Wednesday, July 2, 2008

No Buy July, Day 2

Today was officially day two of NBJ. And, I'm glad to report that I haven't spent a cent. Last night for dinner Jeana and I decided it would be fun to have a baked potato bar, so together we created quite the delicious feast. Jeana made great chili and I made the cheese/broccoli sauce. We rolled the potatoes in kosher salt before baking and they were really yummy. We were stuffed by the end of our meal. We finished it off with the worlds best reduced-fat mint brownies and we were all quite happy.
Tonight I decided I should try something with beans and rice since that's what we've been joking about. So, I found this recipe and altered it a bit. I used two cans of beans, threw in some garlic, a cup of tomato/chicken bouillon, and more cumin than it called for, and topped it with a dollop of sour cream. It would have been good with a squeeze of lime juice, too. And if you're feeling totally wild, you could grill a chicken breast or something to go in it, too.

I liked it, Lucas liked it - especially after he dipped the beans in his blueberry yogurt, and Ben liked it also. It was a success and a totally cheap meal. it probably cost $3 total and it's enough for two meals. It would have been $3.75, but I grew my own onions on the back patio this spring!

I used my leftover rice and some leftover canned milk from last week and made some rice pudding, which I love. I basically just made a stirred custard and added the rice to it (as opposed to baked rice pudding).

FYI - if you eat dinner at our house and you throw your food on the floor, you have to pick it up. If you're Lucas, you can even eat it off the floor, just as long as it gets picked up.

Then you can go out to play.

**If you have any fun, cheap recipe ideas let me know. We can all share on the blog! And let me know if you want to participate in NBJ - we can all share our results in August!**

3 comments:

Eva / Sycamore Street Press said...

this is a great idea...i'd like to try, although i have to buy stuff for the business...but i guess i could say, no buying any personal stuff... besides food.

oh, a yummy thing to do with black beans is to puree them with a bunch of fresh garlic, red pepper flakes, salt, extra virgin olive oil and a little water. it makes a tasty black bean spread...kinda like an alternative to refried beans.

Member of the Justice League said...

Hummus is a great bean meal. One can of chick peas/garbanzo beans, 2 or 3 cloves of garlic, some lemon uice, some olive oil, about 1/2 cup tahini (sesame seed butter). Blend. Serve with pitas or tortillas. Also, sauteed onions, greek olives, fresh tomatoes, or any other Meditarrean veggie.

And we NBJ'ed our 4th of July. Our apartment is right next to the stadium where they have the fireworks. So by sitting on top of the garage, we didn't buy any Independence Day firecrackers and we got a free show.

'Course I bought little flags for the kids, but that was only $2.50 and I had promised Angie that she could have a flag.

amanda said...

i knew eva would have a delicious recipe to add to this. she's so crafty with everything.

i have a super easy enchilada recipe that pete and i love. brown some cut up chicken and some chopped onion. add cream of chicken soup and a small can of green chiles. take some corn tortillas and dip in your chicken mixture and place one layer down in a 9x13 pan. dump out your chicken mixture into the pan and layer the top with corn tortillas. pour a can of enchilada sauce on top. layer with cheese. bake for 30 minutes at 350 degrees. takes 10 minutes to make and is delish. i would say total cost would be around $8 or so and makes a good amount of leftovers.

i like this "no buy july" idea, especially since i may not return to my old job. i'm still working on getting this home job stuff, so i will tell you how it goes. you can check the site out at arise.com. a friend in texas was actually doing this, and she made around $12-16 an hour.