Day 2: Reality Settles In

Day 2 brings on the reality of the fact that I've got 28 days to go with day 2 being no cake-walk. I did not have much time to experiment with rearranging the $30 worth of ingredients, so it was the same menu, round 2. The morning was a frenzy trying to cook two meals and help get kids out the door. But I made it. Definitely starting to feel some of the physiological effects of making such a drastic diet change. The stomach is churning a bit, similar to the effect of traveling to a different culture and adjusting to new foods. Getting some headaches, probably from the caffeine withdrawal? I stopped drinking coffee about 6 months ago, but I still enjoy black and green teas 2 or 3 times a day, so there's some degree of caffeine I'm coming off of. Another challenge is that the stew is not really carrying me to dinner time. I'm considering some kind of shift in strategy involving taking half of the oatmeal & raisins serving from the morning and moving it to an afternoon snack time. I'm looking into baked oatmeal recipes, but I don't think I'll have enough of the ingredients. Breakfast is definitely leaving me feeling a little heavy or bloated, or something. It may be due to the fact that the Vegetable Oil Spread has a bit of trans fats, so I'm considering cutting the tablespoon into a half tablespoon. When I got home this afternoon I was exhausted and crashed for about an hour. Then my hunger motivated me to get up and get the beans, rice and pasta going. It never tasted better. 

I didn't have time to take a photo of breakfast yesterday, but managed to grab a shot today, so here's breakfast from this morning, it's the same as yesterday. Like I said, not bad but too much oatmeal for one sitting. The egg/tortilla/season-all is delicious. 

Cost analysis. I thought it might be interesting to look at what each meal is costing me. 

Breakfast:

Egg & Corn Tortilla with seasoning: 11.5 cents

Oatmeal with raisins and sunflower seeds: 25.2 cents

Lunch:

Stew: 1/3 Ramen, Potatoes, Carrots, Cabbage: 17.7 cents

Corn Tortilla: 2.2 cents

Dinner:

Rice & Beans with Corn Tortilla: 28 cents

1/3 cup Pasta with teaspoon of tomato sauce: 5.6 cents

The other 9.8 cents (+/-) goes to lemon for my water, seasoning, vegetable oil spread, etc.

Prayer Focus: Pray for Venkatesh, a young boy we brought into Peace Gospel's India orphanage. His parents were lost to AIDS and he was surviving day to day on the streets. There are many others like him. Pray that funding would become available to sponsor more of them.

Estimated Savings for day 2: I'm on staff at my local church, and on Tuesdays we typically eat out together in between our staff meetings. One of our usual destinations is Berryhill Tacos. I would probably get a tamale plate and a Dr. Pepper, for about $9.50. Add that to my normal estimated daily grocery cost of $7, subtract $1 for today's cost, and I total out at $15.50 saved for the orphanage today. My running total is now $30.85, which, in just two days, is already over an average month's wages among the poor of South Asia. 

Day 1: Unexpected Bounty

Well, I survived Day 1, and with a few surprises to say the least. Weights and measures in the US Customary System have never really come intuitively to me. The whole fluid ounces vs. non-fluid ounces has thrown me off. For example, a cup is 8 ounces, but only in fluid terms. But it makes sense now that I've had to deal with it in a real life scenario (I've already told you I'm a total novice cook). So my point is, I had been making some of my calculations based on how many cups X ounces would produce. Well, fortunately for me (and for those of you who might be inclined to take the challenge with me) this turns out to my advantage. For example, I was thinking I would only get a small amount of oatmeal each morning (2.8 oz - which I erroneously was thinking would be a little less than half a cup). It turns out I actually get an entire measuring cup of oats per day, which turns out to produce over two cups of oatmeal after cooking. This also has played out to a bountiful yield on my brown rice and pinto beans, of which I prepared bulk batches today. Here's what I ended up with today:

Breakfast:

• Two "servings" of oatmeal (1 cup produced about 2 cups cooked) with 1/8th cup of raisins, 1 teaspoon of sunflower seeds, and 1/2 tablespoon of vegetable oil spread. (To my joy, it turned out that my 1/3rd lb. of sunflower seeds measured out to exactly 30 teaspoons). I'm used to sweetening my oatmeal so it was a different experience but one I think I can grow to enjoy. Definitely filling.
  
• Over-easy fried egg on top of a toasted corn tortilla, topped with 1/2 tablespoon vegetable oil spread, seasoned with a few dashes of Season All. Delicious!

