TISATAAFL

As Natasha pointed out yesterday, it's been a good week for free food.  We are quite lucky that opportunities to have our food paid for as part of our work do crop up from time to time – clearly not everyone trying to eat for £1 per day can say the same.  Today, I had to go to Cambridge (as proof, I attach a picture I took there of some bikes) for a meeting at the University Examination Syndicate, and it included lunch.  I got a lunch voucher which entitled me to a soup, a main course and a dessert.  I took up the offer of all of it, and had a potato and stilton soup, a main of bean casserole with rice, and a pot of fresh melon chunks.  Oh, and a bread roll with the soup.  It was a full main meal for the day, and very nice it was too, except for the melon chunks which were insipid in taste and too unripe.  I really felt stuffed (and a bit unwell) afterwards.  Normally I wouldn't eat so much for lunch, but I felt honour-bound to make the most of it.  

I'd had a normal breakfast, and for dinner, a baked potato with butter sufficed.  My total food spend for the day thus came to 40p, though if I'd have had to pay for lunch, it would have been several pounds.

I got some vouchers through in the post the other day from Tesco, trying to entice me to buy things from them with discounts.  Some of them I will probably use.  For example, they are offering me 20p off a jar of Tesco Everyday Value peanut butter.  I love peanut butter, but not if it's got added sugar.  So this usually means I have to get somewhat more expensive stuff as stocked in supermarkets or go to Holland and Barratt, or CostCo who both do huge tubs of unsweetened PB (though it's the very worthy stuff with nothing added to stop it separating and having a layer of oil on top which needs to be stirred in every time you use it).  If I remember correctly Tesco Everyday Value PB is a rare cheap unsweetened version.  I'll still have to figure out if it's cheap enough to actually use.  If a slice of peanut butter on toast is going to cost 50p then it's hardly going to be worth it. 

There are some other vouchers in there I doubt I'll use.  50p off when you spend £2 on products from the pies and savouries counter ("Includes quiches, slices, Scotch eggs, pork pies & sausage rolls") -- not because I would never buy such things, but I doubt that they are viable on £1/day even with the 25% discount.   Then there are others like "Save 50p on new Tesco whipped full fat soft cheese".  I think I can live without whipped soft cheese.  It sounds a bit wrong, though maybe I am missing out.

Being a good influence

It's been nearly two weeks now that we've been attempting frugality and thus far I've been astonished by the response from people.  So many people seemed very interested and to be closely following our progress.  Today someone at work told me how they were totting up the price of coal and oil that they use in cooking- a level that I don't yet aspire to!

This week has been a pretty good week on the free food front.  I never really realised how much free food I get.  Tuesday I had an all day off-site meeting.  It overran horribly so we didn't get lunch until half three that day- I was starving!  Fortunately there are people more prepared than me that brought snacks (and kindly donated them) so I had a pack of mini cheddars and a penguin at about 1pm.  Wednesday was a free dinner courtesy of a talk that Paul was hosting and today there were celebrations on offer in the office (plus I tucked into some birthday chocolate).  All in all, I feel like I'm cheating and it's all a bit too easy.  It's becoming easier- particularly as we're buying cheaper food through some astute purchases.  I'm finding dairy products the hardest challenge- no cheese or cream, I do like potatoes baked in cream.  It could be much worse though and my weight has been very stable since starting this endeavour which is reassuring.

Let's see how the weekend goes!

This measly breakfast is toast

Today I made a big mistake- instead of cereal for breakfast I had toast.  Financially this was sound; two slices of toast with butter a lot cheaper than a bowl of cereal.  Initially I felt a lot more satisfied too.  This was not to last.  Two hours later I was starving and being at work there wasn’t much I could do, not within budget.  I started off by substituting all my tea drinks of the day for chocolate digestives.  This helped me make it through until lunch time when a big bowl of pasta kept me going for oh an hour and a half.  Then things looked bleak.  Ten minutes later I realised that I had a gift of food on my desk, some nuts covered in chocolate and a caramel glaze, a gift from a relative roughly six weeks ago.  An inch of this had be back on my feet. Then came an unexpected treat- homemade mince pies from a colleague. It was awesome. I came home to a dinner of leftover mash and toad in the hole which I supplemented with some peas and gravy. All in all not a bad day. Won't be having toast for breakfast again any time soon though! 

End of week 1

It's been the end of week 1, and I think we've done pretty well.  Natasha already talked about some of the weekend food in her recent post.  I haven't fully costed Sunday, when we attempted to have a normal roast dinner, but I've worked out my own food.  It's time–consuming to be so careful in measuring out everything and then looking up the cost, especially when much of the food was bought a while ago, and without particular thought to the price and that I would later be keeping a record of it.  

Yesterday, Sunday , I managed a cheap breakfast by eating leftovers.  It was just some plain rice, which was fine by me, though I realise if I am to convince anyone of the easy possibilities of eating for £1/day, I should try a bit harder to make appetising food, rather than having some plain leftover rice.  Still, for lunch I had avocado on toast, with a bit of salt, pepper and olive oil.  The avocado was the expensive thing here, though with the veg market on campus selling them for £1.20 for a bag of 6 small ones, I got through only 20p of avocado, though actually, it was too much for one slice of toast (2p), so I should probably have saved half for later / given it to someone else.  I guess the drizzle of oil added another 2p or so.

