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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I didn’t really have breakfast this morning, other than coffee.  Lunch consisted of leftover Ramen noodles, with some of the mixed vegetables mixed in, along with the leftover pig in blanket from a couple of nights ago.

Since I didn’t have much of a lunch, I also had an afternoon snack consisting of the nachos shown above.  I’m concentrating on storage food for my challenge this week, and the chips aren’t a particularly good long-term storage item.  But they do have a reasonably long shelf life, and they’re the kind of thing one might find around the house in an emergency.  For long-term storage, they could, of course, be made with stored ingredients.  Yesterday, I discussed how tortillas could be made from Maseca and water.  The tortillas can be cut into chips and deep fried to make tortilla chips.

Canned cheese sauce.

The  canned cheese sauce, on the other hand, is an excellent storage item.  A few days ago, I used it to make a passable pizza.  It wasn’t intended for that purpose, and although it made a fairly good pizza, the result was unusual looking.  But today, I was using the sauce for its intended purpose, and it made a very good snack.

The cheese sauce is relatively expensive (about $2.50 per can), so it’s probably not an economical option if you plan to use it regularly on a long-term basis.  However, having a few cans in your pantry can allow you to make some good comfort food in case of emergency.

For long-term storage, a very good option for some of your dairy needs is Honeyville powdered cheese.  This product appears to be very similar to the cheese powder that comes with boxed macaroni and cheese.  For about $21, you get a lot of this powdery substance, a can containing 41 servings of 140 calories each.  It can be used for things such as macaroni and cheese (although the boxes of macaroni and cheese are probably cheaper), and also makes a quite good cheese sauce.  I’ve found that the consistency is thicker than cheese sauce, so it actually makes a better dip.

According to the instructions on the can, you simply add hot water.  It’s not salted, so you will want to add salt.  And I’ve found that the final result is better if you add a little bit of milk and butter or margarine.

A few cans of the  cheese sauce are certainly helpful for emergency storage.  But over the long term, the Honeyville powdered cheese would allow you to augment your dairy storage with something with an essentially infinite shelf life.

Supper is shown above.  I made another batch of biscuits and had biscuits and gravy, using the gravy mix and water.  I also had some of the canned vegetables and a couple of slices of the Armour Treet.  I washed it down with coffee and Kool-Aid.  I am very full after this dinner which consisted entirely of canned and dried ingredients.

I also have plenty of leftovers, such that I don’t think I’ll need to do much cooking for the final two days of the SNAP Challenge.  I have leftover burritos, pizza, and biscuits and gravy in the refrigerator, but I also have additional ingredients in case I want to try something else.  I’ve almost finished my second batch of cookies, so I’ll probably make one more batch.  The largest downfall for most SNAP Challenge participants seems to be the failure to recognize the people often eat between meals.  And having the cookies available makes the challenge much more manageable. 

Click Here For Today’s Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Cartoon