Cooking Local for the United Way Hunger Challenge

One of the perceptions we hear often when talking about local and organic food is that it’s more expensive. We’ve done cost comparisons before, and in fact, we’re planning on doing another one this month. It’s our belief that you can eat well, and eat locally, even on a budget.

So that we can prove this theory, we’ve signed up for the United Way of King County’s Hunger Challenge.

Here are the rules:

• Eat breakfast, lunch and dinner spending only $7 per day (two people get $12/day).
• Salt and pepper don’t count but all other seasonings, cooking oils, condiments, snacks, drinks, and everything else do.
• Don’t use food you already own.
• Don’t accept food from family, friends, coworkers and others. Not even the free samples from Costco!
• Try to include fresh produce and healthy protein each day.

Now right away we’ve want to enter this with full disclosure. We’ve got a prepaid dinner function to attend on Thursday, the 28th. So we won’t be eating out of the $60 for that dinner. However, we’ll substitute Saturday’s dinner for Thursday’s so we’re still eating 5 breakfasts, 5 lunches, and 5 dinners on our $60. Will that tweak our results a little? Yeah, it will. We’ll likely eat more food on Thursday night than we would on any other night of this challenge and the food will be high quality protein. This will likely influence how we feel on Friday (how hungry). Unfortunately, we paid for this dinner a month ago, and the tickets are non-refundable, so we’re going to go.

Breakfasts will be an egg dish, similar to our handheld frittatas, but likely altered to make them a bit cheaper. Lunches will be our standard fare of burritos, made ahead of time on Sunday. Dinners will start with one whole roasted chicken, and utilize beans and legumes high in protein as well as fresh vegetables.

We’ve got one non-local caveat to this challenge. Spices are expensive. We’ve got jars of powdered padron pappers, jarred oregano, and a variety of other spices that we’ve picked up over the past few months that are local. We can’t afford to replace the entire jar for this challenge, and we can’t use spices we already own. So what we’re going to do is utilize the bulk section of the supermarket, buying a couple of teaspoons of various spices that we’ll need. These items won’t be local for this challenge, but we’ll note that and we’ll note how much they are locally.

Check back tomorrow for the results of our shopping trip to the University District Farmers Market on our budget for the week.