Brown bagging it and a 60 cent raise

I am fortunate to have gotten a sixty cent an hour raise this year. I work for a for profit hospital, but my friends who still work at one of the big non-profits here in Nashville have had no raises or cost of living adjustments and have been told not to expect any.In better times, when I paid my way through life with my Citi card, I would have been contemptuous of 50 cents plus a dime more an hour. No more. 700 bucks will fill my gas tank 14 times. It will buy 700 cans of dog food.Since I have been forced into accepting the new Age of Frugality I try to look at all matters financial this way.
This also means no more cafeteria food from the Big Hospital Across the Street where dinner usually costs four bucks plus change. One never knows how much the bill there will be- even the cashier doesn't know until her machine tells her. No one asks either. The only questions there are for the cook. "What is that?" we ask, eyeing the big lumps beneath the Mystery Sauce de Jour. The cook scowls,knowing that we will be ordering a burger and fries. He sighs and starts slamming around, a martyr to the fry basket. We leave, feeling guilty ,but we are happy not to have been fooled into buying Big Lumps with a side of de-natured corn (saltless. Tasteless. Yet heart Healthy!!).
But even burgers add up and before a month is out we are appalled to see that we have spent 75 dollars on cafeteria food. That is a quarter of our cable and Internet bill! It is clearly time to bring out the Tupperware from the back of the cabinet.
Tonight I am bringing in pasta shells with a condiment of sauteed mushrooms I found in a freezer bag. I cooked 2 cups of shells in a lot less water than pasta usually expects and found this made no difference. I steamed the ice off the mushrooms by heating them through in a no stick skillet. I added a few big pats of butter, a half cup of heavy cream, 3 smushed up garlic cloves and some grated Parmesan.I coked this until it thickened. Then I saw the 2 last slices of proscuitto sitting on an egg carton. In they went. I had this pasta for lunch. I will eat it again tonight at work. One must frequently sacrifice variety for frugality in these times when the bank account is only in the mid double digits and there is a week to go before the next paycheck and the gas tank is down to a quarter full.