I added up the price of several ingredients for a soup I was planning on making while I was recording all my purchases after grocery shopping on Thursday. It consisted of 1 pound of lentils (I actually used less because it needed to fit in my pressure cooker – do more pressure cooking is on my tightwad list), 1 large sweet potato, 1 onion, 2 tsp salt and various herbs and spices. The whole thing (including the price of a whole canister of salt $0.39, but we’ll assume that takes into account the spices) made a big pressure cooker full of soup for $2.21. I also made a batch of pretzel bread and steamed some frozen spinach — I am not sure how much that cost, but this post is about the soup anyway.

Truthfully I overly spiced the soup, by like A LOT. I think I added too much pepper. Anyway, it was OK for a bowl. And we both agreed it would be OK for tomorrow’s lunch, but after that I’m going to make burger patties with the rest – I will add rice and bread crumbs and lightly pan fry them and we’ll have those for dinner on Wednesday and lunch on Thursday. Then I realized that that $2.21 is stretching over the course of 4 meals. Of course, the bread and spinach were not free, but still the over-all cost of the meal is very, very low. Like, digging in the bottom of your purse for money for the parking meter low. That’s pretty impressive.

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