October 2015 Food Report

Groceries: $180.82
Unnecessary Foods and Snacks: $9.57

Total Amount Spent for October: $190.39


Cost-wise, I did pretty good continuing the streak of keeping my monthly food budget under $200. I also kept my unnecessary foods and snacks under $10, which I consider even more impressive. But I did have a cooking failure.

Hot Dog Fail

A typical, delicious, and authentic NYC hotdog

While I was in NYC, Nino and I stopped by our alma mater, City College. We went searching for the guy who used to serve us delicious hot dogs. I remember eating so many of them, sometimes 10 in one sitting. We found the guy and, although he didn’t have the chili meat that I loved, his hotdogs were still very good. I’ve had a craving for hotdogs for a while now, so I figured this was enough motivation to make the perfect NY hotdog at home. My first attempt was to make it with the chili meat:

I fried the beef with canola oil, and used paprika and ground black pepper. The taste was too oily and just as gross as it looked. I hadn't cooked beef in a long time, so I guess I forgot that it comes with its own oils from the fat. UGH!

Having failed at that, I tried making the hotdogs with the onions in red sauce that all NY hotdogs have:

The recipe said to make the sauce with ketchup, vinegar, flake peppers, and paprika. Maybe I used too much ketchup or something because it tasted like crap. I thought adding sauerkraut would make it better but it actually made the taste worse

Finally, I decided to make a regular hotdog with sauerkraut:

Best of the bunch. Nice, simple, and required almost no effort on my part. Still not even close to the NYC hotdog taste.

I think it’s safe to say that my hotdog craving is gone. It’s not even a healthy food, and I don’t feel the need to continue wasting time and money on something like this. I’ll always love NYC hotdogs, but I’m very comfortable leaving it up to the professionals and keeping it out of my kitchen. So I took the remaining ground beef and made some tacos:

Ground beef with a little soy sauce, onions, red and green peppers, and a combo of different spices on both. The oil from the beef was enough to fry both it and the peppers. That's just too much.

While I could still taste the oil, the tacos were good, and wrapped with organic whole wheat tortillas. And my first use of fresh SALSA!

While the tacos were delicious, it also reminded me why I hate making beef. Even when I used no oil, the beef came out oily and almost ruined the taste. It’s also a pain in the ass to clean. But since I enjoyed the tacos so much, I’m gonna try using ground turkey or chicken instead.


SALSA!!!

Fresh SALSA from a local supermarket. $4.50. Costco in NYC has a bigger container for just a dollar more, but no such luck in Central/Upstate New York

As long as it requires frying or grilling, it's getting some SALSA!

The great discovery for October was fresh SALSA! Not that nasty salsa that comes in jars swimming in nasty sauce, but the fresh SALSA where they simply chop it up, add some vinegar, and put it for sale. I fell in love with it in NYC when Nino’s girlfriend Ria made breakfast. She made eggs with fresh SALSA and the taste was superb, so I promised to start using it when I came back to Smalltown. In tacos? Delicious. On turkey burgers? Delicious. Except for cereal, I think I can put fresh SALSA in everything and it’d taste delicious. It also gives me something to eat with my organic tortilla chips. I’m very much looking forward to adding fresh SALSA to future dishes, as it seems to make just about anything taste better.

November should be a good month for food as I try out a new kind of salmon and look to start my quest to try one vegan food a month. I’m not sure what it will be, but I’m definitely excited to get the ball rolling. Even if the food doesn’t taste good, I’m sure fresh SALSA will make it better!