The freezer and microwaves are beautiful appliances

A small selection of the food consumed within ten minutes of this challenge ending.

As I briefly mentioned in my last post, the challenge is now over and we didn’t quite make it. We would have done had not we gone on that jolly to Oxford, but within an hour of setting off at 7am hunger had kicked in and the thought of two more days like that seemed preposterous. Thus, the challenge ended on day 27, so we fell four days short. I’m still eating the food I made last month so it’s annoying to have come so close, but oh well.

So what have I taken from this? I think my main observations are that…

1. It’s definitely possible. I had about £4 to spare by the end, and still have about five frozen meals and ten tins or so left in the cupboard. I might have been able to drag another week out of my money if I was careful.
2. It does change the way you think about buying food. I’ve never been an extravagant spender anyway, but now it’s the first thing in my mind whether I really need to buy any more food today, or if what I’ve got at home already is enough.
3. As with most things in life, you appreciate more the things you can only have rarely. So the many days of mechanical eating, when you just whip something out of the fridge and forget about it within five minutes, are compensated for by the times you can cook something new and interesting. It becomes a little novelty.
4. I didn’t eat any less healthily at all, indeed, with not wanting to be reduced to a rickets-riddled cripple by the end of the challenge it was always on my mind to make sure I was cooking well. The big batches I cooked were full of vegetables, protein, lentils, rice, pasta and potato and I got enough fruit in. The only truly crap thing I ate was that 17p vegetable soup; just because I bought a lot of other cheap stuff doesn’t mean it’s any worse than the more expensive versions.
5. If I’d been in this situation for real, I’d accept whatever help people offered me straight away. I was cooked for a few times, went to my friend’s allotment and swapped a few meals with Steven. That help is a real respite from having to think every day about what your next meal will be and where you’ll get it from.
6. You need to allow yourself the occasional cheap crap meal to provide a respite from more frozen food. For me, this was the rediscovery of scallops. If you’ve got some potatoes, oil, bread, salt and vinegar, then you have got one hell of a way to get something quick, easy and dirty going.
7. Wastage goes riiiight down. Having lived effectively as a single bloke for the last few years, I was guilty of over-buying fresh food quite often which would end up going bad when I didn’t eat it all quickly enough. Now, I’ve stopped buying fresh food in bulk and just get exactly what I know I’ll need for the next week or so. It’s not a difficult thing to do – you just need to remind yourself to ask, will I really be able to eat all of this before it goes bad? Quite often, the answer is no and you’re throwing food and money down the drain.

So would I do it again? No. Although I’ve shown it’s possible, it takes up a lot more of my time in planning and preparation than I’m really comfortable with. Cooking the big batches is fine but finding the ingredients is slow – I’ve spent a lot more time looking round supermarkets and trying to find the absolute cheapest discounted bread possible than is really worthwhile in terms of how I spend my free time. As I mentioned in an earlier post, modern food shopping offers a trade-off between cost and convenience and it’s up to the individual where on the spectrum they want to sit. Some people will buy Marks & Spencers ready meals after work every night, others will be at Morrisons at 5.59pm every evening looking for the 9p bread. Me, I’m a 29p bread man. No point paying £1.15 for it when you don’t have to, but I don’t want to spend my life drumming my fingers in Morrisons until the girl with the sticker gun knocks off another 20p.

Well, we came close to managing it, oh so close, but then we were sent to Oxford for two days with work and the wheels came off. Within half an hour of leaving at 7.30am, we’d spent £9 on baguettes and over the next 12 hours racked up bills for £23 and £33 in a Lebanese restaurant. The only positive to this is that if the wheels were going to come off anywhere, I’m glad it was in the only Lebanese restaurant I’ve ever seen in this country.

166 hours and counting….

This last week or so has been hard; not only have I been living off peanuts (not literally they are expensive!) but I have been busy/forgetful during the evenings and have not been as vigilant with cooking to freeze microwavable meals each day. This means around 3pm each day I am hungry.. not just hungry but hungry enough to think that the leather in my wallet may be good eating.

