[Fire roasted tomato and bleu cheese soup with a bacon apple and caramelized onion grilled cheese panini]

Candi Wilvang participated in the United Way Hunger Challenge with her family of three – Mom, Dad and ten year old son (with some help from her 20 year old son). Read about their experience below.

The challenge was an awesome experience for our family to take. I am the mother of two son’s ages 20 and 10. My oldest son Shattuck lives in his own apartment so we took the challenge as mom, dad, and 10 year old son, MacKenna. At first I thought $18 was pretty reasonable because I do not think we spend that much as it is. We utilize our neighborhood food banks. I was quickly reminded by dad that we can’t use anything we already have. He looked frightened after we hid all our food, condiments, spices etc… I, on the other hand, was very excited about learning from this.

We decided we wanted to price compare at 5 different grocery stores and so we would spend $18 a day, for 5 days, at 5 different stores. We spent $15.63 at QFC the first day of shopping. We went there on Sunday and we decided we would just get the basics.

By Monday we realized we had no dinner items and no coffee! “That’s ok, we will spend our next $18 tonight on dinner and a few missed luxury items” I tried to reassure dad. That night we went to Whole Foods loaded with coupons. Mondays dinner was creative, chicken breast with spinach and melted white cheddar on maple waffles and a side of fresh Mango and steamed broccoli.

Tuesday we went to Safeway and spent $17.13 Tuesdays dinner was Feta, pineapple, broccoli manicotti with fresh spinach pesto cheese sauce.

My oldest son works at Seattle Art Museum, Taste Restaurant, and wanted to come with me on Wednesday and buy ingredients so he could cook homemade fire roasted tomato and bleu cheese soup with a bacon apple and caramelized onion grilled cheese panini for us. Somebody suggested we try Grocery Outlet this time and we walked out with almost everything we needed for the amount of $17.04. My son was missing some important ingredients but it turned out fantastic!

With 4 shopping sprees behind us, I realized Thursday was our last chance to buy food. It meant we had to make the food last through to Fridays dinner. The soup went a long way for leftovers. I also used it as flavoring in Fridays “Cheeseburger Cupcakes”. Trader Joes was our final destination and we did our shopping for $19.31 It was the first time we went over budget, but still under budget over all! We deserved that ice-cream sandwich!

I was able to share this experience on Facebook and Flickr which made it all the more inspiring to make creative dishes and photograph it! I think I will continue to post recipes and cook with my children more often. Thank you for this great opportunity. It was empowering.