All About Food: Eating well and spending little

Two years ago, Gabrielle Sunheart found herself standing in line for government assistance. Only a few months before, she had been living a comfortable life with a decent income, but then her husband left and she was denied access to the funds from their family business. Among her many other stressful decisions, she wondered how she was going to feed herself and her three small children.

She applied for government assistance, but unlike most people, cried with joy when she was given $150 a month in food stamps. While others might have wondered how they would survive on such a paltry sum, Gabby took it as a challenge to figure out a way to provide healthy meals for herself and her kids.

“My motivation was clear; it was my children and their need to continue to eat healthy, even when I was no longer in a position to provide for them the way I used to. I absolutely refused to allow my current state of poverty to dictate my family’s consumption of bad, 99-cent snack, heart-attack fast food,�� she said.

After nine months of research and experimentation, using the Laguna Beach Library and the Internet, Gabby cooked up a batch of recipes that turned into a 200-page pocket cookbook, which she self-published. It’s called “How to Feed a Family of Four on $25 a Week�� and includes shopping lists, recipes, a month of menus and a guide to starting your own mini-chef’s garden.

Her meal plan is vegetarian and features weekly trips to the Laguna Beach farmer’s market, supplemented by monthly visits to big box stores like Costco. (She spends six months of the year in town and the other half of the year on the Big Island of Hawaii where she has family.)

She says that, obviously, a vegetarian diet will be cheaper than one with animal protein, “Even if you spend a little more for olive oil or brown rice.�� In her book, Gabby takes $15 with her to do her weekly produce shopping at the Farmer’s Market. Her cookbook is conveniently pocket-sized so you can take it along.

One of her tips is to make the rounds of the market first, calculating what to buy to keep within your budget and then following up with the actual shopping. She tries to buy the fruits and veggies that are in peak season because the more plentiful they are, the less costly they will be and vendors will be more eager to sell them at a good price.

A typical weekly menu might consist of: pizza, tacos or pasta, stir fries, soup, salads and fruit desserts. Staples include: oatmeal, brown rice, pinto beans, all-purpose flour, whole wheat pasta, olive oil, peanut butter, cheese, potatoes, tortillas and eggs.

Weekday menu

Here is a typical daily menu from the book:

Breakfast: oatmeal and tea

Snack: apple with cinnamon

Lunch: enchiladas

Dinner: eggplant Parmesan

Saturday and Sunday

When there is more time to cook, breakfast becomes more than oatmeal and tea. A Sunday menu might look like this:

Breakfast: latkes (potato pancakes) with applesauce

Snack: seasonal cruditées with parsley dip

Picnic lunch: sandwiches of roasted veggies, cucumbers, tomatoes and lettuce with fruit salad for dessert.

Dinner: macaroni and cheese with roasted garlicky broccoli

Gabby doesn’t guarantee that you will be able to live on this budget, and the cost factor will be different for everybody, but it does point in the direction of a healthier, greener approach to eating. She is no longer living the experiment, feeding her family on this extreme budget, but she is still very frugal and hates waste.

Gabby hopes that her trials and triumphs in life will inspire others. Her motto is: “No matter what life throws your way, stay positive and be focused. Our dreams and our lives are what we continually make of them.��

For $20, you can get a copy of her book, “Feed a Family on $25 A Week,�� by e-mailing her at GabrielleSunheart @gmail.com.

ELLE HARROW and TERRY MARKOWITZ were in the gourmet foods and catering business for 20 years. They can be reached for comments or questions at [email protected].