Monday, October 6, 2014

SNAP Challenge Shopping

Due to some unforeseen circumstances, I wasn't able to get to the grocery store when I would have liked to this week. This led to my children eating peanut butter sandwiches for dinner about three nights in a row and to me received a text from my friend Abby asking me if I had dropped off the planet or if I was still doing this whole SNAP challenge thing.

It would drive me crazy to deal with people like me sometimes.

But I finally made it to the grocery store and I was ready to so my shopping specifically for this challenge. The whole challenge is to try to keep the cost of your food to under $3.89 daily. I figured that I would just multiply that by three and that would be my budget at the grocery store.

Armed with my $11.67 budget, I grabbed my cart and got to work.


Basically I tried to choose items that I knew I would eat, that were at least somewhat nutritious, that I could stretch out to last a couple days, that were cheap. As I shopped, I snapped photos of each item I was buying so I could keep track of my total.





Of course, I forgot a very important detail. I'm terrible at math.


So much for staying under budget! I bought everything anyway because I realized I likely wouldn't be eating ALL of this food in three days and that I would also be using some resources that I already had on hand in my kitchen. Hopefully I didn't lose points right out of the gate.

It wasn't until I got home and started unloading things that I realized that I hadn't really planned for actual MEALS. Looking at the small collection of items on the counter, I started to worry that I was going to be really hungry and that I'd missed the point of all this entirely.

Thankfully, my husband was making a huge batch of chili which is very cost-effective and could easily be used in this challenge. Score.

Plan for Day One:
Breakfast - maybe scrambled eggs with avocado? Oatmeal?
Lunch - reheated chili
Dinner - pasta? Something involving the chicken thighs I got for super-cheap last week?

There's going to be so much more math involved in this thing than I realized. Wish me luck!

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