14 day Challenge
Ben and I had just arrived home from a family vacation when we discovered the following e-mail in our in-boxes.
When: Starts
What: For the next 14 days, eat only what you have stored in your home
Why: *to determine if we could get along with what we have in our homes if there were a tornado, hurricane or economic crisis
*to assess what items we don’t have that we really need
*to track how much money we save
*to rotate our food storage
*because if we can’t live for 2 weeks on what we have, we are in serious trouble!
(we were going for 3 weeks, but changed our minds!)
Rules:
*May eat out once each week either dinner or lunch (for those who have obligations to fulfill)
*May spend $5.00 each week to help the desperation, medical prescriptions are exempt
*May barter food storage with friends (here’s 4 cups of sugar for 1 can diced green chiles)
*May accept invitation to eat at someone’s home as long as you take something from your home to share.
*Write down what you choose as menus. Share them frequently with everyone to give each other support and ideas.
*Write down what % of your grocery budget you saved each week.
*Diapers are not groceries. I know you all have cloth diapers you could use, but I don’t want the babies to suffer! Other non-food items are to be included as groceries like toothpaste, laundry soap. We want to simulate not knowing when a disaster would strike.
Prizes:
Prizes will be awarded for creativity, resourcefulness, most creative menus, other money saving tips and ideas that you utilize along the way and great recipes using basic items. Prizes will not be food storage!
**Menus and ideas will be judged by Dad, Me, and a third party and results tabulated by the Accounting Firm of Bartig, Bassler and Ray.
**This obviously will take time to plan, organize, and make from scratch so many items, but we think it will be a great learning experiment if only to make us so happy to be able to buy fresh produce when it is over!
Much to Ben's disappointment, I was getting excited for the challenge, he claims, "We know we have good food storage, what is the purpose of this? To prove we can eat canned fruit?" I just laughed at him with my evil laugh, mow-ohhahaa.
I find this challenge interesting. We may be eating the blandest food by the end of two weeks but I'm very interested in trying. I do have four major problems that I'm going to have to figure out. 1) We are taking dinner to friends this week 2) Wiley is supposed to make and decorate a cake with his dad for his first night of Cub Scouts on Wednesday 3) I'm hosting girls night out on Thursday night and 4) Wiley is having his 8th birthday party at our house on Saturday. With those events coming up I'm am feeling very challenged. I can make bread till the cows come home, but really, as I learned in church today, Man cannot live on bread alone. What now?
I want to follow the rules. I was very tempted to go out and buy groceries last night when we got back into town. It felt difficult to just make it through last nights dinner. I'm going to need to get really creative.
I think I shall have to warn all my neighbors that I'm going to be doing some bartering.
Luckily, I quickly assessed the toilet paper situation along with the toothpaste, shampoo, cleaning supplies, etc, and I'm fine in every area, (or so it seems) except the fridge area. I will definitely be using all $5 for the fresh items.
5 comments:
That is a lot of events. Wow, Good luck!
And just how do you make seived yogurt????
don't you put a coffee filter in a sieve and put sour cream in it? or something like that. The juice of the sour cream drains out and you have sieved yogurt.
Sounds good Sharalee. there is no chance of us following the rules. we're not going to be able to change our behaviors much for the contest
your family is awesome.
good luck this week! and will you share with us your bread recipes.
Wow. What a good challenge. How is it going? I'll bet you learn quickly what you wish you had. I hope you do a follow-up post on that. I'll be watching for it. :)
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