Leftover staple items.
Today marks the seventh and final day of my 2015 SNAP Challenge, where I’ve eaten for a week on less than $31.50, the average amount received by recipients of SNAP benefits, formerly known as food stamps. My actual expenditures were $27.99, which was up a bit from last year, but still well within the guidelines. As an added challenge this year, I concentrated mostly on foods that are suitable for emergency food storage.
Breakfast today consisted of oatmeal. For lunch, I finished the nachos and had another serving of biscuits and gravy. Supper, shown here, consisted of the remaining burritos, and a quesadilla made with the remaining cheese sauce and tortilla.
Most of my leftover food is shown above. I still have at least a pound each of the flour and sugar, half a pint of the cooking oil, and half a pound of margarine. So I could easily subsist a few more days on what I have. But since the challenge ends at midnight, I’ll just rotate those remaining items back into our normal household pantry, and think about what I can do for future challenges.
As I did last year, I celebrated the end of the Challenge by baking a cake, shown here, using this recipe. About the time I was supposed to take it out of the oven, I realized that I had forgotten to include the margarine called for in the recipe. Even though the cake wasn’t as good as last year, it was surprisingly good despite this omission.
I should note that the recipe called for two eggs, and I only had one. Over the last year, there has apparently been inflation in the price of eggs. Last year, a dollar bought eight, but this year, I only had six eggs. Therefore, I had to include one egg from the normal household supply. But I’ll be sharing more than half the cake with the rest of the family.
I have five hours to go, but there’s no question that I’ll survive. I still have about a dozen cookies to tide me over, as well as several biscuits. I also have about a fourth of my can of coffee remaining. In normal use, my 10.5 ounce can wouldn’t have lasted the week, but with a bit of rationing, I had plenty.
I’ll probably have some concluding thoughts in a few days, but this concludes my SNAP Challenge for the year. Tomorrow, we’ll resume our normal programming, and look at why a Boy Scout a hundred years ago took it upon himself to have a Merit Badge requirement changed.
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