Thursday Thrifty Roundup

This week I…

• Food prepped, like every week. This week I cooked a big batch of steel-cut oats, Spanish garbanzo beans with spinach, sautéed garlic kale, roasted cauliflower and roasted sweet potatoes. Last night I also cooked a big batch of lentil and mushroom stew, mixed it with mashed potatoes, baked it in a casserole dish and then cut into individual servings to freeze for B. I like to have a few things in the freezer that I can pull out to give him for lunch.

Last night we ate some baked potatoes loaded with ranch dressing and buffalo tofu, with some garlic kale on the side, and we have leftovers to eat the same thing tonight. Tomorrow my husband will cook collard greens, cornbread and a big pot of beans and we’ll eat that through the weekend.

• Saved money at a birthday party by not drinking. I’ve been avoiding booze for most of the year, primarily in an effort to lose a few pounds, but it’s saving a few dollars here-and-there as well. Last Saturday a good friend had a birthday party at a drag brunch, which was quite expensive on its own – $72 for entrance, which included food and one drink (which I donated to the birthday boy), and another $20 for tipping the queens, but if I’d been drinking I likely would have spent another $30. I did still tip the staff as if I’d been buying drinks, because it’s a dick move to take up somebody’s table all day, barely spending anything but keeping them from having any other customers, and then tip a standard percentage on your minuscule tab.

• Took B to a free rescue farm Sunday morning, although we did pay the $5 donation to get a bucket of food to feed the animals. As B had zero interest in feeding the animals, we may skip that part next time. He had fun with the goats, but mostly he wanted to sit in the playhouse and declare that it was his house and not ours.

• Took B to gymnastics open play on a day when admission cost just $2 and two cans of food for the local food bank, rather than the usual $10. Even with a punch card it works out to be $7 per visit, so two dollars and two cans of beans is definitely cheaper. However, that comes at the cost of it being very crowded, and he had a few collisions with older kids sprinting all over the place while their parents were who-the-fuck-knows-where. That, combined with it not really being at a good time of day for us anyway, means we probably won’t be in a hurry to go back. Which is kind of a bummer, because he’s finally reaching an age where he can play intentionally with a lot of the equipment and he loves going.

• Stretched some protein powder by only using half-servings. I have mixed feelings about protein powder, because I prefer to keep my food as minimally-processed as possible. And I’m of the opinion that most people are getting PLENTY of protein, and that if we went out of our way to get fiber the same way we go out of our way to get protein we’d all be much healthier. But I’m trying to stay in a calorie deficit right now, and in the hopes of preserving muscle mass I’ve decided to add a little chocolate protein powder to my oatmeal instead of the cocoa powder I’d been adding. So I bought a bag of Costco-brand chocolate protein powder (using a shop-card balance), and I’ve been weighing out half-sized servings because I don’t feel like I need to add 25 grams of protein to my oats. All that is to say the bag will last me twice as long. And a fun little anecdote – there’s been a lot of press about protein powders containing high levels of heavy metals, but I saw a Reddit comment from a guy who works in a lab and tested the Kirkland brand protein powder himself, and he claims the levels were all well within acceptable ranges. But whatever levels of heavy metals might be there, I’m only getting half of those at a time, too.
• Waited to buy ice cream until it went on sale. We usually buy store-brand ice cream, which we find just as delightful as any other. But I happened to notice Tillamook’s German chocolate cake flavor while grocery shopping last weekend, a flavor I hadn’t seen before, and I’ve always loved German chocolate cake. It was always my grandpa’s favorite kind of cake, and my mom made it every year for his birthday. I decided to wait until it went on sale to buy it, and lo and behold, it went on sale this week. I grabbed some yesterday when I did our mid-week fruit run. Calorie deficit or no calorie deficit, I’m going to fit some ice cream in.