Budget cooking: Late night snack

For the past 4 weeks, I have kept my grocery bill under $50/week. This includes not only food items, but also a new baking pan and some dishwasher detergent. I'll be doing a few posts of "budget cooking" to show a few ideas for how to keep food costs down because EVERYTHING IS SO FUCKING EXPENSIVE GODDAMN

Anyway, I was feeling a mite peckish one evening around 11:30 and decided I needed a snack. Unfortunately, living on a tighter budget means I skipped getting things like Doritos, so I had to come up with something using the few ingredients I did have. I settled on a handful of cherry tomatoes, a clove of garlic, and a few basil leaves.

I halved the tomatoes, gave them a light sprinkling of salt, then laid them cut side down on a plate of all purpose flour seasoned with salt and cracked black pepper.

Meanwhile, I crushed the garlic clove, chopped up my basil, and went ahead and sliced a couple tablespoons of salted butter while my non-stick pan was heating up.

Once the pan was hot, I added the butter in and let it melt, then placed the tomatoes (cut side down again) into the butter. I let them cook until the flour was a nice bit of golden brown, then flipped them and let the skin sides cook for about 90 seconds or so.

While the tomatoes were finishing, I grated a little bit of asiago and placed the mound of cheese into the center of my plate.

Once the tomatoes were finished, I placed them in a circle around the cheese, dropped a little basil onto them, and poured the melted garlic tomato butter onto the asiago to melt it a little for a nice little topping sauce thing.

The entire box of tomatoes cost me $4.99, a pack of 4 sticks of butter cost $4.29, the full box of basil was $3.79, the block of asiago was $7.29. I've had the flour, salt, and pepper for a while, so have no idea on that costs. I used about 1/6 of the tomatoes in the box ($0.83), about 1/8 of the stick of butter ($0.13), maybe 1/20 of the box of basil ($0.19), and around 1/16 of the block of asiago ($0.45), for a total cost of $1.60 and 20-25 minutes of time. We'll keep this going for a while.

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