A social experiment - Day 2

Having spent double the budget on day 1 I was quietly optimistic that I could do something to redress the balance on day 2, not least because of my cunning plan...

So, nice and early in the morning I took the kids down to the weekly market and had a word with the guy who runs the fruit and veg stall. I told him about our aim of living on £1 per person per day for a week. "A pound!?" he exclaimed. Then I put it to him that we would be delighted to take some of the broken,bruised and otherwise less than perfect fruit and veg off him that he puts aside as unsaleable each week if he could let us have it at a low price...

"That's what my wife and I eat" he said. "And anyway, we've got pigs and chickens so we feed that stuff to them." he added. "And anyway, the only stuff we really have that needs getting rid of is stuff you wouldn't really want anyway, like a box of over-ripe mangoes". So that was that idea scuppered.

However, one thing he said that was helpful, after I'd mentioned the £1 a day thing, was "So you'll be making your own bread then?" Well, I had hoped that I might still be able to afford to buy something as basic as bread within the budget, if not the white loaves that we normally buy from the Sainsbury's bakery counter for £1.35 each. In my mind I somehow thought that there would be sliced white loaves available for about 40p, but those days it seems are gone - at least in Sainsbury's. The cheapest white loaf that they do is still 85p. So I thought that I would have a go at making my own. With help from Delia Smith I managed to produce a white and a wholemeal loaf each of which cost, I reckon about 45p. And to use up a bit of Feta cheese that was lingering in the fridge (usual story - too expensive to buy if I'd really been on the £1 budget during the preceding weeks - but I didn't want to waste it) I made some Feta, rosemary and potato bread, which we had at lunchtime with the leftover soup from yesterday. Yum.

Feta, rosemary and potato bread

So anyway, making one's own bread is a massive money saver (relatively speaking and under the terms of the experiment) although in real life it's hard to imagine spending probably an hour every other day baking bread to save £1.80 a time. OTOH, it was fun and the bread is lovely. In particular (I now know as I'm writing this the day after) the wholemeal bread makes amazingly good toast. It is quite dense and becomes even more nutty and chewy with a really crisp crust once toasted - really, sublime!

Bread!

One slight (huge in £1 a day land) indulgence during the morning was coffee made with ground coffee. I wouldn't have had this but Nic decided that she would forgo breakfast if she could have nice coffee instead. Our stove top pot takes about 25 gm of coffee, which costs about 30p, but we also added about 10p worth of hot milk and some sugar. The pot makes a bit more than one cup so I had to help out there. Total cost 45p.

I was determined that tea wouldn't be a bowl of slop and Nic suggested another recipe (or at least a modified version of a recipe) that we had tried before, namely Gardener's Pie, from an old Cranks recipe book that we've got. Gardeners pie is a vegetarian version of Cottage Pie, with a filling made from onions, carrots, brown lentils,tomato puree, mushrooms and walnuts. The budget woudln't run to mushrooms and walnuts, so I left those out, but to add flavour I added fennel and cumin seeds and a splash of Worcestershire Sauce. After some sautéing and simmering I had poured off the juices from the filling, added a splash of white wine vinegar and a little water then thickened with flour to make an amazingly nice gravy.

I wanted to serve the pie with some green veg and having looked at all the options in Sainsbury's the cheapest I could find was "basic" frozen peas at £1.20 per kg (compare fresh broccoli at £2.20 a kilo)

Gardener's pie with peas

Also whilst at Sainsbury's I found a tin of cheap Marigold stock powder and a tin of kidney beans - both severely dented, but 30% off. I thought I would include the beans in a veggi chill, the recipe of which I was yet to invent, but the stock is a staple as far as I'm concerned and hard to imagine doing without, so that was a bit of a find, allowing me to bring down my spend by a few pence over the week.

Dented cans - cheap!

Pudding was left over crumble from day 1, but with another batch of custard.

So costs for the day were breakfast, about £1.15 because of the coffee. Lunch was partly free as it was mostly yesterday's left over soup, but the feta bread cost about £1 (would have been about 30p without the feta in it).

Tea was £1 of potatoes, 30p red lentils, 10p onion, 40p carrot, 30p tom puree, 10p stock powder + a third of the peas, so about £2.20. Custard was 40p.

Once again there were teas and instant coffees to account for which cost 20p.

I won't add the cost of the bread yet as it will be accounted for as it is used, tomorrow and the day after.

So overall the spend for the day was about £4.95, a bit nearer our £4 target + we have enough Gardener's Pie left over for tomorrow's tea.

A social experiment - Day 1

So anyway, where was I?

Ah yes, the price of fish.

Well actually the price of all food.

So last week I read something somewhere about a couple who were living on £1 a day each for their food and drink spend over Lent. I mentioned this to my kids, the eldest of whom, Agnes (now 9!), immediately asked if we could try it.

We had a small discussion about what that might entail, and because in any case we are already well into Lent decided on a compromise solution of trying it for a week, starting on a Friday so I could make the most of our local Saturday market to stock up with cheap veg near the start of our week.

Well, today was Day 1.