Lunch:

• 1 generous bowl of Ramen Noodle Stew. I was pleased to discover that you can quite easily cut a Ramen noodle brick into thirds with a sharp knife. I'll post the exact recipe later, but suffice to say I used about 1/4th of a medium sized potato, chopped up along with 1/6th of a large carrot, one leaf of cabbage, the 1/3rd of the ramen noodles, the 1/3rd of the ramen seasoning, and a few dashes of, you guessed it, Season All. The real bonus hit me when I was looking over at my pinto beans in the crock pot to see how they were coming along for dinner. It hit me that there had to be some kind of nutritional value in the "stock" the simmering beans were producing. Sure enough, there was plenty there, and I added a couple of cups of this to the stew, making it much more stout than I had anticipated. This really turned out a lot tastier than I had expected. Left me feeling a little hungry but nonetheless satisfied with the quantity and the taste.
  
• Of course, I enjoyed one of my 3 daily corn tortillas with the meal.

Dinner:

• 1.5 cups cooked brown rice seasoned with Season All.
  
• 1 cup cooked pinto beans, seasoned with Season All.
  
• 1 cup cooked pasta shells with one teaspoon tomato sauce. 
  
• Made a delicious beans and rice taco with the corn tortilla, and had plenty of beans and rice left over to enjoy once that was consumed. 

Interesting yield notes:

• 2 cups of brown rice yielded 6 cups cooked (made enough for the next 4 days).
  
• 2.5 cups of pinto beans yielded 6 cups cooked (made enough for the next 6 days).

Prayer focus for day 1: Pray general blessings over our native teams in India, Myanmar and Nepal. Pray for provision for their work that they might be well equipped to reach and serve those in need both spiritually and physically. Pray for their protection from those who wish them harm. 

Estimated Savings for day 1: Today I probably would have eaten out at my favorite Indian Restaurant for lunch: Sri Balaji Bhavan, which would have cost me about $7.75. I might have purchased a tall hot tea at Starbucks at about $1.60. Note: Each day I will add what I'll call my estimated normal daily grocery cost, which I am estimating to be about $7/day. To be honest this is a guess, so please drop a comment if you think I'm too low or too high. So for today, after subtracting the $1 spent, it totals out to $15.35 saved for the orphanage. 

Late-breaking price changes: good and bad

Shopping report: first, the bad news:

• 5 lb. bag of potatoes at Fiesta went up $0.20 to $1.99
  
• 1 lb. bag of lentils went up $0.49 to $0.99/lb. - forcing me to cross it off the list

But the good news was:

• Pinto beans went down $0.04/lb. from $0.63 to $0.59, making them comparable to the previous price on lentils.
  
• Found a sale on generic oatmeal at H.E.B. - $2.29 for 42 oz. compared to $2.74 at Walmart - since I was buying 2, I saved $0.90, helping me recover from the above losses!

I've updated the Google Spreadsheet to reflect the final accounting.

Here's a photo of everything I purchased for the $30 (click to enlarge). Maybe tomorrow I will post the photos of the receipts if I have time! 

Shopping Day, Other $30 Challenges, Rules, Prayer Aspect

Well the big day is here-- the eve of "Day One"-- time to do the majority of the shopping... about to head out this afternoon. I was able to go ahead and grab my Chinatown purchases yesterday. I found locally-produced eggs for $0.99/dozen at Hong Kong Food Market! I also went ahead and purchased the carrots and cabbage at Dynasty, which still had the least expensive costs on those two items by a long shot. I've made a few more adjustments to the Google Spreadsheet if you want to check it out. Major adjustment: When I had checked the oatmeal price at Walmart, they had the 42 oz. box in the wrong place, so I misread the price. Talk about a bummer. I was really basing a lot of my budget around the fact that I was going to get 42 oz. for $1.74. So I had to switch to generic which is still $2.74, and had to drop a few packs of ramen and do some other tweaking. But it's really OK because I decided that ramen was probably not something I'd want to weigh down my diet with anyway, for health concerns. 

