Okay so we went shopping this afternoon and we ended up at the Fairway market because it’s supposed to have really good pricing on products.

It was really challenging to go shopping, and look at places comparing prices realizing that although we normally buy organic produce we could no longer afford to do so on this budget.   Sonia, my wife has decided to join in this SNAP challenge so that gave us a larger budget almost $70 for the two of us for the week.  Compared to our normal lifestyle this was far more restrictive than we normally experienced shopping.

Just the idea of us shopping together, and working with a super restrictive budget brought conflict into our conversation.  Should we actually get packaged goods like Quinoa, or do we buy it in bulk?  How much do we measure out, and how do we use the electronic scale to print out the labels. It’s from seemingly innocuous things but suddenly we were having conversations about what was the most economical product whether produce, cereal bulk, or pre packaged.  We also have to factor in the fact that on Wednesday morning, we will be flying to California so we need to leave enough in our budget to purchase food when we get there for Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. One last thing, we got a $2.99 refund on fresh Brussels sprouts, which seemed too pricey for this limited budget.

Dinner for me tonight was Ramen noodles with a couple of eggs,  some frozen florettes of broccoli, and then adding that into the soup.  Then since it is Shabbos we cheated to some degree, we had two prepackaged soda crackers as a Challah substitute and there was already opened kosher grape juice and we used to say Kiddush so we could say the proper blessings before eating our delicious meal.  Saying Birkat Hamazon took on a deeper significance.