SNAP Challenge: Week 4

This week's soup

Here we are at the last week of the SNAP challenge. Since I bought two weeks' worth of groceries last week, I don't have a shopping trip to report to you, but I'll fill you in on my meal plan.

This past weekend, I ate:

• peanut butter toast for breakfast (I wasn't feeling super well last week and I didn't have much of an appetite in the mornings... does that make me sound pregnant? I assure you, I am not.)
• lunch on Saturday was leftovers from Thursday night (I took two of my friends out to thank them for catsitting for me) and Sunday lunch was the last of the potato chowder
• dinner on Saturday was baked potatoes topped with odds and ends from my fridge (green peppers, enchilada sauce, cheese, and sour cream) and I had dinner on Sunday at a friend's house

Additionally, I volunteered to make a dessert to bring to my friend's on Sunday. I had some leftover baking chocolate sitting in my pantry that I wanted to use up, so I started searching around for recipes. I came across a few good ones, but they would have required me to buy a few ingredients at the store. I almost resigned myself to going out to pick up eggs when I came across a recipe for vegan chocolate chip cookies that I had all of the ingredients for. Score! So, a quick tip for you: if you don't have eggs, search for a vegan version of what you want to make to see if you could make a few modifications to use what you have instead (I used butter for my cookies, so they weren't actually vegan).

My meal plan for this week:

Breakfasts: finish up the freezer breakfast burritos.

Lunches: tempeh tamale pie. There used to be a great vegetarian/vegan cooking blog called Peas and Thank You, but the writer decided to stop blogging. Luckily, some of her recipes wound up on other sites before she took her blog down, so I've been able to still cook some of them. This tamale pie is one such recipe. It's really filling and quick to make. I did a number of substitutions: I used my black beans instead of buying pinto beans, I used real cheese and sour cream instead of the vegan versions, and I used the agave syrup I already had instead of maple syrup. 

Dinners: tortellini soup with peas and spinach. Another super quick and easy recipe. I almost always have frozen peas, spinach, and vegetable broth (as was the case this time), so I only had to buy cheese tortellini. I usually don't make soup two weeks in a row, but I knew I would be cutting it close budget-wise because of the grocery delivery and was looking to use as much as I could that I already had on hand. Also, on a disappointing note, my parmesan went moldy, so I won't be able to sprinkle any parmesan cheese on this soup like I usually do :-(. 

There you have it folks: 4 weeks of SNAP budget recipes. Stay tuned for my wrap up post where I'll summarize my thoughts on the challenge as well as offer my tips and tricks for cooking for one on a budget.

Check out how I did:
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3