Cheaper Teachers are Cheaper Eaters!t

Hello, lovely readers.  Here in NY today is the last day of vacation before we return to school.  Even though I was there last week for 3 days setting up my classroom, this is the last true day of summer before life begins again.

So what am I doing this lovely Labor Day?  Hanging at the beach with my fabulous friends?  Going out for a nice, relaxing dinner and a handful of drinks?  I wish.  I'm cooking for the week.

While I am not always the most disciplined in planning menus, I have determined to save money on meals eaten at work this year.  One easy way to do that is to cook in bulk on the weekend so that I have inexpensive, healthy food to bring with me for lunch.

So, in the spirit of the Cheaper Teacher, I thought I'd share what I'm making, what it costs me and how long I can expect to eat off of it.  This is just a sampling of what I've made so far, and I'll update other lunch ideas as I go.

Easy Quinoa Salad:  I loooooove quinoa.  If you don't know what it is, you're seriously missing out.  It's a simple, versatile grain that can be used in place of rice, couscous or other grains.  It's extremely high in protein and contains no gluten, so it's great for both vegans (like me!) and celiacs.  I get quinoa in the bulk bin for about $3.00/lb, but if you're lucky enough to find the Goya bags of quinoa, they're about $2.00 for a 1 lb. bag.  The bulk quinoa is organic, the Goya is not.

I used 2 cups of dry quinoa, which is a little more than half the bag of bulk quinoa, so it cost about $1.50.  Quinoa multiplies like CRAZY when you cook it - it made about 8 cups cooked.  I cook it in water (free) at a 2:1 ratio and throw in a veggie bullion cube for good measure ($0.10?  I don't even know what the breakdown on bullion is, but it's almost free).

Then I throw in whatever veggies I have in the fridge.  I love this recipe because everything goes in this salad and you can use up what you have left over from other recipes.  I threw in a few carrots, a zucchini, an eggplant that was in danger of the trash chute, three plum tomatoes, a handful of stringbeans, a few olives, some red onion, a wilting stalk of broccoli and some  shredded red cabbage. I also squeezed the juice from one lemon A lot of these veggies came from the CSA, so I didn't pay for them out-of-pocket but through my joining fee.  I would estimate that this is about $5.00 worth of veggies if I'm being extremely generous with price - since I use such small quantities of each, I can't imagine it was more than that.  But let's just estimate high.

For no more than $6.50, this recipe yeilds 26 1/2 cup servings - if you eat two servings per lunch, you get 13 meals (lunch, dinner, snack, whatever) for the price - or about $0.50 per meal!

Big Old Pot of Beans:  A 1 lb. bag of Goya beans runs me about $0.89.  Make the whole bag at once and you get about 8 cups of cooked beans.  You can eat these as a filling side to something else, straight as they are, refried in tortillas, on tostada shells, whatever.  Final Cost - about $0.11 per serving!

Gotta get back to cooking - more to come!