The Challenge!

I'm challenging myself to do what I'm claiming to be able to help you all do: to eat a nutritious diet on a small budget. I'll share tips, recipes, my thoughts about what's always worth the money as well as some good/better/best/never options to help you make decisions that are supportive to your family's health & budget. Here we go:

The rules:

1. This is a six-week challenge. I started it earlier this week in celebration of the shopping cart's birthday. :)
2. I am attempting to buy, cook, eat & feed my kiddo nutritious food, & nothing but nutritious food, on a budget of $25 per person per week. That's $50 per week for the two of us, or $300 total for the full six weeks.
3. The challenge will actually last six weeks and two days because we had a few random "leftovers" in the fridge, and I want everything to be fair & square.
4. I won't promise to count spices & salt in my budget, since those are things I keep around all the time & only buy every few months or so. I may figure out how much of an item I used in a recipe (like a few cents worth of some seasoning or spice), but I won't count buying the whole bottle since I don't buy them every week or every month.
5. Some of you know that I have chickens & get wonderful eggs without spending much on their food. For the sake of the challenge, I'll count eggs at the price you can buy them in this area. Winco has Omega-3 eggs for $2.38 a dozen, plus tax. My neighbor has backyard chickens and sells really good eggs for $2.50 a dozen to anyone who wants to come & buy them. These are cheap prices for good eggs, and I feel that they fit in a healthy-food budget, so the eggs I get from my chickens will enter my fridge at a calculated price of $2.50 per dozen. Yes, it's a bit of a sacrifice for me to figure it this way - I must love you already. :)
6. I'm doing this challenge now because I know that not everyone has garden space. We just started planting the garden this week, so mostly what we can get so far are a few weeds.
7. I'm a working mom, so I won't be in the kitchen making food every waking minute, but eating nutritious food means cooking, especially if you aren't paying someone else to make the food for you.

The kid & I eat a lot, and we like good food. I'm not sure if we'll be satisfied & eat really well or if we'll end up being really creative with weird random ingredients the last two weeks of the challenge, but I know some good principles of both nutrition & budgeting, and this will show how well I can make them work together and where I can still learn better ways or implement better strategies. Hopefully, we'll have some fun along the way! Are you ready? I know (hope) I am!