... 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.