I plan to start the seven-day SNAP challenge tomorrow.  I did the shopping yesterday.  I spent a total of $26.99 on groceries that should last me the week.  Most people who take the SNAP challenge seem to go hungry since they don’t think about their basic caloric needs, which for most people is in the ballpark of 2000 calories per day.

Most of my caloric needs are taken care of with $4.94 of my purchase money, in the form of the following, which make up a total of 17,510 calories, more than enough for seven days:  Five pounds of flour , four pounds of sugar, and 16 ounces of  cooking oil.  Those items are not, by themselves, particularly edible.  Therefore, my mission for today was to change some of those ingredients, along with a few others, into actual food.  Since this process takes about the same amount of time regardless of the quantity, I made enough for the next few days and put them in the freezer.

I started by making the pancakes shown here.  They are now in the freezer and can quickly be warmed up in the toaster or microwave for a fast breakfast or snack.  I used the same recipe as last year, except I used cooking oil instead of margarine, in keeping with my theme this year of using ingredients that can be stored for emergency use.

And since my use of storage food items precludes the luxury of having bread, I’ll be relying more on the pancakes and biscuits.  I also made my first batch of biscuits, which are shown here.  I again used the same recipe as last year, but used cooking oil in place of the sausage grease or margarine that I used previously.

I also made a batch of peanut butter cookies.  The downfall of many SNAP challenge participants seems to be the lack of snack items.  The 18 cookies I baked should tide me over between meals for the next couple of days.  I used the same recipe as last year, but since I had more peanut butter to work with this year, I was slightly more generous.  I went ahead and used the margarine for these cookies, although I think the cooking oil would have worked just as well.

I also prepared two other items, or at least tried to do so.  Envelopes of Kool-Aid cost 20 cents, considerably less than the pre-sweetened variety.   It’s easier to prepare it by the glass, so I made my own pre-sweetened Kool-Aid by adding one envelope to a cup of sugar.  My first failure so far was with pancake syrup.  I mixed two parts sugar and one part water (equal parts of white and brown sugar work better, but I don’t have brown sugar) and left them to simmer on the stove.  I was reminded of this when the smoke detector went off, since I neglected to keep an eye on it.  Perhaps I’ll try again tonight, but I’ll probably just clean up the mess and leave my syrup making for another day.  In any event, I lost one cup of sugar, which was burnt to a crisp rather than delivering any food value.  But last year, I had more than a pound of sugar left at the end of the SNAP challenge, so I won’t go hungry as a result of my carelessness.

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