I’ve been in a cooking funk eating the same things all the time, so I decided to give myself a challenge!

2sday! So every Tuesday I will try to eat only 2 dollars worth of food, and have different meals than any previous 2sday! Figured I’d share my misadventures here.

Here is what I ate today and prices! (I used winco which has buckets of stuff you scoop into bags and sells a ton of things by pound.)

Breakfast:

1 cup of Instant Oats @ .98/Pound

small handful dried dates cooked into the oats @ 2.58 per pound

Spoonful of sugar

A biscuit! Made mostly for lunch, but had one here with margarine.

Dates tasted pretty good in the oatmeal! Honestly a cup of dried oats is a lot, but the goal is to get over 2000 calories today, so needed to start off strong!

Lunch:

Biscuits made with just salt, baking powder, and flour mixture, used 1 cup of flour, mix was .60/pound

Chicken gravy made with a table spoon of oil, flour, and broth from bouillon cube. The cubes I have are .28 cents each.

1/4 cup dried split peas that I cooked until tender the day before, then heated up into the gravy. @ .86 per pound

Small amount of fake butter from my fridge. IDK how much I paid for it, but it’s a super cheap brand.

Ate 4 of the biscuits smothered in the gravy with butter, and turned out pretty good! Split peas didn’t have the exact taste I was looking for since I’m used to sweet peas, but they still added something really good and I probably would just add more to give more heartiness and protein. They’re super calorie dense for price so probably could have just used them as a soup along with the biscuits and had a much heartier meal. Or could have added more peas and ditched the bouillon cube in favor of just using salt/pepper for the gravy.

Dinner:

1 cup rice @ .78/pound 1/4 chickpeas @ 1.17/pound 1/2 can hunts seasoned tomato sauce @67 a can

Cooked rice, cooked dry chickpeas during the day, mixed with tomato sauce and salt. It tasted pretty good, nothing creative here.

So the primary goal was calories today! I’ve watched some youtubers rave about how “filling” budget meals are… that if you do the math are like 200 calories. So wanted to focus on calories. I don’t have a digital scale so don’t know if I hit the goal of 2 dollars exactly, but napkin math says I was pretty close on one side or the other.

Would love suggestions on any other meals that would be part of a 2k calorie diet and fit into 2 dollar budget!