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: Monday

Today is Nicole’s night to cook, and we’re having Italian! Here’s the link to the recipe she found on La Cucina Italiana: Fettuccine with Lemon and Peas. Like most of our meals, she modified it to fit our needs, mostly in ways that she didn’t anticipate.

When we send out our grocery shopping team each week, we trust them to make decisions about what to buy and what not to buy and how to save money. For example, if the store doesn't have an ingredient that we need or it’s too expensive, then the grocery team is responsible for figuring out what to do instead. And we trust each other to do that.

That happened a couple of times with Nicole’s meal. The first time was with her pasta. We wondered how much to buy. She had mentioned one pound, and that was one box. It didn’t seem like enough for all of us, but we trusted the list and saved a little money by buying just one box of pasta.

Then we got to the lemons, obviously a key ingredient for this recipe. The list requested three, but we thought that was too expensive considering we already had lemon juice at home. So we got one instead.

When Nicole went to make her meal, she too was surprised at how little pasta was in a one-pound box. And she was surprised to have just one lemon. The lemons were for zesting, not for juicing as we thought!

So to make the recipe work, she cooked some potatoes and threw them in with the pasta. Then she juiced the lemon instead of zesting it.

But apparently juice didn’t do for the sauce what zest would have done, and it tasted horrible. To rescue the sauce, she added sugar and salt and a few other spices.

She proceeded with the meal and served it to us wondering if it would be enough food and if we would like it. We all dished it up and tried it, not knowing that she had made so many modifications to her recipe. We all expressed how tasty it was, not just out of respect for the cook but because it really was yummy! Nicole sighed and giggled and told us about all that went into the meal and we appreciated it even more.

The cost breakdown:

Bag of frozen peas $1.19

1 lb. box of fettuccine pasta $0.99

Heavy whipping cream $1.99

Potatoes (10 lb. bag, used for other meals) $3.49

Lemon $0.63

Other ingredients we didn't have to purchase: Salt, butter, pepper

TOTAL: $8.50

Mission Year Meals: Super Bowl Sunday

Today is a little bit different from most days because it’s Super Bowl Sunday! You may remember that we don’t have a television in our house. For that reason we went to our pastor’s house to watch the game with his family. So we didn’t have to cook! But we did bring a dip over and some cupcakes over to their house. So here are the recipes we used for Sunday and the meal breakdown.

Cheese Dip

1 block (1 lb.) of Velveeta cheese

1 pound of sausage

1 can of tomatoes with green chilies

1 can of cream of mushroom soup

Brown the sausage. Combine all ingredients in a crock pot and cook it on high for one hour.

The cupcakes we took to the party were sent in a care package! We get care packages fairly often, and this week three of us got packages at one time, so we took the cupcakes to the party to share our fresh-baked bounty. The benefactor of the cupcakes also sent powdered sugar to make frosting for the cupcakes, so I made cream cheese frosting, too. Here’s the recipe:

Cream Cheese Icing

3 cups powdered sugar

1 package cream cheese

1 stick of butter

½ t. vanilla

Combine ingredients and mix until creamy.

Red velvet cupcakes in a football formation!

Here’s the cost breakdown of Sunday’s groceries:

Cream Cheese $1.49

Sausage $2.29

Velveeta Cheese (off-brand “Marvella”) $4.99

Can of tomatoes with green chilies $.63

The other items we already had: cream of mushroom soup, powdered sugar, butter, vanilla

TOTAL: $9.50

Today’s meals demonstrate an important aspect of our lives: other people looking out for us. Our friends love to provide for us, and we always have enough. Sometimes we have abundance! As noted above, we receive a few care packages throughout each month. We also have friends in the city—neighbors, co-workers, church friends—that invite us over to parties, take us out to lunch, or bring us fruit. So thanks to everyone who cares for us. We would get by without you, but it makes it easier to have you helping out!

Mission Year Meals: Saturday

Saturday is the night we host our community dinner. We invite neighbors, friends from church, co-workers, or some combination of those to come to our house and share a meal. It’s out biggest meal of the week, so we sometimes have to get creative about how to make our money go farther. This week, though, we hosted our next-door neighbors, an older couple that look out for us and chat with us on the porch regularly. They were the first people we met in the neighborhood, so we’ve been trying to have them over since then! Finally we had them over to enjoy a meal with us.

On the menu: White Cheese and Chicken Lasagna!

Head Chef: Priscillia.

Sous Chef: Walter Levi

Check out the recipe here!

Actually this week we were a little ahead of the game, buying some of the ingredients last week, including the lasagna noodles, chicken broth, some of the cheese, and spinach.

Here’s the cost break-down:

One block of mozzarella cheese $1.99

Boneless, Skinless Chicken $5.98

Italian Bread $1.99

We have on hand many of the ingredients necessary for the recipe: onions, garlic, flour, milk, and spices.

In addition, our neighbors brought over a salad and dessert to complement our lasagna.

TOTAL: $10.00

Saturday’s meal is the most difficult to keep in budget, but with generosity from our neighbors and a little bit of planning ahead, we enjoyed a tasty meal and delightful conversation about our neighborhood, encountering critters in the city, home remedies for sickness, and Catholic traditions, with plans penciled in to visit mass at our neighbors’ parish.