Day 14

The last day of the challenge!! I was so happy and relieved that it was over and I could get back to my regularly scheduled meals.

Breakfast:

Breakfast was perfect pumpkin pancakes. I forgot to take a picture since they took so long to make and we were rushing out the door to get to work. They were actually pretty good-but not very spicy. I was hoping for something that tasted like pumpkin pie but they tasted like you were just eating straight canned pumpkin. We will probably make these again though :) They were interesting and a fun way to make pancakes a little different. However, these would be better as a weekend meal than as a meal on a workday. It took about 45 minutes to mix up the batter and cook the pancakes-that's way too long for our mornings when we have to get to work.

Total Cost: 1.92 per serving (3.84 for both of us)

Lunch:

Lunch was leftover red beans with a side salad and milk. 

Finished lunches! The salad were chopped cucumbers, carrots and lettuce with vinegarette dressing. It was a pretty yummy lunch-the red beans were the same as the night before (bland) but they kept well. I was definitely full after lunch. I'm surprised how much I'm loving eating salads! I will keep this in my lunch rotation after the challenge is over for sure!

Total cost: 2.03 per serving (4.06 for both of us)

Dinner: 

Dinner was meatloaf muffins-it was quick to make but took an hour to cook!

Ingredients for the meatloaf.

The ingredients were simply mixed together and placed into greased muffin tins. They were baked for an hour at 350 degrees.

Finished dinners! The muffins were accompanied by mashed potatoes and frozen green beans! They were actually really good! These would be great to make on a weekend for an easy grab and go lunch or dinner during the week! They had a lot of flavor and were easy to eat! We will be keeping these in our menu! I'm glad the challenge ended on a high note since we've had so many disappointing meals! Today was probably my favorite day in the challenge!! I will say that I'm glad it's over-I learned a lot from the challenge and I'm glad we did it but it was a tough two weeks! Tomorrow I'll post a wrap up post about everything we learned and my overall impressions so be on the lookout for that.

Total cost: 3.76 per serving (7.52 for both of us)

Day 13

Amid the madness of Spring Break and DH's new schedule we fell off our eating plan hardcore. I went North to visit my parents for a few days which threw us off track. I'm home now and we're back on track to finish our last 2 days of healthy eating.

Breakfast:

Breakfast was banana walnut oatmeal accompanied by milk and an orange. No picture this time since DH made it while I was visiting my parents. He's become addicted to oatmeal as a result of this project. It was never something we ate before this project started and now it's become a staple for him. I'm not a huge fan, but I'm happy that DH found something he's loving that's healthy.

Total cost: 1.74 per serving (3.48 for both of us)


Lunch:
Lunch was a tofu salad sandwich-It was very odd.

Ingredients for the sandwich. The tofu was chopped up into chunks and mixed with chopped veggies and a dressing made out of mayonnaise, mustard and soy sauce.

The finished sandwich. The salad tasted delicious when we made it, but it didn't work well in sandwich form. The bread turned soggy and it was really hard to eat. I took the sandwich apart to try and salvage my meal, but the salad tasted different than the night before. We got an orange and milk to accompany our sandwich-it was a small lunch. I can say that I liked the salad when we first made it and I might make it again. I've discovered that I actually like tofu-who knew?

Total cost: 2.21 per serving (4.42 for both of us)

Dinner:

Dinner was "easy" red beans and rice. It was easy to make, but once again it took a long time to make. We started cooking about 6:00 and didn't eat until 8:00!!

Ingredients for the rice and beans.

