SNAP Challenge, Day Two #JFSnapChallenge
There is more than a little irony going on here.
The girls and I shopped with many of our fellow SNAP Challengers at Checkers Foods last night. The local paper, The Lawrence Journal World, had a couple of reporters and a photographer on hand to write about the story. One reporter asked to follow us during our shopping trip. He was nice and asked a lot of questions while the girls ran around and sometimes helped me shop for food. The photographer got a couple of shots of me sharing my menu and price book. It was a good event. There were City Commissioners, County Commissioners and more than a few prominent community members there to shop as well. We were in good company.
We purchased our groceries and said goodbye to the nice reporter, telling him we had to rush Audrey to her piano lessons. I got in my 2013 Mazda wearing my new Gap scarf and my nice Zappos shoes feeling more than a little silly. After dropping Audrey at piano lessons Mo and I went to Target to get her new snow boots and face scrub for me. I really started to feel like a hypocrite then.
I spent a great deal of time planning our menu for the week, shopping for the best prices, and setting aside time to make from scratch what I could not afford to buy pre-made. I looked on Pinterest, hit a few websites for price comparisons and stopped by the library to check out more cookbooks.
Time may not be something a single working parent with small children has to get the most nutritious food for the limited funds available to them. And money is certainly something they do not have to throw around. They do not have the luxury of taking a five day challenge to see what it is like to be food insecure. At the end of our challenge we can go back to eating what ever I feel like purchasing. And my girls can have the expensive box of clementines they wanted at Checkers last night. I feel like a hypocrite.
As you can see from the photos day one went well. You can check out our original menu to see how close we were to our plan. Maurene refused to entertain the idea of tortilla, banana and peanut butter lunch and asked for cinnamon toast and ants on a log. I relented. I had the banana, tortilla, and peanut butter. I believe Maurene also ate a banana right before lunch. She is obsessed. I took that into consideration when planning our menu. Audrey likes cinnamon apples so that is why that was our only other fruit purchase.
Day one dinner turned into spaghetti, red sauce, mashed cauliflower, and peas. It was easy and well received. The peas and cauliflower were frozen and cooked in the microwave. I dumped the cauliflower in the food processor with the water it cooked in and some soy butter to make "cloud fluff." The red sauce was mostly from a jar with the addition of the mirepoix, garlic and navy beans. If you do not see a beverage we drank water.
The girls also had another pumpkin muffin after dinner. That would have been the end of our day had their father not come home bringing a frozen chocolate treat on a stick. He knows this is our challenge week and felt the girls needed it anyway. There was nothing I could do, they had them in their hands before I knew what was happening.
Check back tomorrow to see how it continues.