Honestly I am unsure exactly how much I have spent or ho much I have remaining; I think I’m in the black as far as its concerned but this does not matter too much as I have no money at all till payday. A minor miscalculation.

So as this challenge enters the final week I have to wonder what I have learnt so far:

Would I do it again?

Of course not… I enjoy my food and I now work so I no longer have to feel hungry!

Would I continue with the freezer/microwave.

Yes, During the working week these are fantastic; make a large batch once a week and you no longer spend a fortune on soggy bacon sandwiches from the Morrison’s selection. Out of everything I will take away from this challenge the use of the freezer and the microwave will remain; although my meals may include meat and other fantastic flavours

What would you change if you had to do it all again?

Removing weekends from the challenge. The week its fine the weekend its terrible. You don’t realise how much money you spend on an average weekend on beer and food until its removed. Obviously there are quite weekends but 4 quiet weekends one after the other is a bit more and frankly dull.

What have I learnt from this challenge?

Nothing important save I can still have a well paid job and feel hungry. Seriously though it is amazing how much money I can save making my work dinners and I aim to continue with this; although this time if I forget its not the end of the world.

I’m really hoping this will end soon….. 165.5 hours….

Scallops, for the uninitiated, are easy chips. Imagine making homemade chips without the risk of burning your house down when you fall asleep pissed watching chatline channels at 2am, and you’ve got scallops. I would give you a photo but a) I burned my camera to death in a rare scallop pan fire last night and b) Google seems to think scallops are some posh fish thing. You’ll have to imagine, then, slices of potato parboiled, coated in sea salt and pepper and crisped up in a bed of oil for ten minutes.

Scallops have been a Godsend in the last week as hunger has struck quite seriously a few times and it’s a depressing thought to eat something out of the freezer that you know will just leave you hungry again in a couple of hours. I seem to get an urge to eat some absolute bollocks that has the nutritional value of a clump of dog shit but will at least kill those hunger pangs for the next six hours. And this is where scallops come in. They’re bollocks, they knock ten minutes off your life expectancy per butty and they make your house stink like a water treatment works but you do feel full for a blessed few hours.

High five to scallops.

With ten full days to go, and the frozen food I’ve spent most of my money getting into the freezer needing to be the basis of what I live on from now on, it’s time to get inventive.

So, you’ve had beans on toast. You’ve seen the adverts for cheese on toast, those ones where they put half a block on so each slice costs £1.90. Maybe you’ve even had duck pate on toast, on one of those spontaneous nights where spending £18 on an assortment of cheeses you don’t really like and crackers that’ll go soggy in the cupboard seems like a good idea. But have you ever had… curry on toast?

Curry on toast, Bet Lynch's favourite food. True fact.

This is a very simple delicacy. Get some curry you’ve made the night before and warm it up using a microwave or other available heat source. To make the toast, get a piece of bread that’s been in your freezer so long it can be used in place of concrete blocks and put it in a toaster. Wait for five minutes as the bread defrosts, flooding your toaster but eventually discarding a heavily burned block of dough vaguely resembling a naan bread that’s been subjected to an acid attack.

Heavily burned toast crosses all the boundaries of dough products – it has the wrappability of a chapatti, the sturdiness of a naan and the something of a roti. Nobody knows what a roti is. Curry on burned toast is an experience that I would like to subject diners in a London restaurant to, just to watch as they tell stories about how they had a bread just like this in a wonderful Indian village while they were volunteering as students.

For a first and spontaneous Desperate Time, then, I’m quite pleased with curry on toast. Give it a try next time you’re desperate.

Have a look below at the vegetable bonanza I’ve landed courtesy of Patricia and my mum. I’ve been helped out with a food drop like a Bosnian in a refugee camp, and this poses the most obvious question about the nature of this challenge yet: is accepting the help of other people okay?

The allotment crop, courtesy of Patricia and my mum. Click for full size photo.

