Fancy Dinner for Low Bucks

To save money (or for other reasons) I'm trying to recreate dinners we've always liked at restaurants, which I found I can make much cheaper. Here's an example from last month: my guy grilled a steak for him, and I made salmon in the air fryer for myself, with a baked potato, a loaf of french bread with an olive oil herb dip, and a wedge salad for both of us.

Breaking down the cost: I shopped around until I found four ribeye steaks for $23.00 at Winn Dixie (which has consistently been the cheapest place for steak.) The entire loaf of bread was $1.00 at Wal-Mart, and it is surprisingly quite good if you can get it the minute they put it out on the racks in the bakery (that's also cheaper than even I can make it.) The oil/herb dip was made from a 10-serving packet, and cost about fifty cents per portion. The wedge salad came from leftover iceberg lettuce I got for $3.00 and used for two other meals. We grew the radishes. The potatoes were from a five-pound bag for $3.99, also from Wal-Mart, which works out to about twenty cents each. I got my salmon filet on sale for $30.00 and cut it up into 15 smaller portions.

I even found an excellent recipe for the dill sauce for my fish that I made with sour cream leftover from another recipe, and fresh dill from our garden.

With the ribeye steak his dinner cost about $7.95; to buy his from a restaurant would be a minimum of $28.99 for one steak and two sides (ribeye is super pricey to eat out these days.) My dinner had two portions of salmon (one of which broke in half in the air fryer), and cost about $5.95 total. The same meal at the restaurant that I was duping was $18.99 before they took it off the menu; I can't even dine out for it anymore in our area. In the end we ate meals worth $52.98 (that includes a 20% tip for the server) that we made ourselves for just under fourteen bucks.

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Stuff

After finding this Caron one pound skein of lovely peach yarn in my thrifted lot I raided my stash for two cakes of Mandala in Pegasus, which matches it perfectly. For practice and hand therapy I'm going to make another Worth Street Afghan with this free pattern , but this time I'll use the yarn that was recommended for it plus the one pound skein. I'm not quite ready to do the vintage/recycled linen quilt I had planned (still a bit too nervous about the idea), so I'm going to use some color therapy and make a quilt from these thrifted green fat quarters. I considered doing another Yellow Brick road patchwork pattern, but I might go with a split rail fence like this one.

Journal Find

This is a page from my 2010 poetry journal. My handwriting isn't the best, so I'll transcribe it: If my heart survives to tell all the secrets kept inside it will be an abalone shell in which the beauty did reside. But I think I will always be lost to the tides that rage in me . . . humbling and polishing . . . I don't write many self-portrait poems, but this one isn't too embarrassing. A bit overly dramatic, but the girl I was eleven years ago went through some tough times. I'm in a much more peaceful place today.

Watchable Farce

The k-drama Undercover High School is a series that brings a handsome spy to play a student at an elite private school where a legend about billions of gold hidden there persists. It's more silly slapstick comedy than anything, but has some surprising romantic and dramatic moments, too. Seo Kang-joon is one of my favorite Korean actors, and this is the first series he's made since finishing up his mandatory military service. He plays Jeong Hae-seong/ Jeong Si-hyun, an NIS agent who infiltrates a snobby elitist school to hunt down the gold. There are four urban legends connected to the treasure that he has to figure out, all under the too-watchful eye of his homeroom teacher, Oh Su-Ah (Jin Ki-joo) whom he eventually discovers was his elementary school love Oh Bong-ja (there's a lot of name changing in this series.) The hunt for the treasure is the highlight of this series, but the romance between the leads is cute, too (and not as taboo as you might think, given that...

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