In an effort to save money and continue to learn useful skills, I’m looking for ways to depend more on myself (for problems small and large) and rely less on buying something pre-made. This is my summer of self-sufficiency. 

I have a weakness for Amy’s frozen foods: The product line is vegetarian, they don’t use peanuts in their facility, they use organic ingredients, and it is healthier than many other frozen meal options.

I usually get their tamale verde, cheese enchiladas, spinach pizza, or pasta cheddar bowl. I’ve relied heavily on Amy’s through graduate school and “early adulthood” to get me fed after long days. You know those days—you get home and just don’t want to do anything, including wait more than 5 minutes for dinner.

The trouble is, these meals can cost between $3.50 and $7.00, and that can add up week after week. Without a steady income, I am more conscious of that price escalation. Then there is the issue of packaging disposal (even if the box is recyclable).

I was flipping through my binder of recipes and decided to try an easy enchilada recipe from Real Simple Magazine. I think the recipe was originally part of a series on easy family meals, since it relies on pre-cooked rotisserie chicken from the grocery store. (I ultimately just made cheese enchiladas so my pescetarian boyfriend could partake of the meal.)

The recipe gives two options for the verde sauce. Either make it from scratch with tomatillos, onions, and a few other ingredients. OR buy a pack of green salsa and blend it with heavy cream. I chose the latter option.

Admittedly, this particular enchilada recipe still included packaging waste (I forgot to take a photo):

• green salsa plastic container (recycled)
• heavy cream container (recycled)
• tortilla plastic bag (trash)
• grated cheese plastic bag (trash)…yeah yeah…I should have grated it myself, but the cheese still comes wrapped in plastic
• diced tomatoes can (recycled)

The final costs for cooking three meals’ worth of enchiladas probably came close to the buying 3 of Amy’s enchilada meals, but I learned how to make enchiladas. And that was the whole point of this exercise. I can keep an eye on sales and hopefully drop the cost a little lower. And if I invest in a larger backing dish, I can easily bake more enchiladas at once.

One of my favorite at-the-office lunches is a mozzarella sandwich with a side of egg lemon rice soup from Cherry Street Coffeehouse. Delicious on all fronts. Sometimes I get tired of the mozzarella sandwich, but not the egg lemon rice soup, no matter how many times I order it. Trouble is, I can’t always enjoy the soup when I crave it. My work takes me away from the office frequently, and the soups rotate daily. Cherry Street used to have a Twitter account that announced the soup of the day, but it is not consistently updated. 

A couple weeks ago, I was craving the soup from afar. I had been wanting to expand my soup-cooking repertoire beyond heating tomato-soup from of a container, so I set out to try making it at home. I googled egg-lemon-rice soup and discovered the recipe is very simple. Half of the ingredients are in the name of the soup. I also learned that this is traditionally a Greek dish, increasing my love for the soup 4-fold. I love Greek food. I love Greece (I spent a semester abroad there in college). Then I remembered I had an un-used Greek cookbook at home. Sure enough, it there was a recipe for my egg lemon soup (avgolemono soup)!

If you’ve never had avgolemono (egg lemon) soup, give it a try. It is not a hearty soup, so you can easily eat it alongside other dishes. The lemon flavoring adds a refreshing aftertaste to the soup. And it took me 15 minutes to make. Boiling the broth and rice requires the largest chunk of time.

I already had eggs and rice on hand, so the biggest cost was the broth (8 cups for each batch). I’ve tried both chicken broth and vegetable broth. Tastes pretty much the same, although I needed to add more lemon juice to the chicken broth version to keep it from tasting like Chicken Soup with Rice. (Does anyone else remember that book? It was one of my early favorites to read aloud with my mom. ”I will eat it on the Nile, atop a crocodile.”)

The icing on the cake (or the seasoning in the soup, if you will) is the money I save in the long run by making this soup at home. With tip included, the sandwich-soup combo meal comes to around $10. If I order just a bowl of  soup and a side of bread, it still runs almost $5.00. Admittedly, these prices are in line with other Seattle downtown sandwich shops. And given the quality of taste and ingredients (mostly organic), I am not bothered by the cost of the meal.

Consider, however, that at home one pot gives me at least 6 servings of the soup. The equivalent of which would cost me close to $30 from the coffeehouse. I spent maybe $8 on the broth and the lemon juice (and I’ll likely get 3 batches of soup out of one small lemon juice bottle). Each bowl of soup I’ve just made costs me $1.00 to $1.50.

This isn’t to say I will stop eating at Cherry Street; I still love their sandwiches and some of their other soups. I have simply found a reliable (and tasty) stop-gap for my soup cravings that also saves me money for student loan repayment.

*Photo credit for Featured Image appearing on homepage: Avogolemono by bookchen (Flickr) via Creative Commons.