Other $30 challenges out there. A few of you have brought to my attention other $30 challenges out there, or $1/day challenges. For the record, I was aware of one sociology experiment done in this context, but have been intrigued to learn of other "challenge" type sites out there. Thanks for pointing those out, Lance and Howard. This guy tried to buy his food each day instead of one bulk run, putting a different twist on the idea. On his site he links to a handful of other similar blogs of people giving it a try for various reasons. There was also a couple who took their twist on the $30 "diet" challenge together, which I had heard of (and subsequently received inspiration from) but did not know the extent of their fame. From the links my friend Lance sent me, I learned that they were featured in the New York Times, and that they've even gotten a book deal out of their little experiment. Crazy!

Rules of the Challenge. For the curious, I thought I would lay down some ground rules. Although the real heart of my particular challenge is to save money and donate it to the Peace Gospel Orphanage in India, there is still an aspect to my challenge involving fasting to foster a stronger heart of compassion for the poor. My thought is that as I have to make the hard choices of what to eat with such little resources, I will be forced to think of what the destitute have to face on a constant basis. Thus in my particular challenge, I will not be accepting any food people may want to offer me. In short, what I buy with my $30 is all that I will eat during this 30 day period. 

Prayer. As with any fast, there is also an aspect of prayer involved in my challenge. Thus each day I will be choosing a specific prayer focus related to our work with Peace Gospel International. My hope is that I'll be able to make a post per day during the 30 days. Each day I will post the prayer concern so that you might share with me in that prayer focus. 

Further comments on the sample menu in my March 21 post. After consulting with my wife on this (I'm not much of a cook), she gave me some ideas that will allow me to find a little more variety in working with the ingredients I'll have. So, the sample menu will indeed be just that, a sample of what may be. I'm a bit relieved at this honestly, as I really was not looking forward to eating the same exact thing every day for 30 days. I'll try to spare you of every detail, but I will try to post some record of what I'm actually doing with the ingredients as I go along through the 30 days.

Ok, well I'm off to the shopping, and then tomorrow starts the big "Day One." 

Thank you, Chinatown

Just a quick update to let you know I managed an extra pound of carrots and and extra quarter-pound of cabbage (for the same amount of money), thanks to a store called Dynasty Supermarket in Chinatown. Carrots are $0.39/lb. and cabbage only $0.25/lb. Amazing. I've been told I need to check out another store down that way called Hong Kong Supermarket. Not sure if I'll have time as it is a bit of a drive for me. Thanks to my friend Judy Ho for the tip on trying Chinatown! Check out my updated Google Spreadsheet.

Thoughts on Rice; Revised Sample Menu

Yesterday I had to pick up some dinner items to prepare a meal with the family, so I stopped in at a Foodarama on the way home. While there, I was able to check a few prices. With a name like Foodarama, one might think it would be a deep discount store, but they didn't have anything on Fiesta, nor H.E.B. Then today I was making my usual monthly run to Sam's Club for some family needs, and was curious if they might be able to help me refine my list. There were a few things that beat my per-ounce or per-pound prices-to-beat (pinto beans at $0.58/lb. for example), but the quantities were just too huge. So, at this point I can say with confidence that my list is as good as it's going to get. 

A correction on my previous post. I had erroneously stated that brown rice is $4.26 for 4 lbs. when in fact it is $4.26 for 6 lbs. The best deal I've been able to find on white rice is about $0.51/lb. whereas brown rice is $0.71/lb. So I would save $1.20 by going with white rice, assuming I can get it the right quantity bag. However the health benefits of brown rice are strong enough to make me want to forgo the savings at this point. Although $1.20 is 4% of my budget, so I'm still mulling it over.

Interesting to note. 6 lbs. of rice is only 12 cups, which produces only 24 cups of cooked rice. So I will only be able to have a 3/4 cup of rice each day. But I think that will work out alright for my rice & beans tacos. 

With the savings outlined in my previous post, I think I will post a new sample menu for what I anticipate to be a typical day. 

Breakfast

• 1 fried egg in a corn tortilla (you could call it a "lite" breakfast taco), seasoned with Season All
  
• 1 small (9 oz.) bowl of oatmeal with 3/4 oz. raisins, sprinkle of sunflower seeds, 1 tablespoon of vegetable spread
  
• plenty of tap water

Lunch

• something I'm calling Ramen Noodle Stew: consisting of 3/4 pack of ramen (since I'll only have 20 packs) with 2.6 oz. potatoes, 1 oz. carrot, and 1.5 oz. cabbage (not sure yet how I'm going to divide up the 20 packs into 30 portions, but I'll figure something out)
• 1 lightly toasted dry corn tortilla 
• tap water with a very thin slice of lemon

