Bonus lentils!

Tonight's dinner. All my meals are starting to look the same...

I've cooked up my lentils for dinner tonight and other meals tomorrow  (please don't make me eat more peas!). I paid $1.33 for 2 cups of dried lentils. I expected them to cook up to 4 cups. But lucky me: they cooked up into 5 cups! Instead of paying $0.33 per serving, I paid $0.27 per serving. That extra $0.06 will go far.

I don't have a kitchen scale, so I've been tracking my costs and volume of what I eat by portioning, and sometimes storing each portion in a separate container. For dried goods (lentils and peas in my case) I cooked the entire batch, then measured them out into cup-sized portions into individual containers. I cut my tofu into eight equal segments of approximately 2 oz. each. I quartered my cabbage and my onion. Oil, salt and sugar live in big containers, and I measure out the amount I need for a particular purpose.

Portioned lentils for the next two days

It looks like more work than it is. I'm surprised at how easy this part of the challenge has been.

For dinner, I'm frying up my lentils with salt, oil, crumbled tofu, and onion. I really want to fat from the oil. The cost is as follows:

1 cup cooked lentils = $0.27
2 oz tofu = $0.12
1/4 onion (less 3 Tbs from my snack) = $0.10
2 Tbs oil = $0.10
Salt to taste = $0.01

Dinner tonight will cost $0.60, which means I'll have $0.30 left over!!! Watch out $0.33 cookie - I will eat most of you.

The one thing that would make me happier than a cookie is reaching my $1,000 fundraising goal to help people living in extreme poverty. Donate here: https://www.livebelowtheline.com/me/claire


-Selfish Blogger