Kitchen duty continues

Nice to wake up and have a few options already prepared and a game plan for day two and all there was to do. We didn't really buy a lot of ready made ingredients, so to keep eating this week required more kitchen work today.

First thing was a cup of tea and 1/2 banana, and then breakfast was a nice treat of two slices of fresh bread toasted with peanut butter.

Then I got on making Sasha's lunch. I made a basic egg salad with eggs and a few of her cucumelons chopped up and some of the pickle juice to flavour with salt and pepper. Sandwich, carrot sticks and a few more cucumelons, plus an oatmeal raisin muffin (the 3 muffins I made yesterday were snacks for each of us today) and one apple were what was packed for her.

I also had my muffin for my mid-morning snack, and had the same lunch, only no apple or cucumelons for me. :(

Mark carried on the Monday afternoon ritual of having lunch with his dad while they watch some footie together. Lunch is always a sandwich, and coincidentally he ended up with egg salad and carrot sticks too!

     

Once Sasha was at school I took a fair bit of time to just relax for the morning to continue to ease my back. I threw it out a week ago and have been dealing with pain to varying degrees ever since. Standing in the kitchen for most of the day yesterday was not helpful to the healing. Still had to muster energy to get back to prep mode, I know I will be grateful for it on my work days to come!

Turns out the loaf I made, though tasty and dense, was rather small. What remained, after using 10 slices of bread (3 of us had 2 pieces of toast for breakfast, and 2 of us had 2 slices for sandwiches at lunch), is enough for one slice each. I think I have enough flour and stuff for one more small loaf, but no baking for me today.

Today I was trying to get a handle on how the rest of our food was actually going to spread out over the rest of the week. I knew it was possible, I just needed to remember to breathe and start doing something once again.

Like measure out enough oats, cinnamon, sugar and raisins for 2 more morning breakfasts for us all. Done!

Then some time cutting up garlic, onion, celery and carrot for 3 separate dishes I wanted to prepare.

 Today was all about lentils, beans, carrots and cabbage! Over the course of a few hours I created a bean and cabbage dish (and plenty of it!) to have with rice for our dinner tonight, a carrot/lentil/ginger soup for us to have for lunches, and a 'veggy cookie' (like mini potato pancakey pakora kinda thing) I baked up for us to have as snacks, made from potato, carrot, onion, garlic, lentil, cabbage and a few tablespoons of flour - and these are pretty great, but could use a dip.

    

Overall, using many of the same ingredients I was able to get a nice range of texture and flavour to mix things up over the next few days.

Basically, all of the food has been prepared except for a tomato sauce to go with pasta for a meal or two (not sure how many portions we'll have), and another batch of muffins or bread.

We will now be rotating between the leftover vegetable stew, beans & rice, pasta & sauce or soup with crackers for lunch and dinner in the next 5 days. There is one more thing I want to make in the morning to add to this mix which is a simple coleslaw we can divide up for a portion each day.

Breakfast will be oatmeal  and a boiled egg for 2 days, eggs (& toast?) for 2 days, and potato pancakes for breakfast on Saturday.

The snacks we have are roasted chickpeas & raisins we can have a few handfuls each over the next few days, about 8 veggie cookies each, some carrot & celery sticks with hummus, and 1/2 banana each per day. Mark and I still have 2 apples to share. Sasha gets a full apple per day and random cucumelons as she likes. Plus whatever I end up baking in a couple of days.

Now I can relax a bit because I have shown my family we really won't starve (they were worried), but it is a lot of work to have achieved this basic level of comfort at this point. I have been food & budget obsessed for weeks now trying to prepare, which culminated in us finding just the right amount of ingredients and just the right price to get what we could, and the work seems to have paid off - I believe we'll make it through ok.

But $54 goes farther than $18 (for all the individuals doing the challenge) and both of these amounts are truly below the amount people on benefits receive and are expected to survive on, and who has the time for this diligence all of the time? Actually feeding my family this week on this amount is very difficult, but compounding the stress of meager amounts of food with all the other systemic stresses for people on welfare, disability or working poor, means daily stress for longer than I can imagine. I'm exhausted from the effort to even try to relate to this reality and it's only been a short while.

My gratitude is abundant for everything we have to eat this week. My thoughts are with all of the people going to bed without having healthy food in them today, and those with empty bellies.