzy
Pumper Barber Shop (which I always wanted as a kid) but instead of
being for Play-Doh, it’s for food!) No mashing! You don’t even need to
peel the potatoes! The potato skins stay in the ricer. And when you cut
up the potatoes for boiling, you can cut them into very large, coarse
pieces. All of these benefits make mashed potatoes in a ricer much simpler
than the traditional method.

Pork Pancakes

The original plan was to finish up the pork tacos for dinner, but I
happened to see an episode of Simply Ming in which chef Ming Tsai’s
dad used a bunch of leftover pork and onions and some simple dough to make
crispy pancakes! So that became the new plan.

The “hot water dough” was simple enough:

Hot Water Dough

2 cups flour
3/4 cups hot tap water
3/4 teaspoon salt

Mix the three together, knead them for about 6 minutes, and then let it
rest, covered, for about an hour. There’s no leavener, so they don’t rise,
so you could probably skip this step if you’re in a rush. The dough cost
$0.32.

Pork Pancake Assembly

Roll the dough out as thin as possible on a well-floured surface, spread a
thin layer of vegetable oil over the whole surface, and then spread
leftover cooked pork, cooked onions, and cooked cabbage over the whole
surface. Roll tightly like a jelly roll into a long cylinder. Cut the
cylinder into about 4-inch (10 cm) lengths, try to twist the ends shut
(just try) and then twist and squish the cylinders from end to end into a
thin, flat pancake:

Fry them with a bit of oil in a hot skillet, about 375°F (190°C)
for about 3 minutes on each side or until crisp and brown.

These were quite good! I’d definitely make them again with leftovers. The
breading is very inexpensive ($0.32 for the entire batch) and it stretches
the remaining pork nicely. This was the first dinner that I’ve actually
felt full after eating (along with 6 oz Colcannon.)

Pork Revision

As noted before in the last 3 days, it was difficult to estimate how much
pork cost per serving until I was done with the pork. The pork shoulder,
which cost $6.79, made 28 portions, which is 7 more portions than I
originally estimated. Thus, I’ve revised the last few days’ pork prices
downward to $0.24 per portion, a reduction of $0.04 per portion. This
actually means that the last few days were under budget as I’d hoped!

Thoughts

The pork shoulder went farther than I thought, so I was able to
recalculate some earlier days’ costs, which puts me back under budget for
every day! W00t!
I’m starting to think I should keep track of everything in my head as
its cost per pound. If something costs much more than about $2.00/lb, it’s
hard to fill up on it.
I need to add an example here of converting per-mass costs into
per-volume costs (for example, how do you calculate how much a cup of flour
costs when you bought it by the pound?) My language Frink helps here, because it knows
the densities of a lot of common materials, for example:

flourcost = 2.50 dollars/(5 lb) 1 cup flour_scooped flourcost
0.15625 dollar (currency)

Note that Frink knows the average density of flour in many forms,
including scooped or sifted. flour_scooped is the density
of scooped flour.
See what Frink knows about different forms of flour by entering ??flour in its interactive interface. (Or just click that link.)
See what Frink knows about different forms of sugar by entering ??sugar in its interactive interface. (Or just click that link.)

Day 7 Costs

Item	Cost
Oatmeal
Oatmeal, 1/3 cup (uncooked volume)	$0.08
Milk, 1/4 cup	$0.05
Brown sugar, 1 tablespoon	$0.03
Oatmeal subtotal:	$0.16

Hot Dog
Hot dog (Oscar Meyer Classic Bun Length)	$0.32
Hot dog bun	$0.16
Hot dog subtotal:	$0.48

Colcannon (price for 73 oz)
Potatoes, 3.5 lb	$1.05
Cabbage, 8.3 oz	$0.51
Milk, 2 cups	$0.40
Colcannon, 73 oz subtotal	$1.96
Colcannon, 6 oz subtotal	$0.16

Pork Pancakes (prices are for 1 pancake.)
2/7 cup flour	$0.05
1/7 yellow onion	$0.04
Cabbage	$0.04
Oil	$0.01
1 pancake subtotal:	$0.38
3 pancake subtotal:	$1.14

Daily Total	$1.94

Day 8 – Braunschweiger and Book Recommendations

Today was a simple lunch of a Braunschweiger (liverwurst) sandwich, one of
my all-time favorites. The Braunschweiger component of the sandwich cost
$0.31 out of about $0.42 total, so it’s a fairly economical sandwich. (The
Braunschweiger I got was $2.50/lb which is fairly good for a meat product.)
I didn’t have any lettuce, so I put on a few cabbage leaves I had left over.

