The 2-Vegetable Dinner

This is my first day with “full bars” and I am feeling like a 4H winner at the fair!  I followed the wisdom of my 9-year old and drank my milk, at veggies with lunch and then snuck two vegetables into our dinner. Speaking of dinners – the Trader Joe’s Masala sauce would make an old shoe yummy (put you’d miss your nutrition goals.)

Breakfast            

Latte

Scrambled Eggs with ham onion, and cheddar

Whole wheat toast with Avocado

Orange Juice

Lunch   

Red bell peppers

Wheat Bread with Munster

Carrots Baby

Dried Plums

Milk

Dinner 

Tofu Masala with Cauliflower, onion and baby corn

Basmati Rice Medley

Milk

Total Daily Expenditure: $7.87

Since I am a winner today and feeling the exhilaration of triumph, I would like to take a moment to address a common peeve registered by my peanut gallery patrons. More than a few nuts have lambasted me for including lattes in an experiment partially about frugality. It would be difficult to say this without sounding condescending so please know that I am only trying to de-stigmatize the wrongly demonized latte. A latte is nothing more than steamed milk in strong coffee and ours happen to be made at home by my hubby, Ed. All in, my latte costs us $0.68 - more than half of which (approx $0.37) is one of the three servings of MILK required each day. So – have your 30 cent coffee and I’ll have my 30 cent espresso with steamed milk and stop fixating on my latte. Latte drinkers are people too.

Full Bars! Celia Wins.

As you can imagine, tabulating, preparing and posting our daily attempts to Eat in 3D takes far more time that the enterprise itself. Since I have shared with you how the program works and the detail with which we tracked our progress, I am going to move to a more simplified posting format. The majority of folks following this blog are simply interested in what works so, going forward, I’ll post examples of a single day for one of the three of us which hit the mark. Don’t worry, I’ll still divulge our failures and tips to avoid them but, fortunately, these are becoming increasingly rare.

Celia was the first of us to achieve what we call a “full bars” day – she met all of the daily requirements under the $10 cap – in fact, she did it under $7. Here’s what she had:

Breakfast            

Orange Juice

Whole Grain Crunch Cereal with Milk

Lunch   

Chicken Patty Sandwich and whole wheat

Corn

Apple slices

Milk

Dinner 

Salmon Patty on Wheat toast with Dill sauce

Sweet Potato

Broccoli

Milk

Total Daily Expenditure: $6.67

Celia’s tips for getting full bars:

1) Drink milk

2) Eat a vegetable at lunch

3) Two veggie for dinner doesn’t really seem like two if one is orange.

Congratulations, Celia! For the record, I was one glass of milk shy of matching Celia's full bars. It's on little girl - oh, it's on!