Reviving an Old Tradition

The booty-fruity returns! This isn't a great example (nor, unfortunately a great photograph) but I've got to represent the gluteal produce in the STL. So here you go...

It's about the only produce that's survived the recent cooking storm in my kitchen. (Well, survived until recently -- I ate it for lunch.) I froze the basil, roasted the aparagus and green beans, boiled the kale and made half of it into a kale-potato casserole based on this recipe, and made apricot sauce inspired by this recipe. I still have a bunch of asparagus, some blueberries, some strawberries, some apricots, and some green onions. (And some cooked kale and cooked gai lan and leftover roasted beans and asparagus.) And I am sure that there's more that I'm forgetting -- I've been to the grocery stores a lot this past week.

Which leads me to my next thought: the $21 challenge. $21 is apparently the average amount that someone receiving food stamps is given each week. The governor of Oregon tried to see what you could buy with it, and encouraged other people to do the same. This conservative website makes a decent case that $21 is a huge underestimate of what most food stamp recipients actually spend, but $21 is the story, and we're sticking to it. I've been spending money rather thoughtlessly this past month -- moving is expensive, and now that I'm living without roommates (whee! yippee! hallelujah!) my expenses have approximately tripled. And not that I'll need to live on $3 a day, but I think that I need to step back and actually examine how I spend money for a few days. So $21 it is...starting on Saturday with a trip to the farmers' market. (In the spirit of full disclosure -- that may be cheating. I don't believe that the farmers' market accepts food stamps, and I'm fairly certain that it was part of the original "rules" to shop only where food stamps are accepted.) And anything that I use that I already own will be marked with a "P" for pantry. I'm actually kind of excited about this...we'll see how I feel a few days into it.