Day 6: Food

Saturday!  My favorite day of the week especially when we have very little planned to do.

For breakfast, I made the kids oatmeal pancakes with cinnamon.  These are incredibly delicious, and there is always enough batter left over to make some pancake muffins for the girls' lunchboxes during the week. 

Josh made the grown-ups an omelet with cheddar cheese, cilantro, yellow pepper, and onion.  We had thick slices of bread as toast.  It was delicious.

As a mid-morning snack, the kids each pilfered one of the pancake mini muffins, and Clare and James had an apple each.

It is at this point that we allowed the kids to deviate from the rules of the challenge.  James's school, Fayette Co-operating Preschool, was having its Fall Fling.  This is one of the school's major fundraisers, and it's lots of fun.  Since this is our last year in Co-op, no one wanted to miss out.  So we went and let the kids get all kinds of junk food:  pizza, juice boxes, cupcakes, cookies, and popcorn.  They were quite pleased.  The grown-ups passed up the sushi bar to honor the challenge and instead went home to eat leftovers of pizza, hoppin' john, enchilada casserole, and mac n' cheese.  I also had a bunch of carrots and celery and an apple afterward.  I do not doubt that the sushi would have been much tastier.

We then went to Whole Foods to get supplies for our grown-up Saturday night dinner.  We spent $13.99 on bread, olives, Brussels sprouts, apples, and bananas.  We pulled out a frozen whole chicken leftover from our CSA bounty of the summer.  A comparable bird cost about $13 at Whole Food, so all told we spent another $26.99 on top of the $106 we had already spent.  I think that puts us at about $133 for the entire week leaving us a few dollars under my SNAP goal of $139.50.

The kids had some banilla yogurt for a snack.  I'm guessing that Josh snacked throughout the day as well (he's always hungry), but I did not monitor his intake that carefully.

For dinner, the kids had cheese quesadillas with a refried-bean-like concoction I made out of the leftover black-eyed peas and onions.  They didn't seem to mind it.  I also cut up a whole yellow pepper for them as a side.  Between dinner and bed, Clare stole some of our bread and handed out a granola bar to each child.  James also had a banana.

Before dinner, Josh and I munched on olives and bread that had a side of olive oil for dipping. Our actual dinner was incredibly delicious.  Josh roasted the chicken and served it with an onion and parsley sauce.  He also steamed some Brussels sprouts and then crisped them up in some olive oil in a frying pan.  I roasted the butternut squash that we never used and drizzled balsamic vinegar over it.  All the flavors together were excellent!

When we were watching a movie later, Josh made a huge batch of popcorn on the stove in canola oil.  We ate every last kernel.  Yum.

Now on to the last day...