Dinner

• brown rice & beans taco: small serving of brown rice and pinto beans in a corn tortilla, seasoned with a dash or two of Season All
  
• 1/4 to 1/2 cup side of pasta with 2 teaspoons plain tomato sauce
  
• alternate: brown rice & lentils taco
  
• tap water
  

Although it's not the most appealing menu, especially due to the lack of variety, I hope you're starting to see that it's not that impossible to eat pretty well off of $30. You're hopefully starting to think, I just might be able to do this, especially if it means saving up a lot of money for the orphans. Maybe you're also starting to think like me... eating this way for 30 days will not only enable me to give more generously, it will increase my burden for the poor and what they have to endure as a constant reality. 

For those of you following it, I've made a few adjustments to my Google Spreadsheet. You can check it out by clicking here. 

Thanks to H.E.B. I'll be eating a bit more...

I was pleasantly surprised by H.E.B.'s prices today. Just when I thought I had found the rock bottom prices at Fiesta, sha-bang, H.E.B. came out of nowhere with some pretty amazing prices:

I'll be able to save:

- $0.64 on my 3 dozen eggs. 

- $0.40 on corn tortillas, while adding 18 more tortillas (90-count!)

- $0.05 on each Ramen pack, allowing me to add 5 more packs!

I'll be able to add:

- 1 lb. of vegetable oil spread sticks to fatten up the oatmeal for only $0.59!

Check out my updated Google Spreadsheet to get the details. 

Their sign says "Small Store, Big Savings" ... true in my case. One thing to debate. I can get an entire additional pound of rice if I go with their deal on white rice - $2.59 for a 5 lb. bag. Up until now I've been thinking brown rice (4 lbs. at $4.26 - Walmart) for the nutritional benefits. But if I can shave off $1.67 and add a pound of food, that's tempting. Just think of what I could do with $1.67! I could get another 5 lbs. of potatoes at Fiesta! Crazy!

Just 10 days to go before I start on the 30th. Tomorrow or over the weekend I might blog on what I've been thinking and praying about as I approach the challenge. It's really started to hit me, this is not going to be easy. Thanks for checking in!

Fiesta! and... a Google Spreadsheet

Had a chance to visit a local discount store here in Houston appropriately named Fiesta. It's a very festive place! I was pretty amazed by their prices. I've managed to squeeze in the following, with the same money:

- 6 more eggs

- 28% more potatoes ($0.36/lb. vs $0.50/lb)

- 25% more lentils ($0.50/lb. vs. $0.67/lb)

- 25% more pinto beans ($0.63/lb. vs. $0.84/lb)

- 12 more corn tortillas (some days I'll get 3!)

- 2 additional ounces of seasoning (thank you, Lord!)

- 9 additional ounces of raisins (yummier oatmeal)

- 1 lemon (high in vitamin C)

- 1 8-oz. can tomato paste (to season up the stew, or for making light pasta sauce)

Walmart still wins on brown rice and oatmeal. Randall's still wins on cabbage at $0.29/lb. I will try HEB tomorrow but I can't imagine them beating Fiesta's prices.

I've set up a Google Spreadsheet to share with you how I'm calculating things. Click here to view it. 

More to follow...

Getting a feel for what $30 can buy

Today I had a bit of time to price out a few items at 3 different grocery stores. I started at our local Walmart. I discovered some really economical items I will likely use on my 30 day menu. Some good prospects were:

2 lbs. of Carrots: $1.34
Red Potatoes: $0.50/lb. (about $0.25 each - score!)
Bulk Pinto Beans: $0.84/lb.
2.5 dozen eggs: $3.35 (about $0.11/egg)
Adolphus Brown Rice (2 lb. bag): $1.42
"Great Value" Lentils (1 lb. bag): $0.67
Guerrero Corn Tortillas (60 count bag): $2.34
Quaker Old Fashioned Oats (42 oz.): $1.74

I love potatoes, so I was pretty encouraged on the red potatoes being only $0.50/lb. My friend Angela told me that I would be better off eating brown rice, as my blood sugar would not crash as fast as when eating white rice. So I was pleased to see that brown rice is relatively affordable. But I might need 2 - 3 bags, so it is getting up there. Corn tortillas will be great in soup, or with eggs for a small egg taco.

