Whole Foods Dinner: Not Your Whole Paycheck

Posted by The Editorial Desk / Tuesday, October 18th, 2011

Last night, in a hasty desire to cook a good dinner, my boyfriend and I swung by the Whole Foods on 14th Street in D.C. on the way home from work. Though it has unarguably great products, it’s all too often that Whole Foods becomes synonymous with Whole Paycheck.

But on a mission to not spend a whole paycheck’s worth on quality groceries (as my stomach growled more vigorously as the hour crept closer to dinnertime, it was hard not to pull everything off the shelves), we roamed the store on a strict budget. And succeed we did, with dinner for two, for under $20. And it was a really good dinner.

Since hunger, not time, was on our sides, we picked out four ready-to-cook herbed and seasoned chicken thighs, a fresh (still warm, oh yes) baguette (I couldn’t help ripping off a hunk from one end of the warm baguette as we walked back to the house four blocks away), a large portobella mushroom, and fresh goat cheese. Lastly, we made an arugula salad at the salad bar. Total cost: $18.02.

That comes out to about $9 per person, and we still had two leftover pieces of chicken, and about half of the baguette and circle of goat cheese. If you doubled the salad quantity, you could easily feed four for about $5 per person.

Now, let me tell you how good this dinner was…simplicity is good.

To start, we made our salad with fresh arugula, shredded beets, jicama, zucchini, corn, and feta cheese. We made our own dressing at home with a little bit of balsamic vinegar, whole grain mustard, honey, hot sauce, olive oil, and salt and pepper. I swear I could have eaten just this salad for dinner, it was that good. There’s just something about fresh arugula, with its sharp bitter taste, mixed with the slightly sweet and tangy flavor of beets and balsamic dressing that is impossible to beat.

Next, we made our crostinis by slicing up the baguette, topping each piece with a smear of goat cheese, and then adding the sauteed portobella mushroom on top. To cook the mushroom, we simply sauteed it in butter and balsamic vinegar, with a little salt and pepper, and then chopped it up and added it to the bread and cheese. We ran out of mushroom for one row of the bread slices, so we just used goat cheese and a drizzle of honey for those. Then we sprinkled all of them with some herbed basil and pepper and popped them in the oven for about 10 minutes while the chicken was baking.

The chicken was the easiest– we literally just transferred it from the saran-wrapped package to the oven. And man, did it come out ever so juicy and tender, with so much flavor from the herbs. Normally I would opt to buy plain fresh chicken and season it myself, but this package just looked so good, so easy, and was ridiculously cheap.

So, as it turns out, it is possible to shop at Whole Foods without making it your Whole Paycheck.

For Whole Foods locations near you, go here.

-Julia Harbo

Tags: Budget, cheap, chicken, cooking, Dinner, easy to cook, Gut Check, julia harbo, Northern Virginia, Northern Virginia Magazine, NoVA, salad, save, Whole Foods