My basic answer is yes, it has to be. I say that because if I was really in the situation where I HAD to be spend no more than a pound a day on food, I think the help of people around me would become amazingly important. Today has been quite a clear-cut example of accepting help from people because I went down to Patricia’s allotment to pick up some fresh vegetables, but less obvious examples of this go on all the time. Some of my family regularly cook too much food because they know someone else will always turn up and find a home for it. Most times that I go to my parents house, they’ll see if I’m hungry just out of courtesy. When you’re living with someone and they’re cooking something that’s easy to make an extra portion of, sometimes you end up sharing it with them. This all goes on normally without you being some form of modern-day Oliver.

Making curry base, which makes you feel like an alchemist turning base metal into gold. Click for full size photo.

So, I think if I was seriously having to eat on a quid a day, accepting the help of people around me would quickly become a normal part of life.

And so it was that I marched home after work with two bags of freshly picked vegetables under my arms, not feeling guilty for accepting the offers. I missed tonights thunderstorms by moments and set about turning this motley collection of tubers and cucerbits into a vegetable curry. In went the cumin seeds, garlic and onion. Special mention must go to these onions which smelt like no others I can remember, and cut smoothly and cleanly, unlike the cheap efforts you normally get. Throw in a couple of tins of plum tomatoes and a mix of spices and hey, you got a curry base going!

After this had reduced down a bit it’s time to throw in the potatoes, cut into chunks. I wouldn’t discover until later how good these tasted. In went carrot slices and some frozen peas, cauliflower and green beans, a concession to my need to bulk this pan out to see me through the next 11 days. At this point I began to wonder if the base was enough to cover everything I was adding, especially after adding the brocolli and courgette, but it all worked out okay and after an hour or so on low heat I ended up with a decent curry.

The taste of this was quite a special moment in the extremely sad way I’ve come to appreciate moments like this. When I know it’s time to make a big pan to cook and freeze, it becomes a focal point of the whole evening. I need to decide which night I’m doing it and make sure I have everything I need, because there’s no nipping out to the shop for a missing ingredient. Cooking’s actually a bit more enjoyable as well, because I know it’s just one big session that’ll last me for ages afterwards. I’ve always found cooking small portions impossible so it’s great to just chop everything up and throw it in a pan.

An allotment vegetable curry!

The result is here and I’m pretty pleased with it. With a pan of rice it yielded six big portions and two small ones, so that’s tomorrow’s dinner sorted and enough to see me well into next week – the final one. On top of the few tins of beans and noodles I have remaining, as well as the £6.36 I’ve got left to spend, I’ve got a second wind of confidence that this can be managed.

This happens to coincide with a renewed wave of people stopping me and asking whether:

I’m still doing the challenge, and if so
Am I managing it?, and if so
Christ, you must be hungry!, and
Come on, seriously, have you been cheating?

And the answers to these are yes, yes, vaguely and no!

The guys in New Zealand who did the $20 Food Week have finished that challenge and, as befits a pair of bored housemates, have taken up a new challenge, the Never Eaten week. In this, Brody and Logan eat mental food they’d never considered going near before. It’s probably not that surprising that they’ve come up with this idea since I’ve found that I’ve been eating loads of mad stuff I never otherwise consider, but just because it’s cheap.

Good luck to them for the savagery they’re inflicting on their palates, anyway.

If I were ever to attempt this again, I would take a month off work and go camping. Raoul Moat was probably happily living off 12p a day by the end.

It initially seems like the most absurd way to attempt living on a pound a day – removing yourself from the freezer and microwave and carting a bag of crap pasta and tinned curry into a field.

Raoul Moat after a tin of 17p Morrisons vegetable soup.

Yet, as soon as you get into camping you find that you don’t eat half as much because you’re always doing something else. When you do eat, it’s a communal experience so there’s free food flying around left, right and centre that you can take advantage of. I took away a bag of food that I photographed in a recent post and brought almost all of it back because I just ate when I was actually hungry rather than living by a timetable I was imposing on myself thanks to my usual workday routine and hours. What happened was that I ate a while after getting up and then did something for most of the day, then ate towards the end of the day. It just worked out that way.