Then I checked out Whole Foods Market for their self-serve bulk spice bins, to see what kind of price range I would be looking at to get a few tablespoons of seasoning. I was surprised to see most of their spices up in the $1/oz. range, but I did find Cayenne powder for $0.50/oz. One ounce is 2 tablespoons so I'll have to decide if $1 to $2 worth of spices is going to make a difference. I guess a dash of seasoning is better than nothing. I think I'll also scope out Fiesta tomorrow to see if they offer self-serve bulk spices. Prices at Whole Foods on most everything else were out of my budget, except maybe for the bulk sunflower seeds at $2.69/lb. but even that seems pretty high. But I wold like to have some kind of nuts on hand to add to my oatmeal, so maybe a quarter-lb. of sunflower seeds would be doable.

I had an errand to run at the Randall's customer service desk, so I had a chance to check out some of their prices as well. I didn't have time to check these products at Walmart, and I'm thinking they might be cheaper there. But I think this is probably a good indication of what I will be paying for these types of items:

Ramen Noodle Soup 6-packs: $1.50 ($0.25 each)
- There's bound to be a better price on this somewhere
Generic Raisins (15 oz. can): $2.49
Cabbage: $0.29/lb. (1 cabbage comes to about $0.79 - nice!)
Generic Macaroni Pasta (2 lb. bag): $1.79

I know there's something I'm not thinking of at this point, but this is what came to mind today. Still have 13 days before I begin, so I'm sure this will continue to evolve. But if I had to choose based off of what I found today, after doing some calculations, here's what I'm probably looking at:

Breakfast:
Half bowl of oatmeal with a dash of raisins and sunflower seeds.
1 scrambled egg in a corn tortilla
Lunch:
Potato, Carrot & Cabbage Ramen Noodle Stew - Half Bowl
(half carrot & half small potato, 1.5 oz. cabbage, half of a ramen pack)
Dinner:
Half serving of Macaroni, Rice & Beans Taco in a corn tortilla
(alternate between lentils and beans)

There you have it.

Just the Food, Folks

I've received a few questions about what I mean exactly by "living off of" $30 for 30 days. In my case, I am just talking about food. With the challenges of getting kids to school and work responsibilities, etc. I decided it would not be practical to include transportation, electricity, etc. But who knows, you might feel called to up the ante in your own challenge. You could ride your bike to work, go off the grid for 30 days, or include toiletries in your $30 limit. I'm sure there are all kinds of variations you could think of to make it more challenging. Go for it. 

Getting Started / Why I'm Doing This

Well, here we go. I've been contemplating this for awhile now. I’ve traveled to South Asia extensively for the past 16 years. I often tell friends about the staggering statistics of poverty in that part of the world. But just a few weeks ago I was walking in the slums of Chennai, India and it just really hit me, I will be getting on a plane and flying out of here in a few days, but for them, this is their constant reality. I took some photos in those slum colonies, you're welcome to view them here. While I was in India, there was a lot of talk about the movie Slumdog Millionaire. So as you can imagine, as I travel to South Asia frequently, a lot of people were asking me if I had seen the film. So I had to go see it just to get an idea of what the big deal was. I was blown away. It really hit the nail on the head, and really brought so much attention to the poverty crisis of South Asia, right into the heart of mainstream Western culture. Wow. I connected with the film on so many levels and had a very emotional response in my spirit. With all of the thoughts of the Chennai slums still fresh in mind, the film just kind of solidified everything and I walked out of the theater thinking, ok that's it, I'm going for it, whatever it takes. So here I am blogging, in the hopes that it will bring more awareness and maybe even raise a little money for our orphanage, maybe it will help them rescue just one more orphan off the streets. Maybe the handful of you who will actually read this will somehow by the grace of God be motivated to join me in my quest here. Maybe you'll accept the challenge. Maybe you'll offer me ideas or encouragement along the way. Whatever the case may be, thanks for checking in.

So what's the plan, you might be wondering. Well, I am speaking at Taylor University's Social Justice Week on April 29th. So I thought it might be nice to have completed the 30 days just before the event, so I will start the my 30 day adventure on March 30th.

This gives me about 2 weeks to figure out what in the world I can buy for $30 that will sustain me for 30 days. So far I've thought of beans, rice, oatmeal, eggs, tortillas, raisins, and maybe a small jar of peanut butter. Just brainstorming at this point. Please post comments with ideas on what I should buy, recipes, or any other advice you might have for me. Or maybe you'd like to join me, that would be huge.