SNAP menu - Working on it.

When I took up the challenge of coming up with food choices or menus for living on a food stamp budget, I struggled with where to begin.  The reason:  I probably know more about making things from scratch and stretching a food dollar than a lot of people.  Why?  Because I took the real Home Economics class in the early 1970's where the first thing we learned to make was muffins from scratch.

What else did I learn from the good ole Home Ec class?  Sewing, cooking from scratch, cleaning and generally an economical way to run a home.  This kind of training went out the door as women went to work in order to help support their families and they needed faster tools for doing things:  i.e. processed foods.

Getting back to my own food stamp challenge, I have decided to do two options.  One for me and with my knowledge of stretching a food budget and one with someone who has not had the same background and training and uses convenience and processed foods.

With a $50 budget ($25 per person in my family) I will use that money to purchase what a person with my knowledge could make into menus.  Since going on a SNAP budget means that we will probably have had hard times and I will have used up most of the items in my cupboard, I will be making up my grocery list with hardly any food at home in my pantry.

Plan B will be using convenience foods to fill the menus for a person who doesn't cook much and doesn't have the same cooking schools that I have.

For both plans I may add an option of getting a small amount of items (i.e. a few cans) from a food bank.

When the food ads come out, I will be using the ad for this week to make up the menus. In fact I may do these budgets for a couple of weeks using the successive food ads.

This was my stumbling block in getting this challenge done.  I was struggling with the "Rules" of the challenge.  Doing this challenge with a Plan A and a Plan B is just the ticket for my getting this research done.