The Spendthrift's Progress

Food = expensive

As we're firmly in the cold, wet, miserable part of autumn right now, I decided that it was a good time to start making nourishing, inexpensive, tasty soup.

Normally, soup happens randomly, with various beans and root veggies tossed together and cooked with some stock and some spices, and occasionally some meat. Soup this way is very, very cheap. It is, however, fairly utilitarian. As we have the Cook's Illustrated cookbook for two more days (after which, the library makes us give it back), we decided to make their Hearty Lentil Soup. After all, it claims to be cheap to make, and tasty to boot.

It probably is cheap to make, but I'll admit the cost of ingredients (we didn't have many on hand) lead to some sticker shock on account of my baseline being the aforementioned utilitarian soup. We were also out of staple items like milk and fruit, so it was a more expensive grocery trip than last week's by about $14.

It's good that I still had some of last week's money left, or I'd have precious little to get me through to the end of this week. Nothing like spending more than 3/4 of your weekly cash on the first day.

In other thrilling and exciting news, having learned that we're about two years away from an open spot at any of the University's day cares, despite getting on the wait list before the girl was even born, we've started looking for slots in other, less convenient places. I somehow expect I'll be looking at sticker shock there, too.

posted by mohmlet @ 8:33 PM