Turkey Meat Loaf and EBT

Tonight I attempted to make meat loaf for my first time ever... It worked out, well kinda. Apart from never cooking meat loaf I realized I have never cooked with ground turkey so I thought this would be an adventure. I decided to combine two recipes from the food networks website, I realized I'm a addicted to using that website. I attempted to use part of Giadas recipe because it called for only 1 lb of turkey meat as well as Elle Krieger's recipe. I omitted a few things and added ingredients as well.

Ingredients

2 cloves of garlic minced
1/2 cup soymilk
1 egg beaten
1/2 cup rolled oats
1/2 yellow onion chopped
1/2 red pepper chopped
1/4 cup chopped sun dried tomato
dash salt and pepper
1 lb. ground turkey
6 oz. tomato sauce
1 teas. worchestor sauce
1/8 cup ketchup

Preheat oven 375 degrees. Combine oats and milk then add everything together and mix with hands besides tomato sauce and leave a few onion rings for the top of the loaf. Grease 9 by 5 inch loaf pan. Place meat in and top with tomato sauce and then layer with a few onion rings. Cook for an hour or until the inside reads 165 degrees.

I found the recipe to be very tasty however it did not have the texture of meat loaf I realized I added too many vegetables and thus the loaf did not bound. I could have either used another egg but more than likely I used too much milk. By adding to much milk it had almost more of a texture of vegetable meat scrambled eggs and the inside kind of looked like that. In all it was good.

EBT
I am on EBT and I am a college student who's car just broke down and I had to scrape it for money. I am in the process of buying a used car soon so I am trying to be very frugal. I am realizing that by doing this food blog I am running out of money because to do a new recipe and use new food that incorporates spending money. Well I am half way through my month of food stamps and only have 18 dollars left. Therefore I need to cut back and redirect my position on eating. I spoke with my friend about this issue and he suggested that I use what I have available with that one staple item rather than using a recipe that calls for many ingredients that I do not have. More like cooking healthy with what I have which causes me not to go poor. Tomorrow I will stand in the Food Bank line and hopefully a type of food will come around that I have never cooked with it. Also hopefully it will warm up outside so it won't be so cold.