First of all I have to admit that we had(have) a few consumables in the fridge that need eating this week, but which I would not be able to afford on our £1 a day (£28 for the four of us for the week) so I'm not quite decided how to reconcile that, but I'll worry about it later.

Today, I have mostly been eating... (anyone else remember the Fast Show?)

... soup.

Actually I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. Firstly, breakfast. The kids had cereal; Agnes, Sainsbury's Bran Flakes; Arthur, Sainsbury's Wholegrain Malties. Both of these are own brand and relatively inexpensive at 27p/100g and 21p/100g in the sizes we buy. Given that the kids have around a 60g serving we're looking at 12-16p each plus around 10p each for milk and a sprinkle of sugar. I had about 15p worth of bread in the form of toast with about 10p worth of butter and Marmite and Nic had toast too. So in total breakfast may have cost around £1 from our £4 daily budget. Yikes!

I'd already decided that our main meal was going to be an old favourite, that I know is dead cheap, but which is so delicious that it's a favourite of ours and the kids too in any case, even without the budgetary constraints - Lentil and Lemon Soup, from the Covent Garden Soup Book (the first one). In brief the recipe (serves 6 (according to them - ha ha)) calls for an onion (sweated), garlic, fresh thyme (I use dried), red lentils, stock, tinned tomatoes and some puree, seasoning, and finally just before serving, but essential for adding zing, some lemon juice.

Lentil and Lemon Soup - even better than it looks and sounds.

I planned to make double quantities with a view to having some for lunch tomorrow too so decided to check out prices at our two (small) local supermarkets. We don't have access to a huge supermarket and I know that I am not going to be able to buy larger size packets that would get me the best prices. Nor do we have a discount store like Lidl or Aldi. We just have a Co-op and a Sainsbury's. However there's no way of knowing which is going to be cheaper for a particular product without checking, which for me meant visiting the two stores on the way back from dropping the kids at school.

Checking prices of the two main items I found that red lentils were £1.29 at Co-op and "basics" tomatoes were 34p a tin. Then I got on my bike to Sainsbury's where lentils were £1.09 (hurrah!) but tomatoes were 35p (aaargh!). Now, if I were really, really trying at this game, I might have bought the lentils in Sainsbury's and gone back to Co-op for the tomatoes, but I just didn't want to have to cycle back across town to save 2p on two tins of tomatoes. But by the end of the week, who knows?

Usually when I get home from dropping the kids I have a coffee made with ground coffee. I've not bothered to work out how much that costs because I'm pretty sure that the budget won't stretch far enough to carry on with that. Maybe if I'm running a surplus in a few days I'll do the calculation, but I'll be surprised.

For lunch I had the small amount of leftover pasta (with salmon and spinach) from last night's tea. I'm not going to count the salmon and spinach as it would have blown the budget and I'd not have bought it  if I were living on £1 a day permanently, so I'll just put down 20p for the pasta, which I might have eaten with a bit of butter and black pepper if I'd been going for a proper frugal lunch.

The other thing I forgot to mention was the kids' packed lunches. They have school dinners on a Monday and Tuesday for convenience as we do a swim session before school on a Monday and I often fast(ish - just eat a few hundred calories of food) on a Tuesday so I don't cook an evening meal then, but I do sandwiches Wednesday to Friday, usually cream cheese and cucumber or plain cheese. Normally they get a round of sandwiches an apple and a bit of cake or similar. Today they got no cake, just an extra half a round of (different) sandwiches Agnes - golden syrup, Arthur - Marmite. Arthur had a Granny Smith apple that I already had in the fridge (V expensive 6 for £2, so about 33p) whilst Agnes had a "basics" cox - smaller, but only £1.50 for 9, so about 16p. She also had a legacy banana (12p). In total then I think I spent around £1.10 on the two lunches.

So, the costings of our soup. 2/3 of the lentils - 70p 2 tins toms - 70p, 2 onions - 20p, oil - 20p, tom puree - 30p, stock (Marigold, expensive but good value) - 15p, 1/2 a lemon 13p. Total cost £2.38 + bread, about 50p.

I also decided to make a pudding. I used 4 Bramleys that I also happened to have in the fridge, that cost £1 from the market. If I'd not had them in they would have been too expensive and I'd not have used them, but I supplemented those with some rhubarb from our allotment (I'm lucky enough to have a variety that comes a few weeks earlier than most people's and this was our first picking). I also needed 75p worth of butter and about 40p of flour and sugar, so around £2.15 in total. + custard (milk, sugar custard powder - 40p).

We also had a bit of luck in that Nic's school has a cake sale as the kids leave on a Friday afternoon and she spotted 4 unsold cakes that had been left behind and nabbed them rather than letting them be binned.

A "free" cake

The kids ate their soup at tea time, ate a small cake each and then went to a triathlon club training session. They had the crumble when they got back.

I've also got to add the cost of some teas and coffees. We use fair trade Earl Grey and a fair trade instant coffee. I reckon they average at about 4p per cup including milk. 9 cups between us during the day x tea/coffee = 36p.

Apple and rhubarb crumble and custard.

Total spend for the day was around £8.09 - DOUBLE THE BUDGET!!!!!!!!!

But we do have half the soup left for tomorrow's lunch and half the crumble for tomorrow's pudding.