Sequestration Meal #627

 

I went rifling through my pantry as my low spend month was deep underway and therefore the obvious things were no longer available. I yielded a partial bag of farro, and this time of year, that begs to be turned into salad. I found a very confusing omnivore recipe for Mediterranean farro salad (warning: the original recipe includes chicken, so don't follow the link if that'll be upsetting to you) that I thought I could use as a jumping-off point. I'm still not sure how much farro the original recipe writer intended, and I didn't even bother with the suggested dressing, instead whipping up a homemade Greek salad dressing to go with mine.

But what I did take from the original was the basic idea of a Mediterranean-style grain salad with olives, cucumbers, tomatoes, and red onions. I was going to have some cucumber anyway, because I bought a large English cucumber to make my nectarine summer rolls with. And I'm trying to let myself have tomatoes here and there because it's summer, after all.

I bought an inexpensive jar of green olives for this (the pimento-stuffed, whole Spanish olives are about $1.17/jar and they add so much to so many things), as well as the tomatoes and cucumber, but otherwise I had everything on hand for the salad, including some Violife Parmesan. All these things add up to a low spend win.

I also give myself room in my tighter budget for the month for convenience, and hence, I served my salad with some prepared Italian fusion tofu as a substitute for the chicken in the original recipe. It went with the salad perfectly!

Although these posts are scheduled in advance, so you'll see low spend month posts for a while yet, I don't plan to keep my strictness up in September. I will loosen my purse strings a bit, because I have mostly gotten myself through the rough patch, and one has to buy the things one has been putting off buying eventually. But I'm grateful for the experience, as it has been really reassuring in the midst of a hard time--I have given myself a sense of control I needed to have.