I also had some homemade kimchi, a very small amount of potato chips, and
half of some sort of lovely pear (Bosc, I believe) that was in the fridge
from before this experiment began (again, if it goes to waste, I have to
charge myself for it.) I don’t remember how much it cost, but fruit can be
very expensive and blow my budget easily. (A single honeycrisp
apple, for example, can be $1.79!) I’m going to take the worst-case
scenario and estimate the whole pear at $1.00, which is the current selling
price of fancy Asian pears in the advertisements. This could easily wreck
my budget, and I may revise the price when I go back to the grocery store.

(I lived in Germany for 6 months on a youth exchange
when I was 21, and dinner in all of my families was almost always a cold
dinner of good, dense German bread along with cold cuts of meat and cheese
and butter, and something like tomatoes. The meats were always delicous,
but Leberwurst was always my favorite (until I got the courage to try the
steak tartare, which then became my favorite. Sorry, liverwurst.))

Dinner was the last of the pork pancakes and colcannon, and a bit more
asparagus. See day six for the cost breakdown of the
pork pancakes and colcannon.

Thoughts

Luckily, the day’s meal was quite under my budget, even with the
expensive pear estimate. The potential sky-high price of pears stressed me
out, though.
I have expensive honeycrisp apples in the fridge from before the
experiment which also gnaws at me. One of these days, I may have to eat an
apple and nothing else! Stupid pre-experiment lavish lifestyle.
Walmart’s price for Bosc pears is $1.67/lb, quite a bit cheaper than I
estimated. How much did my pear weigh? 6 oz? The half that I ate would
be $0.31 then.
Whenever I don’t know the price of something, or want to
comparison-shop, I like to look at delivery.walmart.com which allows you to get actual
current prices (from the luxury of your home,) on almost everything that
Walmart carries. (You can even have someone put together an order for you
that you’ll pick up or have delivered in some markets.) Put in a zip code
for the Denver area (say, 80112) to check prices if they don’t have this
service in your region. This is very useful for price comparisons! (Note:
The site doesn’t work for me in Firefox, probably because of my aggressive
ad-blocking. All searches just silently return no results.)
I have hard-working friends who like Walmart’s service. They fill
their cart online, and pick up their order at the store. I haven’t heard
how well their grocery delivery works, but I know people who could use
that. The ability to choose very specific products, quantities, and prices
from their whole selection is a very nice feature compared to other
shop-at-home systems which allowed the store’s shoppers to easily blow out
your budget with a poorly-chosen subsititution.
Thinking about lunchmeats, I was wondering what the cheapest would be.
I haven’t eaten bologna for a long time, but that looks pretty
cheap. You can get Oscar Meyer brand for $2.00/lb and Bar-S for
$1.28/lb. I’ll probably stick with Braunschweiger, though.
That pork shoulder lasted 5 days! Sometimes pork can start tasting or
smelling “off” to me after 3 days. I’m very sensitive to that. I hope
that cooling it rapidly in the water bath after cooking and before
refrigerating helped to prevent any spoilage. It was recooked each time
it was served, too. I didn’t notice any “off” tastes.
If you’re old-school, you mi

Engineer eats efficiently for $2.50 a day (2016) by hwayne

Engineer eats efficiently for $2.50 a day (2016) by hwayne

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Play Along

Day 1 Costs

Frink Calculations

Personal Notes

Day 2 Costs

Day 3 Costs

Day 4 Costs

So Why Don’t We Cook All Meat This Way?

Day 5 Costs

Spice Rub (very) approximate recipe

Day 6 Costs

Hot Water Dough

Pork Pancake Assembly

Day 7 Costs

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