Day 3 | Dinner: Cosmopolitan vegetable spaghetti
Well, perhaps not as cosmopolitan as I thought at first; broccoli, daylilies, and olives are all native to areas around the Mediterranean. But add some oregano, black pepper, seasoned salt, and creole for a little bit of a kick, and it tasted worldly enough. A little romano cheese didn’t hurt, either.
Total approximate cost: $1.06
It may have become apparent by now that I rarely cook to a recipe. That’s coming in especially handy at the moment, when I don’t necessarily have ingredients to make any particular meal. Whatever seems like it will taste good goes into a stir fry and gets supplemented by pasta or rice—even the pack of ramen I found at the back of a cabinet is as likely to be used as a carb supplement as it is to be eaten some evening when I’m feeling especially lazy. Simpler meals including only packaged goods (like spaghetti with tomato sauce) can be reserved for later in the week when I’ve run through the store-bought veggies; packaged goods won’t spoil if they go unused for a few days. My willingness to eat backyard greens also means I’m unlikely to go without veggies unless I’m too lazy to go out and pick them.
I’m pleased to report that a day later, I’ve experienced no ill effects from any of the green vegetables I harvested from around town. Perhaps I’ll pick up some salad dressing during my next shopping trip so I can do some proper backyard salads. Better still—does anyone know of a salad dressing that’s easy to make from ingredients commonly found in the kitchen? Let me know!
Discardian Musings
I’m not at all sure whether it’s directly related to 31on100, but so far today I’ve paid all my bills for this month, built two chairs that have been sitting in their boxes ever since Ikea delivered them, and am now in the middle of finally cleaning out my closet so I can build my dresser. This means throwing out a bunch of old clothes, possibly some books, and probably the CD player/tape deck I’ve been hanging onto since middle school.
Conveniently, I’m smack in the middle of the four-times-a-year holy ~week Discardia. Long story short, Discardia is a celebration of getting rid of things and thoughts you no longer need. It’s celebrated from each solstice and equinox to the following new moon. That means some instances of Discardia are three weeks long, and some are three days. This particular one ends a week from tomorrow, if you’re interested in joining me in celebration.
In addition to cleaning the closet (and desk, and sink, and pretty much everything else), I’ve found myself listening to Brother, a band that has always felt uniquely mine but which I hadn’t listened too much in the last year, burning Red Crystal incense, and generally harking back to an older version of myself—a version I’ve missed. I wonder how much of this is due to 31on100 (probably not much, given that I’m only three days into the project), how much is due to the beautiful summer weather, and how much to the fact that it usually takes me about a year to really adapt to any new life pattern (high school, college, the real world). I suspect a synthesis of the three, with the last item providing the most impetus—I’ve finally started adapting to my non-student status and the opportunities it provides me to pursue interesting projects.
In honour of Discardia, I ought to obey Strunk and White’s best-known exhortation: ‘Omit needless words.’ To that end, I’m done writing for the moment.
Day 3 | Breakfast
Nothing exciting, just a bowl of cereal and milk. I usually skip breakfast on weekday mornings because I tend to run late.
Approximate total cost: $0.73
I woke up with a list of things to do, many of them involving paying bills, and I’ve already burned through those. The last financial task was taking my snailmail checks to the post office, and it turned out the Oberlin Farmers’ Market across the street was still open. I snooped around since I hadn’t ever visited before—I know, I’m a terrible Obie—and came across a stand that had a pair of young tomato plants for $2 each.
I’ve been meaning to purchase a tomato plant, and since neither of these was bearing fruit yet—read, didn’t count against the $100—I decided to pick one up. The choice was between Nyagous and Amish Paste, both heirloom varieties. I’m not planning to make any tomato sauce, but I would definitely enjoy slices of a good meaty heirloom tomato, so I took a chance on the Nyagous. From what I’m reading, that was a good choice. Now I just have to figure out where to plant it, because I don’t think it can spend its whole life in my little apartment.
Once I’m a little more confident about spending a few years in one place, I’m definitely planning to keep a vegetable garden including things like tomatoes, basil and other herbs, perhaps some daylilies, and goosefoot, beans, squash, and other native crops—maybe even some corn if I have a decent-sized space. If planned and planted well, it could look pretty good and provide some real, fresh variety for the table.
Day 2 | Dinner
Backyard Lasagna/Quiche
No photo, I’m afraid, because it just wasn’t that pretty. Composed of some lasagna noodles given to me by a friend a couple of weeks ago (and forgotten about until now), two eggs, some cheddar cheese I had from before I started this project, yellow daylily buds, and plantain and dandelion leaves.
Approximate total cost (excluding cheese): $0.12
Twelve cents. Seriously. I’ve had worse meals at major restaurant chains, and I don’t mean McDonald’s. The only downside to this meal were some of the older plantain leaves, which were frankly gross—not because of their flavour, which was mostly fine, but because of their texture, which was incredibly tough and chewy. If you ever cook with plantain, make sure to get only young leaves.
