Hobo Monday: Pizza!

Last month I participated in a food blog event called Hobo Monday, where participants must cook a meal for two for $5 or less. And I failed! Both monetarily and taste-wise: my meal was $5.74 and had the lowest EDR ever. Naturally I had to try again. I’m going to keep this short since I am tired and my DVR is filling up with good Thursday night shows as I type this.

This time around there was an additional challenge: no pasta allowed. So I made pizza. Recently I have taken to buying Trader Joe’s pizza dough and using it as a repository for aging vegetables and leftover meat. This time around I did a combination of caramelized onions, mushrooms, pesto sausage, and eggs. The pizza really didn’t need eggs, but I had wanted to try it for a while and my initial Hobo Monday idea had been to do an egg dish, so I went for it. I’m happy I did because I discovered that egg on pizza is actually quite delicious. They cook up like poached eggs, which are my favorite kind and I have yet to master.



Cost breakdown: $1.19 (I think) for the pizza dough, $1.07 for the sausage (1/4 of a $4.29 package), about $2 worth of onions, and I would say about $.80 for the cheese. I’m not sure how to assess a monetary value to the mushrooms because they were leftover from takeout salads we ate on Saturday night; Mr. Penpen asked for his mushrooms on the side, thinking I might want to eat or cook with them. And I’m calling eggs a staple, since anyone who bakes as much as I do always must have eggs. That’s a total of $5.04 (and there were leftovers), which is much better. The pizza gets an 8 for Deliciousness and a 2 for Effort, giving it an EDR of 4 – also much better. If you want to see how others stretched their meal budgets, there will be a round-up posted on the Thursday Night Smackdown site on Saturday. You can also find about Hobo Mondays if you wish to participate next month. Okay, this post wasn’t quite as succinct as I planned. Time for "The Office."