Try tofu prepared a different way. Taiwanese people (okay, just me) love eating this stuff.

My mom brought this from Taiwan and it is absolutely a great snack. Who cares about calories, it’s tofu! It must be good.

Brown crumbs left over..but there was a surprise ingredient! Hint: I took the recipeS off of foodgawker.com

Cooked by the Master Chef, Jonathan. Granted, it wasn’t the best ingredients, but it was still delicious.

So this one day, (May 15th to be exact) I decided I want bacon. A LOT of bacon. A crazyyy amount of bacon! But you can’t eat bacon alone. That’s just way too fattening. So what did I eat it with?

Bacon fat soaked potatos and eggs! Bacon fat is definitely the best cooking fat to work with. You don’t have to flavor your food since the bacon fat already contains all the yummy flavor you want! So how do you make this delicious dish with minimal amount of washing dishes and using extra oil? Bacon fat!

Ingredients

- Bacon (2)

- eggs (2)

- potato (1)

- salt and pepper (to your liking)

Instructions

1. Don’t even bother spraying the pan. Just heat up the pan and dump some bacon in there. The fat in the bacon will cook itself.

2. Once you have your bacon crispalicious, take out the bacon but LEAVE IN THE FAT. That’s the most important part!

3. Dump in the potatos (I cubed mine) and put a cover on the pan. Let it heat up with the bacon fat for about 10 minutes. Check the softness of the potato and if you like the consistency, you’re almost done!

4. You should still have some bacon fat left (I put in 2 strips of bacon and there was definitely plenty of fat) for the eggs. Crack the egg in the pan (or scramble it beforehand) and let it sizzzleeee for a bit before turning it over. This should only take 5 minutes since the bacon fat is already heated and eggs cook fairly quick.

5. That’s it! Not once did you have to use an extra pan!

So what did I have for breakfast? Tea eggs.

My friend decided to make tea eggs and it was delicious. Instead of black tea, she used oolong and soy sauce. It is very easy to make! Just mix oolong and soy sauce with boiled water and let it sit in the water until you think it’s ready. If you need more specific instructions, GOOGLE! hehe.

I don’t know the difference between cheese nips and cheezeits but the nips are delicious at 3oclock in the morning!

$0.50 – popcorn
$0.18 – can of soda
$2.75 – bubble tea
$2.00 – homemade korean curry and side dishes
$0.20 – fruits and corn syrup glazed potato

$5.63 – total

$32.36 – 5 day total

I finished strong with a dollar or so to spare.what made this challenge possible for me is being able to buy food at bulk prices and sharing meals with people. What I fail to do in this process is to eat 3 meals a day.  I used the same habit as I usually do with food and ate when I’m hungry. As you can tell from the list of food, it’s very college-student like. But food stamps don’t only affect people with families. College students are considered one of the poorest adults in the category and not everyone gets spending money from their parents either.

There’s a lot of controversey as well to college students receiving food stamps. Granted, if your household income is very low, your grants and federal loans are very high and that money usually can cover your food budget. However, not everyone is able to get federal loans and grants. Some people may fall in the gap between being ‘too rich’ for food stamps and not rich enough to actually being able to pay for food.

Another problem that I’ve heard of is college students abusing the food stamps. They declare themselves as independents, file their own taxes and since they make very little money working at part time jobs, they fall in the category of food stamps. That is also a big problem since they most likely have the support of their parents and they are taking food money away from others in need.

I feel like it was important to me to eat the way I usually would and personate the role of a college student on budget. What I ate may not always be healthy, but it was filling and definitely had enough nutrient values for college students. To conclude, it was a great way to figure out a approximately how much I eat on a daily basis and to save money.

So I did go over my daily limit yesterday:

$0.50 | 1 popcorn | midnight snack

$0.63 | 3 chocolate | breakfast
$0.20 | 1/3 of M&ms
$0.18 | 1 can of soda

$2.88 | shrimp | lunch

$2.55 | porkkebabs |dinner
$2.4 | roti canai

$9.26 | total

As you can see, my healthy-o-meter was destroyed and I broke all protocols. HOWEVER, I made it up by not ’spending’ as much today:

$0.8 | curry with bread | breakfast
$0.18 | 1 can of soda
$3.00 | fried rice | dinner
$0.5 | soup

$4.48 | total

In combination with Wednesday, it was a total of $13.74. So technically I’m still in the game!

It was pretty hard yesterday though when you are surrounded by food. But I realize that Asian style cooking is really cheap. You can make things really tasty and healthy for no additional cost. The curry for roti canai was great and I used it for my breakfast/lunch the next day. It had chicken and potato and I ate it on whole wheat bread. Fried Rice is also an example of another healthy dish. You get all your veggie and protein in for half the price and all the taste! Plus, we made extra so there was enough for lunch tomorrow and feed an extra person (which is exactly what we did).

I’m thinking of promoting this idea to my chapter sorority and setup a small challenge between sisters at first. Then as we work out the qinks, we spread it nationwide to the rest of the sorority and maybe to other greek organizations. It is a ‘free’ event where you don’t have to pay to participate since people usually spend more money on food than $7 a day. Also, people should get sponsers to support them throughout the week (or month if we’re adventurous!) or donate the money that they allotted to food usually and have the money donated to the local food bank or soup kitchen.

It is definitely an unique idea since most organizations sponser a disease or another non-profit foundation. Why not have the money go where it is needed most with next to nothing overhead fees?

Breakfast:

$0.50 – homemade soup

Lunch/Snack:

$0.61 – 2 slices of bacon + 1 egg

$1.00 – handful of cheese nips

Dinner:

$0.36 – 2 cans of coke

$1.00 – 2 spring rolls

$2.59 – $5.18 for 2 – pasta with sauce, 1# of ground beef, and peas

$.50 – handful of grapes

Total: 6.56

It isn’t so bad.. but I have a feeling my costs would be higher if I didn’t buy in bulk or if I had actually follow the rules of the challenge and bought new food. I think when I move in June, I will restart this challenge but make it a little harder.. maybe 10 dollars a day for two people