Day 40 - Birthday BBQ

Yesterday, marked the day that my Father-in-law's wife turned another year older, so we were invited to a BBQ.  Living close to your extended family certainly has the benefit of free food.  I should probably note here that we did bring brats and cole slaw.

Fil (father-in-law) was manning the grill, and Huzbun was helping - well at least vocally. 

 Here's the spread - some items include: Corn on the Cob, and Asian Noodle Salad (a specialty of Fil's wife - I'll call here MJ)

Little get togethers like this are a nice way to compensate for not eating out as much. 

Day 23 - BBQ

A couple of our friends hosted a big BBQ at their house last night.  We were asked to bring a dish, so I brought my favorite dish to split - Chinese Cabbage Salad.  It's rather easy to make and in my opinion rather tasty.

First off more spending

4 Packages Ramen - $0.80
1 head Green Cabbage - $1.40
1 head Red Cabbage $1.60
3 bottles Coffee-Mate Creamer - $2.97 (99cent each)
-terribly unnecessary I know, but too good of a deal to pass up. 
Arnold Potato Bread - $1.98 (on sale)
Arnold Fiber Bread - $1.98 (on sale)

Total - $10.73

Okay onto the salad

 I started with this.

Shredded and Shredded - I used a mandolin for this task.  I have the cheapest mandolin known to man, and it works great for this task - although I can't say the same for all others. Break up the ramen and mix that in too.   

Don't you just love color of "real" red cabbage... as opposed to out of a bag cabbage. 

Mixed up some sauce - Oil, Vinegar, Sugar and the Ramen Spice Pack are the key ingredients.  I added pepper and oregano too.  

Mix in and taste.

We brought it too the BBQ and got many positive comments.  Here's the rest of the Spread

and my plate:

I ate the Pineapples too, but those went directly from the serving bowl to my mouth... as well as a few tomatoes.  lol

There was also desserts that didn't get pictured and of course - coffee! was available, but 
I won't be disclosing how much coffee I had yesterday.

Day 9 - The husband is cheating!

Okay - hold your horses, it's not what you think, but he might of picked up this!

lol - I couldn't resist using that as my title... and according to him - beer doesn't count!

Anyway, today we made hamburgers.  mmm! We started with some ground beef.  I picked this up at Costco a while ago.  It's all natural, grass fed meat, which I am trying to do more of, but it probably cost me at least $3.00. 

We also used some on-hand seasonings, and two eggs. 

This is what it looks like right before we mixed it up.

with our fingers...

looking good! 

Now add some bread crumbs 

and mix some more so it looks like this:

Press them into burger shapes (I used a "burger press", but that's not neccesary)

Grill them up! notice we also are grillin' our beans.  

When you are done with cooking them on the grill - you can melt on some cheese.  

(I might of had a rolling rock too)

YUM!

So I added in the $3.00 for the meat in this meal - although it was quite possibly more, to be a bit more "realistic" about costs of freezer food.  So now average spent per day is $7.50 - though we could easily eat without spending any more for a while... so I think that should go down. 

I should add here that despite his "shenanigans" with the beer... DH has been super supportive of this whole process.  I don't talk about what he eats on here as much.. but a lot of breakfast cereal and sandwiches - a man of simple tastes my friends.  He even made me dinner tonight (I was just the photographer) - and I think earlier I might of even seen him operating a vacuum... although maybe that was all just a dream... ;-)