Late night bargains

Hello!  

It's a year since we did the eating-for-a-pound-a-day experiment.  We didn't take it beyond the month that we planned, though it has gone on to influence our behaviour somewhat. 

Back in the first post on the blog on 1st December last year I pointed out that we are fortunate enough to be able to spend more than £1/day on food, but we still would like to save money to help us afford to buy somewhere to live.  Well, the good news is that we do now have a house of our own, and since moving in, a Waitrose supermarket has opened just under 5 minutes walk away.  

Now, Waitrose has a reputation of being more upmarket / expensive than other supermarkets.  I don't know whether that's totally fair, as they certainly have some cheaper options that one can stick to.  But perhaps more importantly for readers of this blog (hi, Mum), Waitrose will heavily discount perishable food on the last day of it being for sale.  By heavily, I mean items will go on sale for perhaps as little as 5% of the original price.  The nearby large Tesco typically has such goods discounted to about 75% of original price. 

The picture shows an example of some broccoli I bought for 5% of the original price.  I would probably not have ever bought broccoli in the form of the more expensive "tender stem spears" but at that price, it was definitely worth it.  Of course, we have to be a bit careful to make sure we eat the perishable stuff that has reached its sell-by date, but so far we have done a good job.  I don't eat meat, but my partner does, and her meat intake has gone up quite a bit because the meat counter is a particularly reliable place to pick up deeply discounted items, and meat freezes straightforwardly without preparation, unlike most vegetables.  

Today, I had an egg custard tart for lunch -- reduced from 70p for 2 to 15p for 2!

... and on into January

Well, the plan was to run the £1/day project for a month.  It was hard to keep up with it;  to keep track of everything spent, to weigh every last gram of food and convert it to cost, and to write it up and blog about it (and you'll perhaps notice that we have not managed to do the latter).  December was also a month in which our regular routine was broken and we visited friends and family, who catered for us.  But on the whole, I think we managed to show that it's possible to live on £1/day for food and not to do too badly.  

I learnt quite a lot during the month.  I know now when I have a slice of toast with butter that the bread and butter each cost about the same.  I know that that's around 4p each, though one can buy bread for various different prices, whereas there is much less spread (pun intended) in the price of butter.   I learnt that you can buy, and get through, 25kg of potatoes -- the old fashioned kind with soil still attached -- from farm shops for a cost much less than any supermarket sells its basics/value/essential brand, and that the latter are cheaper than the cheapest budget frozen chips you can get.  I learned roughly how much it costs every time I splash some oil in a pan, and what garlic costs by the clove, and I learned not to throw anything away.

I'm not sure whether we'll go on trying to stick to within £1 every day, but I hope to keep the blog alive to highlight some good-value recipes that I make in case they are of use to anyone else on a budget.  

Since passing into January, I've made some (v cheap) Indian food including some chapatis (pictured), which work out at about 2p per chapati.  Today I cooked some carrots and sprouts (going really cheap in the supermarkets post-Christmas) and used the water to soak some pulses and barley to make soup tomorrow, so something has definitely sunk in over the last month.