Buy no food for a month challenge

That is one fascinating challenge, to buy no food for a month. And my first challenge of 2016.

The idea is to… buy nothing, no supermarket trips, no spur of the moment chocolate bars, no water bottle when you’re thirsty (find a fountain)… Nothing except fruits, vegetables, milk, and whatever wouldn’t last a month. Since the idea is saving money, it is also done via not throwing away the 20lb of apples you would buy on the first of the month. So fresh food is fine.

For me, that only means fruits and veggies. I have orange juice, cream cheese, don’t drink milk or eat yogurts.

I have only been going for a few days, and at the beginning, had done a grocery run on December 28th without the challenge in mind.

I went to a membership supermarket in Guatemala City where I always buy tons of beers, wine, bacon, cheese and other imported products you don’t find everywhere such as olive oil or Nutella.

Before going home, I did a quick supermarket run for vegetables mostly, yeast for my homemade bread, cream cheese and orange juice.

Then I decided to enter the challenge… unprepared.

What is interesting is while this is meant to help you get rid of tinned and frozen food, I already emptied a lot of my deep freezer and cupboards before going on a two months trip to Europe in October. So I don’t have a lot of things to eat. Something I also forgot before entering the challenge, was to buy flour. See, I love my homemade bread. I made a couple of batches at the end of December, that I have frozen in slices to toast every day, and I have some dough waiting to be baked in the fridge. Then I have no more flour. In normal conditions, that would last me a week, maybe 10 days.

Bread is my soul food and I don’t eat a lot of pasta or rice. But I do happen to have a lot of pasta and rice stocked so I’ll eat that and limit the bread to a slice per meal or something. Let’s see. That may make me lose the challenge! 🙂

Here is what I have

Dry goods

• 4 cans of tuna
• 2 cans of anchovies
• Six cans of corn, one of sweet peas
• 1lb of flour (no bread or pizza, horror!)
• Tons of pasta, rice and beans I stocked over the summer for volunteers who came to teach English to the village’s kids. Some might have bugs, but there is enough for a month.
• A bunch of Ritz crackers to make up for having no bread if I run out.
• Powdered milk, pancake and flan mix, a few sachets of Tang.
• Lots of oil, condiments and one bag of pasta sauce.
• Tons of Nutella, chocolates from Christmas
• About 30 beers and 20 bottles of wine.

Clearly, the calories are there. But if the food is hoarded it is either because I don’t eat it often (I’d eat potatoes every day, and rice or pasta maybe once a week), or because it is something you don’t find in the jungle, like Nutella or Dijon mustard, so I usually eat only a little bit of it to make it last. Going through it all would be like a waste for me. I want to get rid of the food that can be eaten by critters instead (we have bugs eating rice unless we put it in glass jars), so I’ll try to leave the good stuff alone.

Frozen goods

• 2.5 lb of bacon
• half a pound of beef that may have been frozen for too long and be given to the dogs
• 1lb turkey breast sliced ham for sandwiches. But I have no bread. Hum.
• about 2lb of shredded mozza
• 1lb fancy goat cheese that may also be old

The frozen stuff is from September or earlier, and with the power outages you never know if it will be OK to eat. The bacon I bought in December, but the fridge broke so it went two days without a fridge. It seems ok. I use bacon everywhere to flavor a lentil stew, on a pizza, in an omelette, with french fries… one pound makes me about 6 meals as I use very little. So even if that’s the only meat I have, I’m good.

Fresh stuff

• 6 tamales my worker gave me for New Year. That makes me three meals.
  
• 24 eggs. I eat two for breakfast. Will have to do pancakes a few days or something else that doesn’t involve too much bread.
• About 1 quart of OJ. I’m fine, I do 25% OJ 75% water to drink less sugar in the morning. That will last or I’ll do fruit smoothies.
• Half a jar of cream cheese. And little bread to spread on so I’ll probably use it melted on pasta instead of cream.
• Half a Christmas sweet bread.
• Fruits and vegetables, which is the only thing I will restock.

The bread

I have a dozen big slices of bread and a batch that will give me two more medium sticks, if I go easy on the bread I should be ok. I’ll bake it if I have guests so they can have fresh bread then freeze the rest.

At first glance, the bread is the main problem, then having only half a pound of meat, but I can manage between the bacon and turkey breast sandwich slices. oh and mayo. I eat mayo all the time, on the turkey sandwich, with fries, with tuna salad… I usually buy a big jar but now only have 1/4th of a small jar.

I have invited two neighbors for dinner, I thought about making pizza to get rid of the cheese, but don’t think I have enough flour, so I’ll probably do some pasta with a bacon-veggie sauce, and in this case would only have to buy a lettuce to have them over. Let’s see how it goes! On the plus side I have little travel planned so it will be easy to cook at home. I am excited to reduce the grocery spending but also not have to drive so often to the supermarket. I won’t hope for weight loss considering the products I have in stock haha.

Have you ever done a buy no food challenge? Did you buy more food in anticipation or like me randomly decided to start tomorrow?