The down side to this is that I had my first crisis point within minutes of leaving last Thursday. As I mentioned in my brief post on Saturday, I left behind the teacakes I made so with a four hour journey ahead of me I panicked and bought food from a Tesco on the way. That’s £2 down on what I now percieve as about 3p worth of bread, a trivial quantity of cheese and some crisps and orange juice I bought in a moment of blind confusion while thinking I may as well just write off the whole endeavour as the idea of a man who’s been smoking heroin through Sid Vicious’ nostrils since the invention of crack. While drinking acid through Syd Barrett’s teacup. On speed.

In summary, then, this week is going to be the hardest. I’m getting sick of planning food, I came back from holiday to find a freezer of the same sodding food I’ve been consuming for weeks, and when people offer me freebies it seems the best thing since cheese was born. For the first time, I have the desire to remind myself what one of those £1.39 jars of jalapenos from Morrisons tastes like. I would like to not know what I will have for tea tomorrow. I would very much enjoy it if it turned out all that palava at Roswell was true, but they kept it quiet because the aliens just wanted to give Richard Carr some experimental refried beans that tasted like nothing mankind has ever conceived of.

This will be a long week, I think.

Just a quick one, as this is being posted via the WordPress app for Android which is a little temperamental with a Welsh phone signal. I’m still on track to stick to budget although disaster struck within minutes of leaving when I forgot the teacakes I’d made and left them in the fridge. The pain of six cheese slices and homemade hummous going to waste is difficult, nay, impossible to put into words. After ten minutes of intense depression I recovered and have since enjoyed a kebab orgy which felt brilliant both psychologically and physically. Aside from that I’ve had some crap pasta and 33p curry so it’s been a mixed bag, but I’m still on course. I’ll do a full update when I get back.

Eating food cooked on a stove that generates the heat of a broken 20p lighter is not an easy way to live for two days. Plonk yourself in a field while you’re trying this and you’ve got another level of complexity. Vast stretches of supermarket aisles instantly become useless to you – anything that isn’t dried or tinned can be forgotten about, frozen food would be like shoveling snow with a tissue (have you thought about how infuriatingly futile that would be?) and this is all before I’ve even thought about the price.

It’s taking this level of masochism to another level then when I head off into the fields again, this time for four days. I’ll be relying on ingenuity, generosity and blind theft to get me through it. Oh, and this motley arrangement of tins and packets…

Food for four days in Wales. In a field. Click for full size photo.

The 33p curry makes a reappearance, as do a few packets of 10p noodles and a tin of beans that’s been in the cupboard for weeks. I have an aversion to beans these days, probably cultivated when cookery was of less interest to me than Eddie Stobart trucks and I quite happily found novel and interesting ways to make baked beans the centrepiece of any meal. Beans on toast, cheese and beans on toast, beans on baked potato, cheese and beans on baked potato, beans and cheese… the possibilities are simply infinite, and I overindulged leading to my current bean apathy. I am not looking forward to this tin of abominably cheap baked beans.

The rest of this bunch is quite depressing. Tinned potatoes, a remarkable invention – a means of taking the most flavoursome potato known to man, submerging it in saltwater and leaving it with the taste of three day old dishwater. The marrowfat pea, a variant of the quite healthy common or garden pea in which a man in an enormous pea-processing factory in Slough has bashed it about until it looks like a rugby ball and has a name that sounds like a substitute for lard. And oh, the soup! – the 17p soup, the God-be-damned 17p Morrisons Value soup that tastes like hot vegetable water. This soup is so cheap you require a ladel to drink it and they’ve actually put marrowfat peas in it. Marrow-fucking-fat, the pea that sounds like it belongs in a stem cell laboratory.

As you might be able to tell, my confidence in this weekend away is lacking at the moment. I’m coping fine when I’m around home and at work, because I’m never far from a freezer and microwave and therefore all the decent, healthy things I’ve cooked myself. It all goes to pot though when you can’t just grab something from the freezer and you have to start dealing with processed junk like this. By way of compensating for this appalling diet, I attempted to make hummus (or houmous or humous) which you can see to the right.It stinks of onions and garlic, but at least it’s not 17p Morrisons soup.