Well, the $2 dinner party was a success! It ended up only being the 3 of us, so I did technically go over my budget by $0.23 for 3 people. That being said, I have a full meal's worth of leftovers in the fridge, so my per person cost is still well under $2. This is how the meal broke down:
 |
| 1 Potato - is it any wonder why I can't cook small? |
Ingredient | Container Cost | Recipe Cost |
Onion | $1.04 / kg | $0.43 |
Peas | $1.98 / 750g | $0.66 |
Potato | $1.50 / kg | $0.66 |
Carrot | $2.16 / kg | $0.22 |
Turmeric | $7.80 / kg | $0.04 |
Ginger | $4.14 / kg | $0.08 |
Yeast | $4.16 / 113g | $0.37 |
Flour | $7.98 / 10kg | $0.54 |
Oil | $4.88 / 1.89L | $0.65 |
Sesame Oil | $5.49 / 327ml | $0.25 |
Garlic | $0.88 / 3 heads | $0.12 |
Red Lentils | $4.49 / 2kg | $0.39 |
Tomato Paste | $0.68 / 156ml | $0.07 |
Spices | estimated | $0.75 |
Ghee | estimated | $1.00 |
Total: | $6.23 |
A lot of the stuff I already had at home, so I grabbed prices for those items while I was in the grocery store. I only ended up having to purchase the top 6 ingredients in the list. All of the prices came from the Real Canadian Superstore, which is a reasonably inexpensive place to shop. It used to be a bulk shopping store where you got a cheaper price for buying multiples, but it seems that over the last few years it's just converted itself to a large scale conventional grocery store.
I ended up making my first choice of dal, vegetarian samosas, and naan bread for dinner. The recipes I used I received through the family cherished, time honoured tradition of using Google.
The naan bread recipe I pulled from a favourite food blog, Foodie With Family. You have to keep in mind with her recipe that she feeds a large family with growing boys. I made a 1/3 batch, and I still have 2/3 of the dough left at home to use this week. It's a super simple recipe that makes tonnes of bread.
The dal recipe I pulled off About.com. I'd like to say that it's a wonderfully fragrant, flavourful recipe... but my sense of smell is missing in action at the moment, so I can't properly vouch for it. Based on my improper vouching, I'd say add more spices than the recipe calls for.
The samosa recipe came from Samosa-Recipe.com. Perhaps not the most intuitive website name, but trust me, they have samosa recipes there ;) I went with the samosa pastry recipe, and the vegetarian filling recipe. Instead of curry powder, I added cumin, coriander, garam masala, cayenne pepper, salt, and black pepper.
That was so much easier than typing them all out, lol.
After some smoky adventures in shallow frying the samosas (the oil is accounted for in the cost estimate), we had a decent meal to start off the evening. There was more filling than necessary to stuff the samosas, so I had a little extra on the side as well.
Rounding out the meal was a tomato bread with a goat cheese honey dip to start, as well as lavender and mint chocolate chip meringue cookies for dessert. Several pots of chai tea got the evening started as we discussed everything from religion to politics (Canadian and American) to sex education in the school system to the concept of free will.
The next $2 dinner party is in about a month, at which point the party will move to someone else's home and I'll get to make something new again. I'm thinking next time it'll have to be a dessert.
What is your favourite dish to take to a pot luck dinner?
4 comments:
What a super idea! I love it. I'm going to have to try it sometime. My favourite potluck dish is a broccoli-cauliflower salad.
Wow! That's impressive! Shows that we can definitely whip up a meal on a budget if we put our mind to it. I'm gonna have to try it too!!
I like baking cookies so I always bring them to potluck dinners.
thats looks really nice, will have to try cooking the dal recipe
I usually take fried rice.
Looks yummy! Mmm!
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