The No Spending Challenge officially begins

It is the long awaited October 1st, the first official day of our No Spending Challenge. Out of the gate I was hit by the additional challenge of a sick child who was in need of some special food and medicine. So while I had planned on delaying my week 1 reduced grocery shopping until the weekend I ended up getting it out of the way today which starts me off with a lovely negative balance (note my sarcasm). The good news is that I resisted buying said child lunch out today despite her rather nasally forlorn pleas, so that was good, right? She pretty much thinks this whole idea sucks now.

Tally for the Day:
Day 1 Baseline Avg Spending: $24.90
Day 1 Actual Spending: $78.39

Savings/Loss: $-53.50

Bummer to start in the hole, but I am certain tomorrow will put me in a good place. I should mention spending less than $200 let alone less than $100 on groceries for 4 is a milestone for me, so really I did well there as long as I really do make them stretch along with my pantry items. I took advantage of some Shady Brook Farms 2 for 1 specials but bought many organics as well. I am trying very hard to stick to my food principals as much as I can (though technically SBF don't work well there, but sustainably raised meat is just tough on a budget - can't wait till my Farmer delivery next week!) p.s. isn't that little guy the cutest?

Tonight we had a nice economic meal that was so good. I had leftover shredded pork from the crock pot yesterday ($6.99 for 3lbs). I made some rice and homemade corn tortillas and we simply loaded those tortillas up with the rice, shredded pork, diced Havarti cheese, shredded organic lettuce and a little dollop of light sour cream. Fabulous. The shredded pork made 2 dinners for 4 plus 3 lunches, so works out to roughly $0.63/serving. Tortillas are super cheap as all you use is the masa flour water & salt. A 4 lb bag of flour is around $5 but it will last for quite some time and figure this to be about $0.08/serving of 2 tortillas (though everyone got really whiny tonight that they only got 2). If I added on another $0.38/serving for the rest of the meal (trust me I had my calculator and receipts out on that like the geek that I am) the meal came to $1.09/serving or $4.36 for all 4 of us, not bad! I would recommend adding another veggie though, we were a bit remiss.

If you have never made (or even tried) fresh out of the pan corn tortillas you don't know what you're missing. They are super easy, cheap and extremely good, nothing like what you buy in those plastic bags in the store. The only investment is masa flour (I use Maseca) and a tortilla press. I purchased a Victoria press which is heavy cast iron and works great, don't skimp on a lightweight press. You can make tortillas easy any night and trust me the kids love them.