Finished dinners! The red beans and rice was accompanied by lemon spinach. The spinach was really good and simple-the spinach was simply cooked and coated with lemon juice! It was awesome-very tangy and flavorful! The red beans and rice were just blah. No seasonings were used so they were kind of bland and tasteless. I dated a guy in high school whose family was from Lousiana and I loved eating the Cajun food his mom made! I still make some of her recipes and I love how spicy and flavorful Cajun food is. Red beans and rice is a Cajun staple and his mom's was amazing-this in no way matched the flavor. With some spices and flavoring in it it would have been amazing-but without any spices it was just bland. I was pretty disappointed-I don't know why this plan is so against the use of spices! That's what makes the meal :)

Total cost: 1.82 per serving (3.64 for both of us)

Day 12

We're so close to the finish line! I'm getting excited to get back to my regular cooking schedule! This has definitely been a very eye opening project. It is a lot more difficult to eat healthy than I previously thought. I was really one of those people who was dismissive of a lot of the excuses that were given for not eating healthy. I tended to look down on a lot of the choices people who were living in poverty made. While I still disagree with some of the choices made I can be more understanding of the challenges that go into making healthy choices. The average food stamp allotment provides $3.00 per person per DAY! That is not a lot of money to make healthy food choices. Many of our meals were over 3.00 per serving-that would be impossible to make on our food stamp budget. I will say I'm thankful that DH and I have the resources to do a project like this and that it isn't our reality-it was way harder than I expected.

Breakfast:

Breakfast today was cereal and scrambled eggs with salsa. We essentially combined the meals from the past few days to make one meal.

Getting ready to cook up the eggs! 

Finished breakfasts! I've already talked about the values of cold cereal so I don't have much to add. The eggs and salsa were delicious-I liked them better in burrito format rather than just scrambled but they were still pretty good.

Total cost: 1.86 per serving (3.72 for both of us)

Lunch:

Lunch was the leftover white chili from the night before.

The leftover chili was accompanied by a side salad-carrots, lettuce and vinegarette dressing.

Finished lunches! The toast and milk were the usual accompaniments. The chili kept well for the next day and was pretty easy to reheat in the microwave. The salad was yummy. The toast was actually a good accompaniment to the chili-it was pretty tasty to dunk the buttered toast in the chili.

Total cost: 3.78 per serving (7.56 for both of us)

Dinner:

Dinner was quick and easy but strange-it was misickquatash also known as Indian succotash. We had a side of mashed potatoes to go along with it.

Ingredients for our dinner. Luckily it was WAY less ingredients than yesterday's dinner!

First step was to brown the ground beef.

Once the ground beef was browned the tomatoes, Lima beans and corn were added. Once they were added simmer for 5 minutes covered and dinner is finished! This was a less than 15 minute dinner which was nice! 

Finished suppers! This wasn't a bad supper-it was definitely full of veggies, colorful, healthy and easy to make. It tasted pretty good as well-right before serving it was topped with nutmeg which was an interesting choice. If I was making this on my own I probably would have added more seasonings to it to give it some more flavor. This meal could work with lots of different types of veggies and still be good! However, it was kind of expensive which worked against it. I do think this is something simple to make and something that we could make again.

Total cost: 3.10 per serving (6.20 for both of us)

Day 11

Holy moly! Thank goodness it was Spring Break! Day 11 was a complicated and time consuming day! Dinner took almost 3 hours to prepare-and most of that was hands on cooking time!!

Breakfast:

Breakfast was scrambled eggs and salsa wrapped up in a burrito!

Breakfast! The eggs were made in a very interesting way-you baked them in the oven in a Pyrex pan! They actually turned out really good and it reduced the cooking time by a lot! I liked that the burritos were portable-I had a ton of stuff to do and I could take my breakfast in the car with me! We will definitely be making these again! You could add veggies, sausage, cheese and all sorts of stuff to the burritos to make them more filling! 

Total Cost: .80 per serving (1.60 for both of us) This was our cheapest meal yet!

Lunch:

Lunch was a roast beef sandwich, carrot sticks and an apple with peanut butter. 

Ingredients for lunch! I like all the fun ideas they have for sandwiches on this plan. It's easy to add some tomato and lettuce to a sandwich to amp up the health factor!

Finished sandwiches. The lunches also included carrot sticks and apple slices with peanut butter. DH ended up putting the peanut butter on his carrot sticks and he said it was really good! I find the carrot sticks to be kind of boring even with some ranch dressing. I'll have to try peanut butter next time!

