Day 1 – evening
Posted: April 27, 2015 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Asda, budget, frugal, Leicester, Live Below the Line, potatoes, sainsbury's, Tesco, Vegan 2 CommentsI wasn’t planning on going anywhere by car to buy food, I was going to get it all on foot, but I unexpectedly had the opportunity of a lift to Asda where they are selling 1.5kg (which worked out to 6) potatoes on special offer for 87p, so I’ve got my spuds after all. I even got half of them baked for me!
I took the rest of my daily portion of slaw and 2 pickled onions in a container with me to serve over a potato, but ended up just eating a half-potato as I have been strangely un-hungry this evening. I will eat the rest cold over the next couple of days, but I also saved the other 3 to boil/mash/add to soup.
Since I’ve got everything I planned to, pretty much, here’s my final list for the week:
- Tesco yellow split peas, 500g – 53p
- Tesco value cornflakes 500g – 31p
- Tesco value crunchy peanut butter 340g – 62p
- Tesco value silverskin pickled onions 440g – 30p
- Tesco value self-raising flour 1500g – 45p
- Tesco value mustard 190g – 25p
- Tesco value teabags (40) – 20p
- Tesco value salt 1000g – 25p
- Sainsburys tomato purée 142g – 20p
- Asda ‘Extra Special’ Rudolph potatoes 1500g – 87p
- Aldi red cabbage (weight not listed, but weighed by me at 1270g) – 45p
- Aldi carrots 500g – 27p
That leaves me 30p as I couldn’t decide between a jar of jam, a bulb of garlic, an orange or lemon, and I was even kind of tempted to buy some Love Hearts sweets, even though they probably have even less nutritional value than the jam.
I don’t know if there’s much point in my costing out each day’s worth of food (I did make a start but it got fiddly with all the components in each thing I made), but I will run through what is left at the end of the challenge and work out the total spend and average nutritional intakes that way.
I already know I have enough here to last the 5 days in terms of calories and protein and will do roughly okay with regard to some vitamins and minerals although I’ll be falling short on a few things e.g. essential fatty acids and B12 and won’t manage to make the 5-a-day fruit and veg goal unless I eat more dandelions and other freebies.
I’m lucky to have plenty of spare time to source the cheapest item from each store, cook from scratch, and to own the equipment and know-how to carry that out, and I know that has made my cash go a lot further.
Day 1 – breakfast and lunch
Posted: April 27, 2015 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: cleavers, dandelion, foraging, frugal, Live Below the Line, pickled onions, red cabbage, soup, split peas 2 CommentsMaybe it helps that I’ve got hayfever at the moment so I’m not tasting things as much as I could be, but I don’t think the 20p-for-40-teabags tea is as bad as people have been making out! It’s certainly a huge improvement on having to go through caffeine withdrawal! I had four cups this morning.
Having said I’m not a breakfast person, I woke up peckish so I had 25g dry cornflakes in the privacy of my own home.
I ate the 6 snack crackers I took to work throughout the morning along with my cups of tea, then went into town on the never-ending quest for affordable potatoes. Nothing doing in Leicester Market, they had 1kg potatoes for £1.10 (I’ve got £1.17 left from the fiver, I could spend it all on potatoes, but I was hoping to get something else for flavouring as well, like a bulb of garlic), or some people were selling bowlfuls for £1 but lesser quantities did not seem to be on offer. Marks & Spencer didn’t have any for less than £1.75 a kilo. There’s an ‘International Supermarket’ (smallish grocery shop selling some fresh produce) on Granby Street, and they had 2 kilo bags of potatoes for £1, but they were outside in the full sun in an orange-toned plastic bag and I didn’t trust them not to be green once the bag was opened.
Empty handed I started for home, but on my walk back I saw some cleavers peeking through a hedge on New Walk so I gathered a small handful of those, they’re supposed to be a good spring tonic.
When I got home I made a very simple bannock from 100g self-raising flour, a pinch of salt and enough water to make a soft dough, rolled out a bit into a circle and baked in a hot oven until it had puffed up and just picked up a tinge of brown on top. I ate half of this with soup made from 150g split peas, 15g tomato purée, 25g chopped carrot, the cleavers and 2 dandelion leaves finely chopped, salt, and water to cover, simmered until the carrot was tender. I topped this with a couple of spoonfuls of the cabbage cooked with pickled onions that I made last night.
The soup was… functional? It wasn’t bad, and the dandelions stopped it from tasting too boring by making it very slightly bitter, but it would have benefited from some spices and a squirt of lemon.
The other half of the bannock I had as a sandwich with 50g coleslaw and 5g mustard. This was good, I will make something similar again.
I calculate I’ve had around 885 calories and 32g protein so far, which isn’t too shabby. I’m about to take a walk to Morrisons now to see what I can come up with for that final £1.17.
dropscone 
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