Normal Green: The $10 Dinner Challenge

By Stefania Pomponi Butler - November 3, 2008

There's been a buzz going through the food blog world fueled by two major food brands: Prego and KFC. Both companies are challenging folks to cook dinner for their families for $10 or less. Prego's idea of a healthy $10 meal is a jar of Prego spaghetti sauce over pasta sprinkled with shelf-stable Parmesan and a can of cut green beans. The KFC $10 challenge consists of a seven-piece chicken meal, 4 biscuits, and a side like mashed potatoes with gravy. Both meals are designed to feed a family of four. Both meals leave a lot to be desired in terms of fresh, healthy cooking. When I first heard about the Prego challenge, I immediately thought, "I know I can do this better and cheaper." Kurt Michael Freise had the same idea when confronted with the fat-laden, highly-processed, fast food chicken dinner. It would be so easy for someone who always makes her tomato sauce (me) to criticize the canned, jarred and processed meals above, but with so many people trying to stretch their budget these days, I know this combination of food items appears more often than not on dinner tables all across America. You have to make the choices that are best for your family depending on your budget. No one can fault that. (And let's not deny it: fried chicken is freakin' delicious.) In a perfect world, we'd all eat local, shop local, and cook our meals from scratch avoiding unnecessary fats, sugar, salt, and preservatives. Friese puts it a little more bluntly: I'm not really a competitive soul, but this was one challenge I could not resist. When it comes to food, America has been sold a bill of goods. We've been flimflammed, bamboozled, hoodwinked. We've been tricked into thinking that cooking is a chore, like washing windows, to be avoided if at all possible, and then done only grudgingly and when absolutely necessary. On the contrary, cooking is a vital, spiritual act that should be performed with a certain reverence. After all, we are providing sustenance to the ones we love -- can anything be more important? The question I asked myself is essentially the same question Freise asked, "How can we change people's minds about what a low cost meal is?" I know that many people think eating organic and/or local must be expensive, but eating locally can also be done on a strict budget. I know. I've done it. But back to the task at hand. How can I show that $10 is much better spent cooking a more wholesome meal at home? I set out to do that by cooking my own $10 meal (I actually went a little over budget) and challenged others to do the same.  My meal consisted of panko-crusted thin cut pork chops, smashed yams with local butter and honey, and locally-grown roasted broccoli. I purposely chose items that could easily be found in any supermarket. My meal was fine, but really it's the meals submitted by those who took up my challenge that are the ones worth writing home about. Ainsley and Oswald prepared Lemon Broccoli Pasta and Feta Tomato Pizza bread for $7.20. Mandajuice cooked up a big batch of roast chicken, mashed potatoes and green beans for $9.63. Darlene of Blazing Hot Wok stir-fried grass-fed beef, veggies and udon noodles for $8.24. Friese managed to cook up an entire chicken plus biscuits and mashed potatoes with pan gravy for $7.94 following basic recipes from a mid-eighties copy of Joy of Cooking. Plus, as he points out, he still had more chicken than the KFC meal and the chicken carcass leftover for soup. So that's like two meals for the price of one. Inyerface, KFC! This week, I'd like to challenge you to take to your grocery store or farmer's market with $10 and see what kind of magic you can work with it.