The Great Recession-Proof Food/Cooking Experiment! - Day One:

On my mission, a companion of mine taught me a simple tip on making a can of tuna go longer. When making tuna sandwiches, he would crush a packet of instant ramen and then mix up the dry noodles with the tuna. As a filler, it can stretch what would normally only be enough for two sandwiches to four, if used prudently. For an extra twenty cents, you could double (sometimes even triple) the capacity of your tuna. And if you really like ramen, you could use the bullion soup base as flavoring for your tuna as well (I don’t recommend it, though).

I used the same principle for dinner, stretching a can of chili to its limits. After cooking one and a half cups of rice, I dumped in the chili and chopped up hot dogs, mixing it all together into some kind of poor man’s instant jambalaya. Black pepper tops off the simple dish nicely.

Breakfast was provided by Dantzel’s family, a mini-celebration for her little brother leaving on his mission, and for lunch, I snacked on two wheat mini-bagels, toasted in our mini-toaster oven, with generous portions of butter slathered on it.

Daily total spent: $2.43, for the hot dogs and can of chili.
Cumulative total: $2.43