Since I started my $5 per week food budget, I’ve developed an odd habit: dinner for breakfast. Yes, I’m eating my dinner foods first thing in the morning, odd as that may seem.

Before I started conserving on my food budget I started each day with a tall mug of sweetened tea and a Clif Bar. The Clif Bars cost $1.50 or so here in the one supermarket in our remote mountain town. My favorite flavor was “Peanut Toffee Buzz” which has a bit of caffeine in it. Unfortunately the Clif Bars, which cost me a minimum of $10.50 per week, were the first things to go from my food budget. I say minimum because I liked them so much, I often ate them for snacks later in the day as well.

When I ran out of Clif Bars I started making oatmeal for breakfast but my supply has dwindled. Though I’m an avid food storage advocate, I hadn’t stored oatmeal. Big mistake! I plan to make a food storage shopping trip after my six-week $5/wk. budgeting experiment is over. Oatmeal is one thing I’ll stock up on. It is a great way to get a filling breakfast in the morning.

I know a lot of people reading this will be groaning because they think oatmeal is the worst breakfast ever, but it has its uses. It digests slowly and come to think of it, Avena Sativa (oat) is a popular herb for various reasons… energy being one of them. Google “Avena Sativa” and you’ll get other ideas on what people are buying this herb for. I have some in capsule form that I’ve taken as part of my regimen to get off hypothyroid medications.

Since I like to eat a substantial breakfast, and am a total vegetarian, I’ve started eating my rice, lentils, potatoes and carrots for breakfast. I cook them once or twice weekly in my rice steamer; rice and lentils in the bottom and veggies on top. I cut my potatoes in half and eat them like baked potatoes when the rice steamer opens. For breakfast I chop the steamed potatoes and carrots into small pieces, warm in olive oil with sliced fresh garlic, and then add the rice and lentil mixture on top. Spices I add are simply salt, pepper, and garlic powder. I like lots of garlic as you can see, and believe it has great health benefits for my circulatory system.

It is nearly 4am as I write this and I’ve just had two small plates of this wonderful breakfast. Though I also eat the same for dinner I’m fully satisfied with this and know I won’t be hungry for a while.

I’m developing another breakfast… with vegan pancakes and a variety of toppings. More on that another time. The recipe isn’t perfected enough to share yet. Meanwhile, I can say I’m still eating well though I’ve reached week three of my $5/wk. food budgeting experiment.

Food purchases last week were $1.99 for a bag of potatoes, $.35 for carrots, and $.98 for fresh broccoli. That gave me $1.68 left over which I’m adding to this week’s food budget. I haven’t decided yet what I’ll spend it on. I’m considering olive oil as I’m almost out. I do have a couple pounds of butter I could use instead. I’ll probably wait until later in the week to make a decision on what to buy next. Oatmeal comes to mind.

My goal, between now and the end of the year, is to spend only $5 per week on food.

Can I do it? We will soon find out.

Why the strict budget? Well, my income went down and now I’m finding out I can still pay all my bills (that’s good) but I will have to choose between firewood and food (not so good.) As it gets really cold here in the mountains, I definitely want to buy the firewood. A nice young man comes by and dumps the wood, a cord at a time, in my front yard right in front of the flower bed. We pay him $190 for all his labor, and usually need more than a cord per month once winter gets rolling.

I have a lot of food stored up here. I have canned foods I almost never touch. I was saving them for an emergency. They’re about a year old now and I really should consume them and then replace the stored items when I’m feeling more prosperous. I’ve also got lots of stored beans and rice, and other dry foods… you know, flours and things like that. I think this will serve to sustain me.

I’m nearly through consuming all the vegetables from my summer garden. I need to plant a winter garden soon… but that won’t suffice for this six-week budgeting experience. Therefore I expect that some of the weekly shopping money will be spent on vegetables. I’ll also need to buy tortillas, though if need be I can make them.

One thing I’m giving up entirely is bread. All it does is make me fat and fill me with candida. It may be the primary reason why I’ve had trouble losing weight. Whoever said bread is the “staff of life” really hooked me. All these years I thought of bread as essential… but no more. The supermarket here sells quality bread (the only kind I’d eat) for $4.50 a loaf. Obviously that will be too much for my $5 per week food budget. I’d rather spend my money on other things.

Another thing I’ll have to give up is my beloved Clif Bars. I’ve been buying them for breakfasts and snacks for a couple years now, and I’ll sure miss them. But at $1.50 a pop, I just can’t afford them now. I’ll probably make myself bowls of oatmeal to get the same effect without the high cost.

I’ll post my results after my first weekly shopping trip.

Oh, I also should mention — I will no longer go into town more often than once weekly to pick up mail and get groceries. Staying away from shopping areas is sure to help keep me from spending money!

