Friday Night Dinner

We didn't want to heat the house up last night and it was just the three of us, Pete, Paige and me, so we went with a tuna salad. Everything in it was either obtained at the food pantry or was languishing in our cupboards from sales or old dishes long gone by.

In the center is drained and crumbled tuna in oil that I bought a while back at 10 for 10 dollars. It is white albacore in oil, because that tastes better than water in my opinion, not as fishy. I probably have five cans of the stuff in my cabinet right now from separate sales. For dinner I used two cans. On the left are cut up cornichon pickles that I bought a couple years ago for Paige's bento because they were so small. On the right side of the bowl is a pile of finely chopped red onion that we got in our produce box. Boy were they strong! I had to rinse my eyes a lot in order to see properly. There is a box of sprouts there, but they came in last weeks box, I usually grow them myself. They didn't make it into the salad, but were available to use outside of the salad filling. There is also a pile of finely shredded carrot that we got from the food bank. There is one large there. The mayonnaise has been in the house for a long time now since we don't really use a lot of it around here. Everything was mixed together and served on wheat bread that we got on sale a month or so ago and had in the freezer.  It is hard to figure out the cost because of the onions and mayonnaise (how much is mayo right now?), but it was extremely filling.

When I was volunteering there they offered us a few bags of food, which I had trouble getting because we did have some food in the house and my purpose for going was to give back, you know? Still, everything but the mayo, onions and pickles could have been picked up in the food bank and many households have mayonnaise and pickles in their refrigerators. As we start going through the last of our stores dinner prep is going to be a little harder.