Mission Year Meals: Thursday

Thursday is the last day of our grocery week! Sophie and I made taco pie. Although normally we take food to our weekly Thursday night citywide gathering, this weekend was actually “Come and See,” a time when family and friends were invited to visit our home and taste the Mission Year life. But this week we had Thursday night to welcome our guests arriving into town. The taco pie recipe is one shared with me by my sister, a source of many of my recipes. Here it is:

Taco Pie

1 lb. ground beef

1 ½ c. chopped onion

1 pkg taco seasoning

4 oz can chopped green chiles, drained

½ c. Bisquick mix

½ c. shredded sharp cheddar cheese

Brown the beef and onions together; drain. Stir in taco seasoning; place in sprayed 9” pie pan and top with chilies. Blend Bisquick, milk, and egg together and pour over beef slowly. Bake 25 min at 400, or until done. Sprinkle with cheese and continue baking until cheese is melted.

We are also serving it with salad and sour cream on the side. Those ingredients:

1 head of lettuce

A few tomatoes

Cucumber

Carrot shavings

Sour cream

We usually doctor meals a little bit to our liking. In this meal, we used more than one pound of beef (to feed more mouths) and increased the amount of bread topping and cheese. Although you can’t tell from this week’s menu, we don’t usually eat much cheese, so when we do eat cheese we indulge ourselves. So instead of just sprinkling cheese on top, I also sprinkled a layer between the beef and bisquick topping.

Ground beef is actually one of our staple meat ingredients. We usually buy the 5 lb. tube and use it for several meals. We don’t usually buy it for just one meal as we did this week, but it was on sale, so we snatched it up in anticipation of meals next week. We don’t always have room in the budget to plan ahead, but when we do, we take advantage of it!

COST:

Ground Beef $9.95 (An investment for next week too!)

Jalapenos (instead of chilles) $0.14

Baking Mix (off-brand bisquick) $2.49

Block of Sharp Cheddar Cheese $1.99

Sour Cream $1.49

Other Ingredients on hand: onion, taco seasoning, and veggies from the general/lunch/breakfast budget

TOTAL: $10.00

So there you have it! Six meals, all under $10.00! It can be done, and it is done every week in my house. 

Mission Year Meals: The Grocery List

Many of my friends were intrigued (or should I say shocked?) that my daily food budget is a little more than $2.00 a day, which totals to $117 for my team for the week. Some of you don’t believe that we actually eat enough to survive. This is the first in a series of posts this week to prove to you that we are not only surviving but thriving with plenty to eat and actually hosting guests for dinner once a week!

Early on we established a system for feeding ourselves that has endured until now. For some context to this conversation, here’s our system:

• Everyone is on their own each day for breakfast and lunch.
• For dinner, we are divided into pairs that plan and cook two meals each week, with everyone taking point on one meal a week.
• Every month we switch pairs and switch nights of the week, so that we cook with different people on different days.
• For example, this month I cook with Sophie on Sundays and Thursdays. If we decide that she will take point on Sundays, then I take point on Thursdays, providing the recipe and leadership in the meal preparation.
• We eat together for dinner whenever we can, which is most days, but we always eat together on Family Dinner night, which right now is Mondays.
• On Saturdays, we host a Community Dinner, inviting neighbors and friends from work or church.
• On Fridays, our Sabbath days, no one cooks.
• The pair that cooked the night before does dishes. On Saturday, the Thursday cooking team does dishes.

Now here are some of our operational systems for buying groceries:

• Each week on Saturday morning we create a grocery list, naming items we need for breakfast, lunch, and for each dinner.
• We allot ten dollars for each dinner, leaving about $50 for lunch and breakfast for the week.
• A group of three or four of us goes shopping and the rest of us stay behind to clean the house.

 

The grocery store we frequent is Save-a-Lot, a discount store that carries few name-brand items and has a somewhat limited selection. It’s about five blocks away (depending on how you count blocks), and we usually walk, although there is a bus that goes straight from our block to the store.

We’ve pretty well mastered the layout of the store, and it doesn’t take long for us to fill our cart with the items we seek. We record the cost of each item as we pick it up, and at the end of our spree we add it up and make sure it’s within our budget of $117. Usually it is, but sometimes we have to make hard decisions about what to put back to stay within the budget. 

For example, this week we didn't buy much meat, but we had a lot of dairy products on our list. When we counted up the costs, we were initially at $121. We talked through what we could put back, and ended up getting blocks of cheese instead of bags of shredded cheese, and traded one pack of sliced American cheese for imitation. We also considered putting back the ground turkey in favor of ground beef, but our cheese compromises saved us enough to stay at $115.

Starting on Saturday, I will post our individual dinner meals, sharing recipes and cost-saving ingredients. Each day’s post will be about what we ate exactly one week earlier, so don’t get confused when I reference a Super Bowl party on Sunday! I hope you enjoy this series—it has been fun so far to make it. And hopefully the doubters will believe that we eat and eat well--with just $117!