[NOTE: If you're new to my FOOD, INC. $11 Dinner for Four Challenge, I recommend you read Ground Rules and Day One Meal, as background before reading this entry.]


On the menu for day three's dinner is red beans and rice with chorizo. Thanks to @ChefReinvented, @mango_lime and @oysterculture for suggesting different variations along this theme. Children and adults drink milk. Sorry, grownups, STILL don't have enough ducats to buy coffee for you.

For this meal, I "shopped" at the Val 16 Mart on 16th and Valencia on July 3, 2009 as well as the 16th and Potrero Safeway on July 7, 2009. I checked out Val 16 Mart because @oysterculture suggested a corner market might have better prices than Safeway. I had mixed results — will give details later.

As with the frittata, I had no clue how to make red beans and rice so I turned to the Internet. After rejecting a number of possibilities that didn't pass muster one reason or another, I chose a Puerto Rican recipe from SparkRecipes. Our family is Latino of unspecified nationality so I believe that this will be more culturally appropriate than Louisiana red beans and rice. However, for budgetary and taste reasons, I made a few alterations:

1) First and foremost, there is no way on earth that I'm planning a menu that uses minute rice. We're buying the real thing. I'm opting for brown (as called for in the recipe) because I believe it will be better for the diabetic father.

2) Still can't afford a bottle of olive oil so I'll use some of the butter left from day two to sauté the onions.

3) Skipping the cumin in favor of some hot sauce. The hot sauce is less expensive and more versatile.

So, let's cost it out.

We have butter and half of a jumbo onion left from day two so no money spent on those items.

A bulb of garlic costs $0.50. We'll use two cloves and save the rest to use later (usually seven or eight cloves in a bulb).

A 15 oz can of O Organics Organic Red Kidney Beans cost $1.39. The organic price is $0.15 more than the conventional store brand but the difference in sodium is so great (120 mg per serving for organic versus 340 for conventional) that it's a no-briner to spend a few extra pennies for the organic. This was a big takeaway from the meal — brands matter, especially when it comes to sodium. More on that later.

A 6 oz can of Safeway Tomato Paste went for $0.69.

A 5 oz bottle of El Pato hot sauce ran $0.69. We'll use a couple of teaspoons instead of the cumin and have plenty left for later in the week. Should be plenty tasty.

One pound of Safeway brown rice cost $1.25, Club Card price. We'll use 3/4 cup (uncooked), leaving about 2 cups left for future use.

We're out of milk so we need to buy for tonight. Fortunately, we have enough money to buy a gallon of Safeway Lucerne 1% Milk for $2.99. Compared to day one's purchase, that's double the milk for 50% more cash. With more money, I could have done even better as Safeway had to two for $2.14 each sale but you had to buy two gallons to get the sale price. Adults and kids alike get 8 oz. of milk to drink.

Chorizo was a better deal at Val 16 Mart so we "bought" a 12 oz. package (2 large links) for $1.69.

Adding it up, ingredients plus milk cost $9.20. We have $11.00 for today plus $0.11 left over from day two so doing the pluses and minuses we have $1.91 to spend on dessert.

Safeway had a Club Card special running on red plums, $1.88 per pound. Four plums weighed in 0.9 lbs., (I actually bought these) so that's dessert.

(Complete aside...while looking at the plums, one of Safeway's produce employees gave me a taste of a Red Velvet Plumcot. Heaven in a peel. And I don't like apricots!)

That brings us up to a grand total of $10.89 for today's meal. Including day two's carryforward, we had $11.11 to spend. So, we'll carry $0.22 into day four, plus 7 oz. of butter, three large eggs, 5/12 cup of Parmesan cheese, three quarts of milk and most of a garlic bulb into day four.

Per person, this meal delivers 738 calories, 29 g of total fat, 12 g of saturated fat, 1124 mg of sodium and 9.25 g of fiber. It would be pretty easy to remove about 40 mg of sodium per person simply by draining and then rinsing the canned beans. Most of the nutritional information came from www.safeway.com. Information for Safeway brand brown rice was not available (should have looked when I was at the store, sorry) so I used comparable information Mahatma brown rice. I can't see the data for an unprocessed staple varying much from brand to brand. Nutritional information for the butter, garlic, chorizo and plums came from www.thedailyplate.com, for the onion from www.nutritiondata.com.

The meal's a bit light on calories and fiber, a touch heavy on total fat and 50% high on saturated fat and sodium. As with the first two days, I think I'm doing better than fast food burgers but still haven't nailed the right balance. Click here if you want to see a JPG of the spreadsheet used to calculate the per person nutritional content for the meal.

Estimated prep time for the meal is about 40 minutes because brown rice needs some time to cook. "Shopping" took me about 45 minutes, circa 15 at Val 16 Mart and around 30 at Safeway. I'm becoming a more efficient shopper and think I can get it down to 15 to 30 minutes with some practice.

Our family could save a dollar, not to mention 105 mg of sodium each, if they purchased bulk, dry kidney beans. They cost $0.99/lb at Val 16 Mart. Between 1/5 and 1/4 lb. dry beans translates into 15 oz. cooked. However, as noted in previous posts, time is often an issue for poor families. Going the dry bean route requires either an overnight cold soak or increasing the prep time to a bit over an hour if a hot soak is used.

One thing that struck me was how much nutritional parameters differed between brands of similar prepared foods. I previously mentioned the difference in sodium between Safeway store brand and O Organics kidney beans. There were also large differences between sodium content for hot sauce (100 mg/tsp for Tapatio vs. 70 mg/tsp for El Pato) and chorizo (670 mg/2.5 oz serving for El Mexicano vs. 500 mg/serving for Carmelita), as well as for fat in chorizo (23 g total, 9 g saturated/serving for Carmelita vs. 18 and 7, respectively, for El Mexicano). The lesson: read the freakin' label!

Another was the prices in Safeway versus the corner market, Val 16 Mart. On one hand, chorizo at Val 16 Mart was $0.30 less expensive than at Safeway. OTOH, 28 oz. of Mahatma brown rice was $0.20 cheaper at Safeway. (Both options were our of range for our budget so we opted for a smaller bag of Safeway brand brown rice.) No clear winner regarding price.

Time to start work on day four. Does someone out there in interwebland have a good recipe that uses butter, eggs, Parmesan cheese, milk and garlic?


[NOTE: Again, my posts for the seven days of the FOOD, INC. challenge will not appear on seven consecutive days. Real life makes me do things other than blog.]