The roast dinner was always going to be the costliest part of the day.  I wanted it to be as normal as possible, as my oldest daughter really looks forward to Sunday roast.  On Saturday, when taking the youngest daughter swimming, we drove past a farm selling 25kg sacks of potatoes for £5.99.  This is much cheaper even that the on-sale potatoes I bought at Tesco earlier in the week, for Natasha's birthday meal.  This sack was Maris Pipers, too;  the favoured spud for roasts.  I picked out three large potatoes which, when chopped gave 18 decent-sized roast potatoes.  More than enough for the four of us.  That cost 23p for all of us.  Natasha had suggesting mash for cheapness, but I went for roast, with 19p of fresh oil, and a little bit left in a pan from before.  Of all the vegetables we had, I went for carrots, to try to save cost for the toad in the hole.  I prepared 491g of carrots;  possibly quite a lot for four of us (one being a baby), and they came to 39p;  so the potatoes + veg part of the meal came to 81p or 27ppp (for the three being charged, though the baby did indeed eat some).

For the toad in the hole, Natasha has already mentioned the cost to her.  Flora (oldest) and I had two vegetarian sausages each.  They cost 25p a piece, so that was already half our permitted cost.  I had them just cooked in some oil that I siphoned off the nearly-done potatoes, though I made real toad in the hole for Flora and Natasha.  I didn't want to use the caged-eggs that had been bought for us for myself.  I also had a bit of mustard with my dinner.  Less than usual, and I didn't weigh it, so I can only guess how much it cost.  5p, perhaps?

So my day's food came to 0p (breakfast) + 24p (lunch) + 82p (dinner), though I had slightly smaller portions than ⅓, so perhaps I could just about count it as £1.  Still, if I'm going to have roast dinner, I should think about either having cheaper food earlier in the day, or not having the veggie sausages.  Our other staple for Sunday lunch is a puff-pastry tomato tart.  That may be potentially cheaper, but I haven't worked it out.  

So this 25kg bag of potatoes (pictures) looks like a great thing.  I hope I can get through them all, though.  If I have to throw any away, I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to account for it.  I am supposed to store them in an airy dark dry place between 8–10ºC.  I'm not sure I have anywhere that fits the bill.  Roast potatoes every night it is, then...

The weekend

I've found breakfasts quite challenging this weekend.  I normally have cereal on week days and I'm cool with that.  At the weekends when I have a bit more time I tend to have breakfasts that take a bit more time to make and are (in my opinion nicer).  Having croissants that you bake from frozen in the over wasn't an option though because my normal portion alone comes to £1.50.  I'm also fond of crumpets and eggy bread but it's all too expensive.  In the end I didn't really fancy anything and just had a larger lunch which suited me well enough.

That was yesterday, today had different challenges.  Dinner was a roast.  It's a favourite of the 7 year old and we wanted to try to plan it in as normal for her.  Her favourite is toad in the hole and yesterday we worked out carefully how to pay for it over the course of the day; I opted for a larger lunch of avocado on toast again with no breakfast (36p), I forget what Paul did in the end, he'll probably blog about it.  My real problem came from the sausages.  As the only meat eater in the house, I don't go through sausages that quickly, so tend to separate them into twos or threes and then freeze them.  Lately (the last 6-8 weeks or so), I've been especially hungry so had frozen sausages into threes.  When Paul asked how many sausages I wanted I had a myriad of problems- more than two would be too expensive, but if I just have two what to do with the remaining sausage- one was clearly too few.  Then, I realised that they actually cost twice what I thought (33p per sausage.)  Then the solution hit me- cook more rather than less.  We ultimately cooked all three sausages in a lot of batter and then cut it in half for tomorrow's dinner.  I still came in over budget- 50p on sausages, plus 27p on potatoes and veg (not yet worked out the cost of the batter) but I think it's a lot nearer to the mark than I would have otherwise been and a lot more sensibly filled with food.  With my hot squashes I reckon I may well be about 15-20p over budget.  Quite a lot really, Paul may yet save our average as he's clearly the frugal one.  We shall see.  I'm not going to beat myself up since I had a very good day yesterday and have prepared quite a lot of good stuff for tomorrow; half a toad in the hole for tea, (cheaper) pasta and pesto for lunch.  I think we/I'll be in a good place.

Buying bargains ... or not

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.

The best of intentions...

When I wrote my earlier post today I was still full come breakfast time so around 11am I started guiltlessly snacking on yesterday's leftover. There were plenty of them so I had intentions of basically eating nothing paid for but avocado on toast.  It was all going well. Instead of tea I drank hot squash. When it came to lunch though I decided that one avocado on toast- a grand £0.25 was not enough and decided to have a slice of toast and butter alongside it for good measure bringing the tally to £0.35. For me this seemed to be a theme.  The plentiful leftovers for dinner I ate at 5pm when the baby was having dinner. This was my downfall- it was too early for dinner, or maybe it was not having breakfast or finding out that Paul had purchased the aforementioned 1.5kg bag of chips. So I had a second dinner of chips (17p), and decided I wanted ketchup (bizarrely for me) at 3.5p and then as we had some biscuits (2x3p) that needed finishing today decided to splash out a whole 5p on smoky tea! That brings me to a grand total of £0.71! A lot more than the 30p or so I'd envisioned spending today but hey- what a life of luxury I live.