$5.00 Menus?

30°f/-1°C, clear all day but only warmed to 54°.

Another night of troublesome sleep so here I am in the wee hours writing my blog. I might as well make use of being awake! 

Today was a town day for us. Larry had a load of junk metal to take to the scrap yard (and got a whopping $9.25 for it!), and I wanted to get our first load of mulch, so we took the truck. I was surprised to see a long, deep scratch down its side, and a new dent in the front bumper. Larry says he has no idea how either happened, but I cannot imagine he didn't hear that scratch being made. Poor old truck.

Anyway, I straightened up our Ripley booth while he got rid of his load of junk. Last weekend was the Spring open house at this mall, so I knew it would be untidy. Then it was lunch with friends, Walmart for mulch, feed store, and grocery store. 

At the grocery store I got to thinking about a question someone asked in a cooking group on Facebook: if you had only $5 to spend for all your food for a day, what would you buy? Five dollars doesn't buy much these days, does it? Here's what I came up with, if I shopped at Kroger :

• A box of 8 packets of instant, sweetened and flavored oatmeal: $1.67
• A half dozen eggs: $1.15
• A bag of frozen chopped broccoli: $1.29
• One Roma tomato: $.25
• 2 bananas: .60
• Total: $4.94

So, oats for breakfast and snacks, mix a packet with a couple eggs and a mashed banana to make pancakes for lunch (no syrup but the sweetened oats would add enough sugar), and omelet with the rest of the eggs, tomatoes and broccoli for dinner.

My goal was a fairly healthy menu, so could I do the same at Dollar Tree?

If I shopped at Dollar Tree, I could buy:

• A bag of brown rice: $1.25
• A bag of black beans $1.25
• A bag of frozen veggies $1.25
• A box of instant oatmeal packets $1.25
• Total: $5.00 (there is no tax on food in WV)

This would allow oats for breakfast and snacks, and beans and rice with the veggies for lunch and dinner. Nothing fresh but not too bad.

Public domain photo

Both of my options assumed that the only other food items I had on hand were water, salt and pepper. The Dollar Tree menu would provide more food, since the beans and rice would make quite a lot. 

Of course, most of us have lots of flexibility when cooking, using food, spices, etc that we already had on hand. There are many days that I doubt what I cook actually costs even $5, because I may use only a part of something.

If you had to do this, what would you buy? The exercise made me feel grateful that I do not have to buy all my food, and that if I did, I could afford more choices. 

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

Just Another Sunday

58°f14 4° C, mostly clear. Warmed up to 88°f! Ridiculous.

Talk about a heat wave! Almost 90° today, way too hot for this early in the year. Thankfully, it did not feel as hot as the same temperature in summer. Maybe it's the angle of the sun? Or maybe that steady, often pretty strong breeze/wind. Anyway, people were certainly out and about. As we drove to our Ravenswood booth to restock we saw kids playing, men tinkering with mowers, women mowing, people out on their porches. And at the mall, there were plenty of shoppers, a surprise because Sundays are typically pretty quiet.

We rarely do our booths on Sunday, but neither of us wanted to go Friday with the gravel coming, and yesterday after Sarah left we rested until late afternoon. But since it was going to be so warm, today felt like a good time to get this job out of the way.

Then we stopped at Shari's for a snack and iced coffee, and visited with a couple friends who were there, always a pleasure. It was still 88° when we got home, but we had things to do. Larry worked on cleaning out his garage while I spray-painted porch furniture. I didn't finish but I made a good start. Note to self: do NOT spray paint in sandals. Very unwise. My toes look very odd now, a faint ring of black around my toenails. I scrubbed hard and got most of it off my toes and foot but the nails...oh well.

If you must know, the reason I did not change into shoes was simple: I was tired, and I knew that if I stopped to put on socks and shoes I just wouldn't tackle the job! Silly but true. Sometimes little things seem like the biggest obstacles. But then, I got a second wind and did put on the socks and shoes to go out do some stringtrimming, and piddled around in the vegetable garden, raking back mulch in a little spot so the soil will dry enough to dig and plant my lettuce. Of course, rain is on the way tonight. Of course it is.

I also cleaned the remaining dried up vines from the arches and was surprised to find that we had missed some lima beans when we picked the last of them in the Fall. 

I wonder why the one pod spoiled, while the others just dried? 

I was very appreciative of our awesome shower when I came in. Grass clippings all over me, bits of dried vines in my hair, paint on my feet...I was a right mess. There is nothing like a good shower, is there?

Tomorrow we won't get much above 50°, and will drop to around 30 tomorrow night. Such a fickle friend is Spring!

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

Of Family, Books, and Explorers

49°f/9.4°C, clear after a stormy night.

More gravel arrived yesterday, big stone to make a solid base over the new culvert. No stuck dump truck this time! But Larry had a lot of tractor work to do getting those boulders spread. It is going to be a rough ride until next week when we can get more gravel. Just dollars disappearing into mud, but it has to be done, sigh.

We had dinner with Derek and most of his family, and Sarah of course. Derek made his famous chicken and pasta salad, and one of his baked cabbage heads---this time wrapped in bacon and absolutely heavenly. 

Sarah came down from her cabin for breakfast, and is now on her way back to Colorado.  So sad! We will certainly miss her.

After she left, we did...nothing.  Larry is exhausted from the tractor work, so he went to sleep.  I read and cleaned sime silver then made dinner, a simple meal of chicken,  baked potatoes,and salad. But eaten out on the deck made it seem like a feast  

I am continuing to read multiple books at the same time, and am really enjoying them all. I have added Culpepper's Complete Herbal since I finished Winter Morning Walks, reading one alphabetical section at a time. I miss the poetry though, so I will add another book of poems to my daily stack.

Reading The Assassin's Cloak has taken me down several rabbit holes, as I follow up on diarists' entries that catch my interest. Today it was Robert Falcon Scott, the British man who explored Antarctica in the early 1900's. The entries included in Tbe Assassin's Cloak have been stark, detailing the difficulties of his final attempt to reach the South Pole. As of March 21, 1912, the situation of the expedition was dire, and several had already lost their lives. I couldn't stand it; I had to look him up to learn more about him, and how it all ended. 

Then I wondered, what about his wife? He had just married her in 1908. Who was she? How did she manage his absence and (spoiler alert) death? As I found out, Kathleen Scott was no weakling either. She was a well-known sculptress, an activist, a WWI volunteer,  and was a single mother for a number of years. 

Reading all this reminded me of the movie Shackleton, about yet another harrowing South Pole expedition, which thank goodness ended more happily. 

These hardy explorers really puzzle me: why on earth did they do it? Was it really only for the glory and fame of getting there first? Granted that they did many scientific experiments along the way, and in Shackleton's case, there was an expert photographer, Frank Hurley, on board who recorded the trip in stunning photos, which are available today in a beautiful book. Perhaps it was just the times, when countries were exploring and claiming land everywhere (with really no right to so so). Even today,  there are people like Musk, intent on going to Mars! I am sure someone will get there but at what cost? And how many lives will be lost in the effort? 

Larry has cleaned up after our meal while I was writing this, so I better be getting busy too!  No wild adventures for me today, just cleaning up outside. Fun, fun.

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.