Day 11

Just as a recap...we are now 1/3 of the way through with our social experiment. How do I feel so far? Pretty good! Our fridge is at a manageable capacity right now. We are eating our produce before it goes bad. It is also making me more creative in using up leftovers and it has helped us reduce the amount of meat and eggs we eat. What we should have done was get blood tests to check our beginning weight/blood sugar/cholesterol and all that stuff so we can compare 30 days later. Anyway...day 10 and our pantry and freezer is still going strong. The vegetable and fruit situation is not something we're going to sacrifice or skimp on--remember--the goal is healthy--so we will buy more as we run out. No biggie.

The " total spent on food" is how much we actually spent this month to buy food or groceries.

The "estimated cost of food" is a more accurate measure of how much we spend each month because we were basically just eating through our previously purchased supplies. Once we run out, we'd have to replenish it. I divided the "estimated cost of food" into servings and multiplied it by the two of us when we had guests over for dinner. We often invite people over but that number is variable. I wanted to specifically measure how much the two of us spend.

The total "estimated cost of food" is the total cost of food including ourselves and our guests.

Here is a brief recap of our 10 day expenses:

Total Spent on Food/Groceries: $15.06 or $.75/day per person. This number is a little off because I bought $32.58 worth of groceries on August 31st, so really, the total I spent so far is: $47.64 or 2.38/pp. I didn't add the August 31st grocery cost to the "Estimated Costs" because I accounted for each item individually so I only included what I actually used. That is different from this total because here, I included the cost of all the groceries, including items that I have not yet used.

Estimated Cost of Food (based on 2 people): $47.68 or $2.39/day per person.
Estimated Cost of Food (including our guests): $70.12 or $2.34/day per person.

Today, we just ate leftovers for lunch and went to a friend's house for a BBQ dinner. It was a potluck and I brought a seafood quinoa dish. I had this frozen mussel broth leftover from when my friend's visited me last month and it was a rich, yummy, wine-y concentrated broth that was perfect for cooking the rather tasteless grains of quinoa. Add in some fresh sliced corn (thanks 10 for $1!) and a small handful of frozen seafood mix, I was all ready to go. It looked and tasted luxurious but it probably cost $3 to $5 total in ingredients. I'll just say $5 to be on the conservative side. I wish I had taken a picture but we were in a hurry. It was gobbled up pretty quickly but I'll just ask you to take my word for it that it was a good potluck dish.

Total spent on food today: $0
Est. Cost of Food: $5