Paleo on 100 Dollars a Month - Ground Rules

Ok, here's what I am doing.  Same ground rules except for the amount of money to spend per day and a couple of exceptions.  Unlike other challenges, I am not buying a bunch of food in bulk at the beginning of the month, hoping it will last to the end.  It is pretty much pay as you go, with one exception.

Even though I have a freezer full of ham fat, beef tallow and bacon grease, I felt it was important enough to have coconut oil in my diet.  My general plan for this month is to decrease protein consumption and make up for the difference either through eating fat or burning my fat stores.  One concern I have is that I don't want to increase PUFA consumption too much.  My freezer fat stores are all higher in PUFA, but I can keep the consumption down by increasing the amount of saturated fat from coconut oil without the additional PUFA.

I already purchased my container of coconut oil, refined Lou Ana.  It doesn't taste as good as other brands, but it is half the price.  It set me back $5.99.

The other exception is that I won't be replacing the food I eat from my stash with new food from the garden.  There is very little from the garden that I put by at this time of the year.  My freezer is already too full, and I don't want to waste the space with even more celery when I'll need it for the new zucchini in a few weeks.

I told one IRL friend about the challenge, and that may have been a mistake.  She insisted that I take more oranges, and now wants to set up regular delivery.  She does have several trees, and she hasn't picked last year's crop off yet.  But I am still on the lower carb side of things, and we eat only about one or two oranges a day around this paleo homestead.

Spring has sprung, and in addition to several bowls of oranges, I have a bag of rough lemons and another of kumquats.  Here's the deal about free fruit.  People hate these fruits so they are so easy to obtain.  People have tons of rough lemons.  They are quite tasty and sweet (at least to me) but there isn't much juice.  They aren't bred for the eating market, so people complain about them and think that they have some kind of disease.  People grow them because the rough lemon is a common rootstock for older orange and lemon trees.  When there is a frost, many think their trees are lost, but then they sprout back up, usually below the graft, and they don't know until years later that they have rough lemon.  This is not a dwarf variety, need I say more?

Kumquats are just weird.  They are super tart and contain lots of seeds, so people don't want to bother with them.  I might make some marmalade this week before I start the challenge if I can find an extra three hours it will take to chop and de-seed them.