As Natasha pointed out in her post earlier today, we had some leftovers to dispose of and we made them the basis of our evening meals today. They had been costed already in previous days, since we are counting the amount of food cooked or prepared, not actually necessarily eaten.
I was pretty hungry at breakfast, and had a big serving of cereal (Waitrose Essentials bran flakes) which came to 20p, including milk. I was at home for lunch, and had Marmite on toast. The bread was a slice of Waitrose own-brand wholemeal, which works out a 5p per slice. I measured the amount of butter I put on, which turns out to also be 5p. I didn't actually weigh the Marmite. I have a huge (600g) plastic tub of Marmite which I bought from Costco at least a couple of years ago. A quick search suggests that they sell it for £2.59. I reckon the amount I put on toast probably doesn't exceed 1p at that rate, but maybe as much as 2p. I don't have scales sensitive enough to measure.
The leftovers I had for dinner – some potatoes, kale, celery and onions – didn't look so very appetising, so I decided to augment them. I had a tub of chick peas that I'd tried to reconstitute from dry. Most dried lentils and pulses I'm happy to soak/cook, but I never seem to get on with chick peas. I soaked them for a couple of days, then tried boiling them endlessly. They seem to take so long, which has the problem that I end up leavening them unattended, they boil dry and then burn. I tried to only have them boiling for periods when I was in the kitchen cooking other stuff, so that they would boil to tenderness over several sessions, but in the end they ended up drying out and getting burnt when I thought I could get away with leaving them for a bit. I caught them quickly and they weren't totally ruined, so I added a handful to the leftovers. I used 15g of butter and some Costco powdered garlic to fry the whole lot up. It was actually rather tasty. The chickpeas, butter and garlic that I added to the leftovers only amounted to around 10p.
In the title of the post I mentioned buying bargains, or not. The bargain came when I stopped in the local shop, in the campus of the University of Surrey, where I live. I wouldn't normally consider buying food there, even when not trying to be quite so provident, because it has the usual convenience store expense, but they had a couple of loaves of bread going cheap as it was the last day they could be sold. They were thick–sliced Hovis white bread, which is not what I'd usually buy, but at 35p/loaf, I couldn't resist buying them both. I also picked up the newspaper (The Independent), which has a cover price of £1.40, but which is sold by Universities for 70p in an agreement with the publishers who want to get students as life-long readers (all the broadsheets do this). In the end, then, I paid the paper's cover price for the paper plus two loaves of bread. Given that the bread was at its sell-by date, I put one and a half loaves of it in the freezer
The perhaps-not-bargain came in the form of another thing I wouldn't usually buy; a bag of Tesco value frozen chips. I got them yesterday when I was buying things for Natasha's birthday dinner. They were a mere 85p for a 1.5kg bag. It seemed pretty cheap (and I guess it is), but I should have paid more attention to the fact that I bought 2.5kg of King Edward potatoes for £1, which is clearly a better deal. Well, anyway – Natasha and I both fancied something to augment our leftovers, so we went for chips. Living the dream. I had 150g of chips (8.5p), in the form of a chip butty with white bread (4p for 2 slices + 10p butter). We used 140ml of oil, shared between 2 batches of cooking chips. We'll use it again, but cost it with this meal. That's 9p each.
All in all, then, my breakfast was 20p, lunch 11p, dinner 32p, plus "free" leftovers. Oh, we finished up some discounted Mr Kipling cakes that Natasha's mum gave us, at 6p for each of us, and we had a cup of Lapsang Souchong tea, at 5p each. I had a coffee at work for 3p. All-in-all, then, I got up to around 80p.
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