United Way Hunger Challenge - Prep Work

Lots of soft tacos

Sunday we spent some time preparing for the United Way Hunger Challenge by premaking our breakfasts and lunches for the week. We do this on a regular basis anyway, so this wasn’t out of the ordinary for this challenge. We’ve been loving homemade soft tacos for lunches because they’re easy, ultimately flexible, and delicious. Our basic guide is 2-3 cups of beans, 1 lb of ground beef, a vegetable such as kale or cabbage, a bit of cheese, and a bit of salsa or other flavoring. For this challenge we used the cheapest vegetable we could find, cabbage. The cabbage was on sale at Nash’s for $1.39 per pound and we used about 1/3 of a pound of cabbage. We found cheese on sale at the local QFC. 2 pounds of Tillamook cheddar for $6. This was one of four items for this challenge that we purchased outside of the farmers market.

A few notes as we get started. For each item, the cost that you see is the cost for the amount of the item we used. For example, we purchased $6 worth of flour. So far, we’ve used $2 of the $6. We plan on using more of the flour later in the week. Same for the cream. We’ve only used a very small amount of the bottle of cream so far, but the rest will go in our coffee for the week, as well as in either a soup or mashed potatoes.

This post breaks down our breakfasts and lunches for the week, but for the rest of the week, we’ll have daily posts showing how much we spent per day and how we’re doing on our goal of feeding ourselves on $60 for 5 days.

Beef and Bean Soft Tacos

The cost breakdown for the soft tacos is:

• Flour . Nash’s Organic Hard Red Wheat- $2
• Lard. Sea Breeze Farm – $2
• Beef. Olsen Farms – $5
• White beans. Willie Greens – $2.50
• Cheese. Tillamook from QFC, on sale – $2
• Cabbage. Nash’s – $0.50

Soft Taco Leftovers

Unadjusted Total Cost: $14.00

BUT, this yields us enough burritos for 7 days, a couple of extra tortillas, and some extra filling mix that we can use in another meal. So, total cost for 5 days worth of lunches is approximately $11. ( (14/7) * 5) – $1.50 for the extra filling and extra tortillas. We had about 4 Tbsp of ground beef leftover, and almost a cup of pureed beans.

Notes: The beans are a very simple recipe. Soak white beans overnight. Cook in a pot full of water for about 40 minutes, or until soft. Puree in a food processor with some salt and pepper and optionally some spices. You don’t have to puree the beans. Many weeks we don’t. So there’s really no special equipment needed for this recipe beyond a rolling pin or dowel to make the tortillas, a pot for the beans, a pan for the beef, and a cheese grater for the cheese. Total calories for each soft taco is approximately 350.

Adjusted Total Cost: $8.50

Breakfast Frittatas

Next we move onto our breakfast frittatas. We adjusted the recipe a little for this week.

We made 10 of these beauties

Here’s the breakdown.

• 7 Eggs. Skagit River Ranch – $3.50
• Cream. Golden Glen Creamery – $0.25
• Lard to caramelize the onions. Sea Breeze Farms – $0.25
• Kale. Nash’s – $1
• Crushed red pepper. Bulk spice – $0.25
• Onion. Willie Greens – $0.35
• Cheese. Tillamook – $0.75
• Rye Berries. Nash’s – $0.25

Notes: Normally we’d use bacon in these. However, we completely forgot to buy bacon at the market. So instead, we took the savings from not buying the bacon and bought coffee to get us through the week. To substitute for the bacon in this recipe, we added extra cheese, and some rye berries to up the calories a bit and add protein, carbs, and fiber. Total calories for each frittata is approximately 160.

Total Cost: $6.60

Total Weekly Cost so far: $15.10. Leaving us $44.90 left for dinners and extras.