Monday Dinner

Tonight's dinner was marinated chicken breasts grilled on the George Foreman, sliced and served whole on spinach salads with dried cranberries, walnuts, and gorgonzola cheese crumbles. Everybody had their dressing of choice and French bread rounded out the meal.

The chicken was Italian marinated Perdue Perfect Portions. I've blogged about these before - they're generally overpriced (as most overly-packaged, pre-portioned food is), but they can be a reasonable deal if you can find them on markdown and/or have coupons. They're regularly $8.99/package of 5 at Harris Teeter, but I found some this week with a $2 markdown sticker. (I frequently find markdown stickers on this product at Harris Teeter, so keep an eye out.) I also had a .75 coupon that tripled, so the package only cost me $4.74. At a little under $1 per breast that I don't have to marinate, pound, strip of gristle, fat or membrane, I think it's a good deal. As a bonus, they're uniform thickness and cook very quickly.

The dried cranberries (Ocean Spray Craisins) were on sale buy 2, get 3 free earlier in the summer, which brought them to about $1 per bag. We really like these on salads and The Kid just likes them for snacking, so I stocked up. The gorgonzola is $1.99/tub at Aldi - a fantastic price for this. The spinach also came from Aldi - at $2/bag, it's the best price in town unless you can use up those huge bags from Costco before they go bad. (We've tried and failed many times.)

Totals:

$2.84 - chicken (3 of 5 chicken breasts)
$1 - spinach (1/2 a bag)
.75 - cranberries, gorgonzola, walnuts
.75 - 1/2 loaf French bread

$5.34 for dinner for 3