Total cost: 2.48 per serving (4.96 for both of us)

Dinner:

Dinner was white chili, herbed vegetables and baked sweet potatoes! The chili took FOREVER!

All these ingredients for the chili. Thank goodness we had some leftover cooked chicken or we would have had to cook chicken too!

 First step was to cook the beans. It took an hour and a half to cook the beans! I didn't realize it took that long to cook beans! All the water cooked away and I ended up having to add more half way through.

While the beans were cooking it was time to chop up the veggies! We had some tomatoes that needed to be used up so I went ahead and added them to the chili. The chili used 3 cloves of garlic!

I made the sweet potatoes in the oven. It's very easy-stab them with a fork, sprinkle with salt, garlic powder and pepper, wrap in aluminum foil and bake at 400 degrees for 45 minutes! They turned out so good!! They were really soft and tender and delicious!

I was running like crazy-three pots on the stove and the oven going!

The canned vegetables were mixed with onions and Rosemary. 

Finished chili! It looks like a lot of food, but it was only 4 servings!

Finished dinners! The chili was topped with shredded corn tortillas. It was a lot of food! Dinner was good-the chili was certainly interesting. I liked it but because of the preparation time I probably won't make it again. I usually make delicious chili in the slow cooker-it takes only 15 minutes of hands on time and it tastes just as good! It's also cheaper than this recipe-the chili was EXPENSIVE! The herbed veggies were good, but we used a little too much Rosemary. I always forget that since our Rosemary is from the garden it's more powerful than the dried stuff. These were simple to make-I'll definitely make them again! I LOVE sweet potatoes and we already eat them quite a bit-these will be made again for sure!

Total cost: 4.25 per serving (8.50 for both of us). All the veggies that went into this really raised the cost quite a bit!

Day 10

We've had a crazy schedule lately due to DH's work schedule so we have been eating out more and more and cooking less and less. We've finally been able to get on track-we're so close to being finished!

Breakfast:

Breakfast was cold cereal with fruit and milk. It was a morning I was in pain and I was happy it was something I could eat on the couch while using my massager! It was a cheap and easy breakfast! Cold cereal is such an easy meal and it's pretty healthy! We've made so many complicated breakfasts and this one was so cheap and easy! There really isn't a lot you can say about cereal. We had peanut butter toast to go with it! I love the fact that peanut butter toast has healthy fat, protein and whole grains! It's so easy and makes a great snack! I've actually added peanut butter toast to my regular repertoire! 

Total cost: 1.10 per serving (2.20 for both of us)

Lunch:

Lunch was salmon salad with milk and crackers. It was disgusting!! 

Ingredients for the lunches!

The salads were made with a whole can of salmon! It kind of overpowered everything else! Even with a ton of dressing you couldn't hide the fish smell.

The salads were accompanied by crackers. There wasn't a lot of food with this meal-no fruit or side dishes :(. The salads didn't keep well in the fridge! When I took it out to eat it I practically threw up-it smelled like the salmon had turned. I texted DH (since we all know my aversion to fish) and he agreed. I tried to pick off the cucumbers and tomatoes to eat but they had absorbed the fish juice!

I ended up cheating and going to Burger King. This was the first meal that was truly inedible! I texted DH this picture with the caption "yup I cheated". Slightly awkward situation since his friend was looking at his phone and didn't see the picture! Oh well! I did drink my milk and eat my crackers!

Total cost: 3.46 per serving (6.92 for both of us) This was a very expensive and terrible meal-not even factoring in the cost of eating out when it was inedible.

Dinner:

After the disappointment of lunch I was looking forward to a yummy dinner. DH ended up cooking and I didn't have to be involved at all! 

Simple and easy supper-honey mustard pork chops and baked potatoes. The soy sauce and mustard were mixed together and the chops were soaked for a few minutes before being fried in oil!

Dessert was applesauce cookies (and cake since it made so much!) DH said these were really easy and quick to make!

