Challenge Week: Day Seven

Here's what we ate today, Day 7:

• Breakfast: challah with peanut butter and honey for the adults; the last of the cereal and milk for the kids (their choice); bananas.
• Morning snack for kids and Eric: walnuts and apple slices. 
• Morning snack for me: a spoonful of peanut butter.
• Lunch: the last of the challah, plain; tuna fish and black beans for the kids (one also had some more walnuts; the other had the last of the yogurt); leftover bean soup with tuna fish in it for the adults; grapefruit. 
• Afternoon snack: popcorn.
• Dinner: chili pasta (that is, pasta mixed with leftover chili), topped with the last bit of cheese; the last of the corn and broccoli; pineapple for the kids. (After watching the kids all day while I caught up on my work, Eric also decided to have a beer with dinner even though it wasn't part of the food stamp budget.) 

At the end of the challenge week, we have this food left: 

Also left over: one grapefruit (I forgot to put it in the photo), part of the bag of popcorn, about half the container of coffee, and about half a bag of frozen peas. We also have a few leftovers and some pasta sauce in the fridge, but not a whole meal's worth of food. 

Interestingly (and despite Eric's concern at the start of the week), enough food is left that if we really were broke, we would not starve in the next few days, although our meals would be quite limited in variety.

Eric said he missed having meat this week and found the meals to be a bit repetitive, but we did not go hungry anytime. In fact, our meals were pretty similar to what we usually eat. As for the kids, I don't think they noticed all that much difference besides not having a variety of cereal to choose from and not having juice boxes for one kid's lunch (I put juice in a Thermos instead). But I don't expect these results to be typical. 

As I said to Eric last night, in a way I've been preparing for this challenge for three years. Since we started trying to cut down on artificial ingredients in our food in 2009, I've been reading food blogs and learning how to cook things from scratch. Along the way, I've developed a knack for repurposing leftovers in creative ways.

I really am tempted to retake the challenge eating only what someone might be able to prepare in a motel room without a kitchen, and without making a grocery list before hitting the supermarket. An alternate challenge might be to eat only what can be purchased in a convenience store in a food desert. 

I'm looking forward to attending the closing meeting of the food stamp challenge tomorrow morning and hearing about other participants' experiences.