Day 128- Beans, a Link, and a Challenge Option

First off, I've been eating beans. All day. They're yummy. I ate them with avocado, tomato, and onion, I ate them in a bowl scooped up with bread. I ate beans with polenta. I ate a lot of beans, basically.

All Hail the re-emergence of the pie plate! Avocado might be the most expensive ingredients, at about $2 a pound.

Dinner (still munching on this one this morning)

Only the yeast, oil, and avocado were more than $1 a pound here, too. The flour used in the strangely fluffy bread was 24.3 cents a pound.

Which brings me to the link.

50 healthy foods for under $1 a pound

The list is (mostly) reasonable. I admit that i haven't seen asparagus in that range, and i don't usually price meat. But the people insisting it can't be done are really negative. It's really all about where you shop.

In the last week, for example, I've been in a BiLo (huge naming mistake), a Publix, and my beloved Save-A-Lot. If I only ever shopped at the first two I'd be somehow more broke than I am now (tough to picture, right?). For an idea of price range, Roma tomatoes at BiLo were $1.99/lb, $1.29/lb at Publix, or $0.99 at Save-A-Lot. They're the same 99 cents a pound at the vegetable bin downtown, but the $5 I spend in gas makes it a trip I only do when I can combine it with something else.

Anyway, that's 1 item. There are dozens more, though. Cabbage? 69 cents/ lb at Publix, 39c /lb at Save-a-Lot. On and on, seriously. But if I never went to the "sketchy" (not really) Save-A-Lot because it's not the sort of place "people like me" shop... I'd probably starve to death. It's pretty much the same veggies, and most of them (lately) are even grown in the US.

So, the alternate Challenge-

For people who are having trouble coming up with something to make cheaper, or people who have no interest in it, or whatever.

I challenge you to make a meal (a full meal, none of my cheater "a bowl of beans is *like* a meal" meals) spending less than $5 out of pocket, and using only the least expensive produce/ meat/ brought in ingredients. Extra points for keeping everything but oil (or butter)/ yeast/ spices under $1 a pound. Double extra points for each item used that's less than 50 cents a pound.

For people in the metric using world, we'll call a pound 500g, though really it's not. Don't want to make the math too tough. And local money or $1US as exchanged to local currency. So 1 euro or pound, or .46 (or whatever) pence/ euro-cents. I'd suggest a dollar over a peso, though, if that's your option.

And because I'm dropping this here now, instead of last week with the other one, you have until next Wednesday, 30 June 2010. Extra sparkly invisible points for getting someone else to try it, even if you don't do this one.

Less scary? This one seems much more achievable to me. Any takers?