Trying to Eat Cheap: A Month of Dinners, Day 9

This is the 5th or 6th Sunday when I've made buckwheat-butternut-cabbage soup. It's yet another meal-in-a-bowl--very easy to make, vegetarian and healthy. This recipe is from one of my favorite cookbooks, Kristina Turner's The Self Healing Cookbook. Basically, if you're interested in macrobiotics, this book should be your bible. I had a four-plus month stint about 8 years ago where I was obsessed with macrobiotic cooking. I ate a lot of brown rice and lost a lot of weight. I also learned what it's like to be Really Hungry. But this soup was a later discovery--maybe if I'd known about it back then, I wouldn't have been trying to eat the linoleum just to fill my tummy with something sustaining.

Here's a "frugality breakdown":

butternut squash: 1.25
buckwheat: .25
onion: .75
wakame (sea vegetable): 1.00
cabbage: 2.00
buttered toast: 1.50 (I guess I have to admit I consider this a legimate side dish)
Total: 6.75

I made this for company a few weeks ago and it's easy to make this fancy--just add lamb meatballs (blend ground lamb with 1 egg, breadcrumbs and cinnamon, form into balls and bake briefly til cooked through, then drop into finished soup). One more note: that's my homebrew in the background.