Finished dinners-it didn't look like much. They were yummy! The pork chops had a lot of flavor-we did over cook them a little bit. Next time I would like to bake them instead of frying them! The potatoes were topped with salsa-I was unsure about that combination at first but it's actually really good and saves a ton of calories! Surprisingly we didn't have any frozen veggies with this meal-I thought that was strange! It would have added some much needed color.

The applesauce cake! We had so much batter that we turned it into a cake! It was awesome! I've been really impressed with the desserts on this plan! They are healthy and taste delicious! It's nice to have desserts to munch on during the week, even if we don't eat all of it! 

I really liked today's dinner! It was easy and very delicious!

Total cost: 3.45 per serving (6.90 for both of us) It was a little pricey for sure, but the dessert was a large part of it!

Day 9

I was thankful that day 9 was an easy day. In between the craziness of my birthday (most of the night was spent cleaning up dog vomit and pee after an accident) and work craziness I wasn't at all looking forward to a long day of cooking.

Breakfast:

Breakfast this morning was a sausage omelette and hash browns. It was pretty yummy and the omelette was very cheesy!! If we were making this on our own it would have been made with egg whites. It was a nice treat to have a real egg omelette! The hash browns were good (except that they cost me one scorched stainless steel pan since DH isn't very good and cooking in anything other than a non stick skillet). It took about 25 minutes for the eggs to firm up-is that normal? I feel that cooking eggs should take less time than that.

Total cost: 2.31 per serving (4.62 for both of us)

Lunch:

Lunch was peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and carrot sticks! I was happy it was a quick meal to make the night before.

We used Damson plum jelly on our sandwiches! It was so yummy! Sand plum jelly is very sweet and it mixed well with the peanut butter. I just can't say much about carrot sticks with ranch dressing or PB&J. This was a pretty basic and simple meal that anyone could make. Even my students could make this meal on their own without any danger!

Total cost: 1.78 per serving (3.56 for both)

Dinner:

Dinner was tuna casserole with frozen green beans and a roll.

Ingredients for quick tuna casserole.

The milk, tuna, peas and cream of mushroom soup were all mixed together in the pan. The recipe indicated that you should mix them in a bowl and then put it in the baking dish but I just used the dish as the mixing bowl.

You cooked the egg noodles for two minutes and then added them to the mixture before topping with bread crumbs. Bake at 350 for 30 minutes and dinner is done!

Finished dinners! The casserole really tasted like tuna! When you cook tuna it gets really smelly (or maybe I'm just crazy). DH really enjoyed it and I wasn't a big fan. The roll and the green beans were standard fare-the usual stuff we eat every day. This was a good meal to make after work-I think the casserole would work well with any type of pre cooked meat (chicken, ground beef etc.). I'll probably modify the recipe and use chicken next time-then it will be a keeper! 

Total cost: 2.48 per serving (4.96 for both of us)

I liked that today was very simpler  and fitted to a working schedule. While none of the meals today were exciting or fancy they were filling, healthy, cheap and easy to make! This is what I wanted from this meal plan since we started! I didn't have to spend hours in the kitchen and I still had time to get stuff done even after cooking! 

Day 8

Day 8 was a very interesting day. I wasn't a fan of breakfast and lunch-but dinner was a huge hit.

Breakfast

Breakfast was raisin oatmeal (no peanut butter this time) along with milk and a banana. I'm honestly getting pretty tired of the obsession with oatmeal! There are so many other breakfast options out there and adding raisins to it just doesn't make it any better!!

Raisin oatmeal-it definitely is a healthy and filling meal but not exactly the most appetizing way to start my day. I know lots of people enjoy oatmeal, but I don't. I will say that this is an easy and practical breakfast that is pretty cheap. This would be practical for many families.

1.63 per serving (3.26 for both of us)


Lunch:

Lunch was a tuna sandwich with tomatoes, mayo and lettuce along with a side of sliced cucumbers and ranch dressing. I enjoyed the sandwich but it didn't keep very well in the fridge-the tomatoes made the bread all soggy by lunch time which was gross. I definitely enjoyed my side of cucumbers-I actually didn't even dunk them in the ranch. They were just as tasty on their own! It was a fine lunch, but nothing that was very exciting!

