Day 49 - Value Eating on 05/01/2010

Today was a fruit & veggie day. After all the sampling & trials for the asparagus pasta, I was ready to detox.

Breakfast was 1 banana, 1 organic grapefruit and one organic apple sliced and shopped into a refreshing fruit salad for 1.9$
For lunch I had a big serving of the freshly picked, local & organic arugula salad, tossed with a little of Guido’s Balsamic for 1.5$

Dinner was a mistake. Or not. Better: it was a temptation I could not resist. I had seen a very delicious recipe on the fabulous blog “Lucullian Delights” (see in navigation: Other blogs I like) for potato bread with chives. Turns out I had a bunch of local, organic chives in my fridge, which came in my weekly produce box. Plus, some old organic local yams – testimonies of a winter that finally passed (although Michigan did have frost last week, which unfortunately destroyed some of the fruit already blossoming). So, I was wondering, could potatoes be substituted with yams? How about the starch content? Was it similar? I decided to take the risk, using the Lucullian Delights recipe, adding another cup of organic whole wheat flour and more chives. What can I say. It was delicious. And so was dinner: I almost ate 1 quarter of my bread, slathered with butter. And just to be precise: we are not talking about a small loaf of bunny bread, but a large wheel! The taste of the chives mingled with the slight sweetness the yams brought to the bread. And the dough was perfect. Fluffy, moist – soooo yummy. Baking bread yourself is really not that difficult. The two important things to have are: a) patience – you need to give the dough time to rise. I had it sitting for five hours before baking it; b) make sure you have an oven thermometer, so you can finetune the temperature. The exact temperature is very important for bread baking! So, now how much did this dinner cost me? 1.49$ for organic dry yeast, 1.8$ organic flour, 1.2$ for Cosimo’s EVOO, 0.2$ organic raw cane sugar, 0.6$ for the yams, 0.4$ organic Castle Rock milk, 0.3$ chives = 5.99 for the bread overall. Let me have eaten 1.50$ of it with 0.4$ of butter = 1.90$ and a lot of happiness for dinner.

Total food cost for today: 5.30$