Budget Meals for the Week

Ahhh Sunday! The day that I destroy my kitchen (even more than usual) to make my meals for the week. I have been super busy lately with working and going to the gym, so now it is even more important that I observe this ritual. Last week I ran out of home cooked meals and ended up eating lots of Boca burgers and Clif bars. Not that I am complaining too much. Today I made several dishes that will hopefully keep me fed all week. I also think I did a pretty decent job of keeping everything fairly inexpensive. Cheap food does not equal any lack of flavor or nutrients in my kitchen! This post will detail my cooking adventures for this weekend.

First off, I made a big stir fry with my old nemesis...frozen vegetables! I have never cared for the texture/flavor of frozen veggies. Something about them has always bothered me. Maybe because I grew up eating a lot of canned goods. I will eat any vegetable fresh (except celery, because that is NASTY), and I occasionally use canned veggies in my cooking, although I am trying to get away from that. Frozen veggies are very cheap and easy to stock up on, so I have been forcing myself to try like them. I think I found a winner with this dish.

Thanks to the magic of Sam's Club, I picked up a 4.5 pound bag of frozen stir-fry veggies for around $7. This mix includes broccoli, snow peas, carrots, red pepper, water chestnuts, and mushrooms. Oh, and I found 2 sketchy-looking sauce packets when I opened the bag. They weren't really frozen like the vegetables, which made me even more suspicious.


I tossed some veggies in my handy microwave steamer and put them in the microwave until they were in a less-frozen state. I ended up nuking 2 batches, or about half of the bag. I was actually planning on using a sauce packet for some reason.

For my protein in this whole ordeal, I decided to use some tofu. I picked up a couple of packs of Melissa's organic extra-firm tofu at Hy-Vee last week on sale for $1.99 each. My favorite brand of tofu is Nasoya, but since Melissa's is usually $3-4 I figured I would give it a try. All I did was press it for a while, using a handy kabocha squash

Cube it...


...and bake it. Yes, I bake tofu. Quite a lot, actually. It helps firm it up and dry it out, without adding much extra fat. My favorite thing to bake it with is my handy $1 pizza pan I got at the Salvation Army years ago. It is now well "seasoned" and really does the trick.


See? Slightly crispy, chewy, golden deliciousness! I didn't season it this time because I was going to add it to something, but it was still tasty plain and hot out of the oven. The sauce that came with the veggies was actually pretty decent on its own, but that didn't stop me from adding tons of fresh garlic, sesame seeds, and chili garlic sauce!


This dish came together beautifully, and ended up making 3 hefty servings for around $5.50, or about $1.83 each. It was so flavorful that I actually didn't mind the texture of the vegetables. Hopefully this is a step forward in training myself to accept frozen veggies into my life!


Another fairly cheap dish I made was a big breakfast scramble. I am famous for my scrambled tofu, which I usually make with firm tofu. Lately I have been making it with silken tofu for a change. I have a very rocky relationship with breakfast. I used to skip it all the time. Horrible, I know. It took me a lot of training (and Luna bars) to get in the habit of eating breakfast every day. A good portion of my morning meals still consist of eating some type of bar in my car on the way to work, but that is still better than nothing! I figured I would eat better breakfasts if I cooked a bunch of food to heat up in the mornings. So that is how this mess came to be.


I actually had about half of a tube of Gimme Lean sausage in the freezer, so I figure I would use that up. I also added some diced red onion, minced garlic, and jalapenos, along with two boxes of tofu. Seasoning includes ground mustard, tumeric, nutritional yeast, Braggs, and black pepper.

While I was making this mess, I was trying something new in my slow cooker. I guess you could call this a Tuscan style "baked" beans dish. I will probably tweak this a little next time, but it basically consisted of a pound of white beans soaked overnight and a jar of Trader Joe's bruschetta.

I just tossed the ingredients in my slow cooker and let 'er rip on high for about 8 hours. I have learned the hard way that when set on low, even for 10 hours, my slow cooker is NOT capable of cooking beans. I checked on these beans a few times during the day, and they were technically cooked after about 4-5 hours, but I love how they broke down a little after going all day. They really have the same consistency of baked beans from a can. Yum! This whole pot of beans cost about $3.50, and it made a TON. I am not sure how many meals it will last me, but they will all be super cheap.