The rest of the meal was very tasty. It’s hard to go wrong with eggs and cheese, and the young plantain and dandelion leaves tasted like slightly bland spinach, while the daylily buds contributed a more green-bean-like flavour and a mushroom-y texture. There was one absolutely delicious mouthful that I think must have contained the two dandelion buds I managed to find—dandelion buds are often used in stir fries due to being more flavourful than the rest of the plant. Some people even claim they taste like mushrooms. I’ll have to find some more to try.
As the month goes on, I’ll run out of the butter and cheese I had previously bought (and eventually the daylily buds as well, as the season winds on). Nevertheless, these first two days have made it clear to me that a determined person could eat at least two solid meals a day in an Ohio summer on much less than $100/month.
Disclaimer: If you can’t identify a plant with 100% certainty, you have absolutely no business eating any part of it. Unless you have extensive experience with plant identification, I don’t advocate scavenging your own food.
The expected privilege rage has surfaced.
I’m just going to get this out of the way: in my first two days of eating frugally, I’ve discovered that an absurd number of common weed and backyard species are edible. If I can cook and eat acorns and plantain and dandelions and violets and on and on and on, why the hell is anyone going hungry?
Someone is fucking things up. No one should be dying of starvation in a world this bountiful.
"Native Americans called the plant “white man’s footprint” or “Englishman’s foot” because it appeared wherever white men went."
Plantago major - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Conveniently, it also has a taste like that of “very bitter salad greens with a lingering aftertaste not unlike spinach”. At least in theory. Part of dinner tonight will be a plantain and dandelion salad (or possibly an omelette variant), so I’ll post again after I’ve tried it.
The upshot of the fact that dandelion and plantain leaves are edible is that one could probably live for a summer entirely off the backyard bounty of a two-block radius in Oberlin, if one were willing to swallow his pride and a very repetitive diet of plantain, violet, and dandelion salad and stir-fried yellow daylily buds. I’m not sure where this one would get his protein in that case, though.
Please pardon that last paragraph; I’ll try not to let it happen again.
Day 2 | Lunch
Generic Honey Bunches of Oats—the generic cost less than half of what the brand name cost—and a banana, with milk. I also ate a small chunk of cheese I had purchased before deciding to undertake this project, although I didn’t need it and regretted doing so almost immediately.
Approximate total cost (excluding cheese): $0.82
This project is making me realise just how much extraneous food I eat. If I had gone out to eat anywhere in this town, I would have spent at least six times as much (assuming I had lunch to go and didn’t tip) and probably eaten twice as much food, all of it rather less healthy.
In other news, I guess I’ve received my banana equivalent dose of radiation for today.
Day 1 | Dinner
A chunk of French bread (I acquired a giant loaf for $1.99 while shopping and stuck the rest in the freezer) and a (heaping) handful of sunflower seeds with a couple of leaves of basil—I have a basil plant and a growing urge to sacrifice it for one really excellent batch of sunflower-seed pesto. I intended for those to be individual snacks rather than dinner, but it’s gotten late so into the dinner category they go.
I’ll give a fuller accounting of my first shopping trip tomorrow.
"When newly opened, Viola flowers may be used to decorate salads or in stuffings for poultry or fish. Soufflés, cream and similar desserts can be flavoured with essence of Viola flowers. The young leaves are edible raw or cooked as a somewhat bland leaf vegetable. The flowers and leaves of the cultivar ‘Rebecca’, one of the Violetta violets, has a distinct vanilla flavor with hints of wintergreen, however, that is quite delicious in salads."
Viola (plant) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I’m aware of a number of edible plants, but this use of violets is news to me. Good news, since I’m about to go out and see what I can pick to supplement the food I purchased earlier.
The Rules
1. I am allowed to spend only $100 on food for myself this month. That money may be split across the month in any way and spent on any foodstuff or meal.
2. If a friend owes me lunch or dinner and offers to make good during this period, I am allowed to accept. I will accept such an offer no more than four times over the course of the month, although that shouldn’t be an issue since I can’t think of four people who owe me meals.
3. I am allowed to use any coupons or deals I can find or haggle. A major point of this exercise is to learn frugality.
4. I am allowed to dive for food if the mood (and an experienced friend) should take me. See previous re: frugality. Besides, I live in Oberlin—diving is something I always meant to try as a student and never got around to.
5. I am allowed to use the food already present in my home. Besides some useful spices, oils, and tea, this currently equates to a half-bag of sushi rice, a few lousy apples, about a pound of butter, and some cheese. Oh, and a partial bottle of white wine. Hopefully I can find creative ways to use them.
While not on the official list of rules, I will also be acquiring a bike in the next week or two and attempting to reduce my carb intake substantially. Losing some weight and getting back into decent shape are secondary but very desirable outcomes of this experiment.
If you’ve got any questions or suggestions, please let me know!
