Our Daily Bread

I planned our weekend menu around a package of bread.  This six pack of ciabatta sandwich rolls at Aldi set me back $2.99.  The rolls were used to create three meals.  One of my goals at camp is to keep the food bill for the weekend lower than one dinner out.  The challenge last Friday was that my neighbor gave me a beer before I set out to shop!

Meal number one was lunch.  I figured we'd have toaster oven pizza.  This was not to be the toaster oven pizza of my youth -- red sauce over an English muffin with part-skim mozzarella.

My version started with some EVOO, freshly sliced Roma tomatoes, sliced full-fat mozzarella cheese, basil, oregano, salt, pepper, then baked on the convection/turbo setting for 20 minutes.  These turned out crusty-cheesey good!

The next meal was dinner where I made Gorgonzola garlic rolls.  The main course was a shrimp and Gorgonzola pesto, to which I also added some yellow pepper (because we had it and it needed to be used).  The shrimp was grilled separately and tossed over the pasta at the end.  We had one half of a roll and some shrimp and pepper left.  That was all toasted together for a snack on Sunday.  This meal made use of a half a tub of cheese we had remaining from the previous weekend.

The third full meal was  breakfast on Sunday.  I put a healthy schmear of Neufatchel on two sides of a couple of rolls, then sandwiched in sliced strawberry.   This became French Toast, which we grilled.  It was super yum!  We made the French Toast rolls and the bacon on the grill -- although I started the bacon in the microwave.

The bread wasn't really the star of each meal, but it was the foundation I built around.  My entire grocery bill for the weekend came to $33.  That's what we would have spent for one breakfast out -- or for half a dinner out.  It's fun for me to find a specific ingredient that isn't expensive and build my menu around it.  As for the priciest component, it was the $5.99 bag of raw shrimp.  I did also have enough stuff left to make both lunch and dinner on Sunday once we got home.

I take my camp weekend meal planning seriously because I like to eat and I also like to have everything I need so that it's not a hassle to start cooking.  Planning around a base like a bag of rolls is also fun to do!