Lunch ingredients

Sliced cucumbers-it wasn't a lot!

2.12 per serving (4.24 for both of us)


Dinner:

Dinner was red hot fusilli pasta. We ended up using bow ties since they didn't have fusilli pasta at our grocery store. The side dishes were peas and a dinner roll. For week 2 we bought pretzel rolls instead of white dinner rolls. They were the same price and have less calories (and ours are whole grain!). It made all the difference! It was so much better than just a plain dinner roll.

The pasta was pretty simple to make and delicious! I enjoyed it, but I'm not sure we cooked it right since our sauce wasn't very saucy. It was more like chunks of tomato and chicken-it was good though!

Finished dinners. I was able to mix the peas in with the pasta which added some flavor to the frozen veggies. I'm actually growing more fond of the frozen veggies at each meal! They are so quick to make and are such an easy way to add some health to a meal. It doesn't add much to the preparation time and can be added to any meal. This is something I could easily encourage my 8th graders to do-they could even prepare some frozen veggies for a family dinner! Some progress is better than none!

I think more topping would have maybe made them set up into bar form. 

More of an apple crumble

Dessert was apple cinnamon bars. They were actually pretty simple to make and they were tasty-however they didn't quite turn out like a bar. I was expecting something portable, but it was just a crumbly mess. There wasn't quite enough sugar mix to cover the apples and they never set up into a bar format. It was really delicious and tasted a lot like apple crisp! We will be making these again but I might try to find a way to modify the recipe in order to make them turn into more of a bar. These would be a great thing to have for breakfast as well. Dinner tonight was definitely a hit!

Total Cost: 3.71 per serving (7.42 for both of us)

Day 7

Day 7 fell on a weekend for us and it was SO much less stressful when we had the whole day to cook.

Breakfast:
Breakfast today was fantastic French toast! I had actually mentioned to DH that I was craving French toast and I was so surprised when I woke up! I actually thought he had forgot about our challenge and made me a surprise. The breakfast was paired with juice and a banana! The French toast was delicious! I just wish we could have had more than one slice. I have no complaints about this breakfast!

French toast cooking on the Griddler. For a cooking implement I totally recommend the Cuisinart Griddler! It takes on the job of a griddle, panini press and you can buy plates to turn it into a waffle maker! We use it all the time-for breakfasts, lunches and dinners! It cooks awesome hamburgers :) Plus it's super easy to clean-I used to have a George Foreman and it was a pain to clean. The plates on the Griddler are removable so it's awesome.

We forgot to take a picture of the rest of the meal-we were way too busy chowing down! It was an awesome breakfast.

Total Cost: 1.18 per serving (2.36 per meal)


Lunch:
Lunch was leftover lentil stew with toast and milk. Since I already covered the lentil stew in Day 6 I won't cover it again. It was just as delicious the second day (and it was even good cold).
Total Cost: 1.32 per serving (2.64 for both of us)

Lentil stew again-it was just as delicious the second time around!

Dinner:
Dinner was a pan fried pork chop with a baked potato and cabbage slaw. DH commented that we were frying more things on this plan then we usually do-which is true. The pork chop was awesome-DH jazzed it up a bit with some breadcrumbs and seasonings. The baked potatoes were okay-the salsa was an interesting topping and something I hadn't thought to add to my baked potatoes. I would have liked to add some sour cream or cheese as well.

The pork chops were pretty simple-I've made these before out of my Loveless Cafe cookbook-typical Southern food! 

We made lettuce slaw instead of cabbage slaw since our cabbage went bad before we were able to use it. It was actually pretty interesting and kind of tasty. DH wasn't a big fan but I really liked it. We apparently did a terrible job of taking pictures today. I guess the meals were so delicious that we were too busy eating to photograph the meals!

Total cost: 3.41 per serving (6.81 per meal)

I really liked today! Every meal was pretty simple to make and nothing took a lot of time! Also the meals were inexpensive and delicious. This was probably the perfect day so far out of the challenge.