Our dining-out fund is like one of those parasitic creatures on “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” completely reliant upon its host body -- in our case, the grocery fund -- for sustenance. The only time it gets “fed” is when we beat our weekly spending target. Then whatever’s left over goes to the dining fund.
Some weeks I’m the only one who pays much attention to this process, even though I post the figures regularly on our fridge “scoreboard.” But when the dining fund accumulates enough money that the kids foresee, say, a trip to the Chinese buffet in our near future, they become fixated on what we can do to chop our grocery spending. Instead of nagging me that we need milk or cereal, they’ll suggest we mix up a pitcher of powdered milk and offer to eat oatmeal.
This week we came in $12.08 under our grocery budget, which we set at $90 -- $15 per person per week.
One of the things we avoided buying was noodles, even though we had chicken and noodles with mashed potatoes for dinner one night. When Grandma Linda makes this traditional Midwestern dish (which Grouchy Dad calls a "starch-on-starch stockpot") she probably spends $10 on a big can of chicken meat, noodles and brand-name cans of chicken broth. We used two cans of store-brand chicken noodle soup, bullion cubes, and five leftover lasagna noodles.
My plan was to soften them up in the broth, then pull them out and cut them into noodle-sized pieces. But I left them in too long and they disintegrated into their own odd shapes. Ordinarily the kids would’ve rolled their eyes at this odd looking topping for their mashed potatoes, but not this week. This week everybody’s got their eyes on the prize.
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