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Now for a word on what I’m eating today. I recently bought a rice steamer and I’m just loving it! I make brown rice with lentils (2 cups rice, one cup lentils) in the bottom of the steamer and put vegetables in the steamer tray on top. This week the veggies were potatoes and carrots. I take the resulting rice/lentils/veggies and fry them in a bit of olive oil, adding garlic powder, pepper, turmeric and ginger. This goes into a warm tortilla with fresh diced onion and a bit of hot sauce. A delicious, healthy and filling meal. Very vegan!

I don’t know if any of you were in a situation anything like mine. If you identify, let me know. The problem was that my mother didn’t teach me how to cook, so as a young woman I was very much lacking in self-confidence when it came to cooking. Plus dinner preparations in our parental home were less than optimal. My mom woke up from a nap and went into the kitchen, not wanting to deal with us kids, and fixed something simple like hamburger patties or hamburger helper, and warmed-up green peas with a salad. There was always a salad, and that’s what she asked one of her daughters to fix. Honestly, my mom was and is a wonderful cook. She can do amazing things with food when she needs to. I’m just giving you a worst-case scenario. Still, I didn’t learn much about cooking.

Also my grandmother, her mother, was a fantastic cook. Dinners at her house were always wonderful. But neither of them took time to teach me how to cook, except for one incident I clearly remember. My mom wanted to teach me how to bake a cake and so she taught me - from a box. I remember baking a marble cake - I think it was chocolate cake mix with white cake mix swirled in. Now, that was a good, positive experience, and I thank Mom for it. But when I was 18, on my own, trying to start a family, I was clueless in the kitchen. I knew how to make grilled cheese sandwiches from processed prepared sliced cheese, and a tossed green salad, and oatmeal for breakfast, and that’s about it.

Of course this didn’t go over good with my first boyfriend (later he was my first husband) but he tried to help. We lived in San Francisco - at first in the Haight Ashbury, then in Noe Valley, and later in the Haight Ashbury again. At that time we started making bread together every day. He knew more about making bread than I did as apparently his mother did it. I, however, had never seen anyone making bread.

I’d seen my grandmother making pie dough. Once when I stayed with her as a teenager she decided to make a peach cobbler. I asked her to teach me how but she said something like, “Not now, I’m busy, I just want to do this and get it over with.” She put flour in a bowl, then butter. This she cut in with two knives. Nothing was measured. She poured in the appropriate amount of water, and voila! Perfect pie dough. Then she lined her 9×13″ pan with dough, put two big cans of peach slices in, poured in some sugar… again, no need to measure anything. Then she covered it with more dough and put it in the oven for an hour or so. It always came out perfect and I learned almost nothing about how to do it myself. I think I tried to make a peach cobbler once and it didn’t turn out nearly as good as my grandmother’s.

Anyhow, back to bread-baking in the Haight Ashbury. I tried every day to bake bread right, but usually it was a failure. Usually the bread didn’t rise right, or wasn’t cooked enough, or something would happen to make it less than perfect. It took months before I could produce edible bread. Somehow I had decided I couldn’t cook, so I couldn’t. A self-fulfilling prophecy. I knew nothing about being the kind of woman who could prepare a wholesome meal every evening, regularly and dependably. Plus my boyfriend and I had different eating preferences. I was a vegetarian; he wasn’t. He brought in steaks to cook for himself and didn’t want most of what I wanted to eat anyway.

So that was the beginning of my cooking career. I wish I’d worked in a restaurant back then; it would have made me feel much more comfortable with the issue of cooking food. Instead I suffered for many years, trying to learn to cook. Even to this day I still have times where a fear of cooking comes upon me. That lack of self-confidence is hard to get away from.

Because of all this, it is strange that I have a cooking blog, don’t you think? I can cook now, and have collected my own workable, practical vegetarian recipes over the years, but I’m hardly a natural at it.

My favorite recipe site is allrecipes.com - I’ve been going there for help with finding recipes for years. I like how people can contribute their own recipes, rate recipes, and find almost anything. You can print out your recipes in several sizes. Sometimes there’s almost too many choices!

I put in the search term, ‘blueberry muffins’ and it came up with ‘Lemon Blueberry Muffins’, ‘Health Nut Blueberry Muffins’, ‘Blueberry Muffins 1′, ‘Diabetic Friendly Blueberry Muffins’, ‘Banana Blueberry Muffins’, ‘Streusel Topped Blueberry Muffins’, ‘Blueberry Muffins 2′, ‘Alienated Blueberry Muffins’, ‘Applesauce Blueberry Muffins’, ‘Applesauce Wheat Blueberry Muffins’, ‘To Die For Blueberry Muffins - Lighter Version’, ‘Best Lactose Free Blueberry Muffins’, ‘Oatmeal Blueberry Muffins’, ‘Black and Blueberry Muffins’, and lots more.

You get the idea. This reader-contributed recipe listing service is hosting tons of recipes and if you can’t find what you’re looking for there, I’d be surprised.