A social experiment - day 3
So one thing I've found (no surprise really) is that making a decent job of writing up our £1 a day experiment is as time consuming as doing it. But as we did see the process through for a full week I am going to try to get everything written up.
Day 3, Sunday, was always going to be interesting as we were going orienteering, which meant taking a packed lunch.
We got off to a good start with breakfast though. The kids had been slightly shocked at how much of the £1 a day budget was down to their bowls of (relatively cheap) cereal - about 25p each. So they and Nic opted to go for porage for breakfast made to Nic's recipe (add water) rather than mine (add milk). Approx 50g of porage oats per serving costs about 6p using the Sainsbury's oats we normally buy (though could be brought down to 4p if we bought Tesco's Value version) - but they did add some milk and sugar on top (they're not hard enough to go for salt) so I reckon they had breakfast for 10p each. OTOH I couldn't face porage so I had a couple of slices of toast with a mere scrape of butter and marmite.
Getting back to lunch, I'd baked bread the day before, but that still left the vexed question of what to put in our sandwiches? Normally it might be cheese and pickle but in £1 a day world that would be out of the question so instead I went for...
...cucumber!
"Mmmmm, delicious", you're probably not thinking. Cheap though. One cucumber is 80p and half a cucumber does sandwiches for four. We also took two bananas to share so another 24p there.
So lunch after a hard run around the woods in the cold, was adequate, if a little dispiriting.
At the event the kids also had a go at the String Course, which is a special simplified orienteering activity for children that usually earns the participant a small reward - in this case a chocolate, which the kids appreciated much more than they might normally have done.
On the way home we also needed to call in on some friends whereupon we had slices of "Yum" pressed upon us (we didn't resist very hard) along with cups of coffee - Yum is their name for some chocolate based tray bake confection - not sure of the other ingredients, but very nice and outside of our £1 a day ration.
For tea we had...
... the same as yesterday!
Leastways the kids did as there was still a small amount of crumble left over. But Nic and I had the same as yesterday minus pudding. I might have felt bad about that, except that I went and did some babysitting for some friends and they had kindly left me a portion of their tea-time pudding, which turned out to be...
... apple and blackberry crumble with custard.
They also left some beer in the fridge. Thanks Tania.
So anyway, totting up our costs for the day we have a mere 40p for breakfast, £1.24 for lunch (bread, butter, cucumber and bananas) and 40p for tea to cover the cost of more peas to go with the free (leftover) pie. Add in a few more teas and coffees (we took a flask with us to the orienteering) at 28p and we get to a grand total for the day of around £2.32 - under budget!
So luckily we all had some "free" treats to keep up moral during the day, but of course had we had to pay for them we would have blown the budget again.
Day 3, Sunday, was always going to be interesting as we were going orienteering, which meant taking a packed lunch.
We got off to a good start with breakfast though. The kids had been slightly shocked at how much of the £1 a day budget was down to their bowls of (relatively cheap) cereal - about 25p each. So they and Nic opted to go for porage for breakfast made to Nic's recipe (add water) rather than mine (add milk). Approx 50g of porage oats per serving costs about 6p using the Sainsbury's oats we normally buy (though could be brought down to 4p if we bought Tesco's Value version) - but they did add some milk and sugar on top (they're not hard enough to go for salt) so I reckon they had breakfast for 10p each. OTOH I couldn't face porage so I had a couple of slices of toast with a mere scrape of butter and marmite.
Getting back to lunch, I'd baked bread the day before, but that still left the vexed question of what to put in our sandwiches? Normally it might be cheese and pickle but in £1 a day world that would be out of the question so instead I went for...
...cucumber!
"Mmmmm, delicious", you're probably not thinking. Cheap though. One cucumber is 80p and half a cucumber does sandwiches for four. We also took two bananas to share so another 24p there.
So lunch after a hard run around the woods in the cold, was adequate, if a little dispiriting.
At the event the kids also had a go at the String Course, which is a special simplified orienteering activity for children that usually earns the participant a small reward - in this case a chocolate, which the kids appreciated much more than they might normally have done.
On the way home we also needed to call in on some friends whereupon we had slices of "Yum" pressed upon us (we didn't resist very hard) along with cups of coffee - Yum is their name for some chocolate based tray bake confection - not sure of the other ingredients, but very nice and outside of our £1 a day ration.
For tea we had...
... the same as yesterday!
Leastways the kids did as there was still a small amount of crumble left over. But Nic and I had the same as yesterday minus pudding. I might have felt bad about that, except that I went and did some babysitting for some friends and they had kindly left me a portion of their tea-time pudding, which turned out to be...
... apple and blackberry crumble with custard.
They also left some beer in the fridge. Thanks Tania.
So anyway, totting up our costs for the day we have a mere 40p for breakfast, £1.24 for lunch (bread, butter, cucumber and bananas) and 40p for tea to cover the cost of more peas to go with the free (leftover) pie. Add in a few more teas and coffees (we took a flask with us to the orienteering) at 28p and we get to a grand total for the day of around £2.32 - under budget!
So luckily we all had some "free" treats to keep up moral during the day, but of course had we had to pay for them we would have blown the budget again.
posted by Jon Brooke at 2:33 pm
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