I've tried out a number of her recipes, and bought her book; but I also fancied seeing how hard the actual challenge would be.
The challenge itself is to live for five days on £5. There are additional rules (for example, that's £1 a day for five days; not spend £5 on Monday and enable that food to last for a week; not buying a lettuce for 30p, then saying you'll only have 6 leaves, so that's 2p - what you buy you have to pay for out of the fiver).
So as I wasn't going to ask for sponsorship, or sign up to the site, I thought I'd relax the rules a little, but stay within the ethos of the challenge - if I would, on "week 2" have used the rest of the food (i.e. it would be viable to use, and practical) then I could take a percentage of that. An obvious example is a bag of rice - a 1Kg bag costs 40p, so I could use half of that in the week, and take only 20p from my budget. This seems a reasonable compromise to me, and something I could do were I genuinely living on that level of income.
The focus of my ideas came from simple food, made with basic ingredients. I decided to go for goods I could get from the local Tesco superstore, and at their 'everyday' level it's remarkable how cheap some items are.
Here is the budget I put together, and the meal plan for the week:
I had already started making my own bread, so calculated I could make a half-tin loaf, and some rolls for less than it would cost to buy (and the flour, salt, and yeast could work on the budget, and be used in later weeks); and although the mince would take up a lot of the budget, it could give me my main meal for the full five days. At the time the milk price wars were happening, so I could buy 4 pints of milk, freeze 2 pints, and use 2 pints in the week ... a week without tea is beyond contemplation. This would give me porridge (with milk!) for breakfast, and with the beans and tomatoes some breakfast options.
When I was a child, the *only* thing I ate for lunch was banana sandwiches, so I knew I'd be okay with that for five days.
On 'Day One' I found out that my yeast had gone off, so my bread didn't rise. Luckily I went to the local shop and they had some 'use by' today rolls for 20p which meant I had bread for those days, and I then made some more bread (with fresh yeast) for the remainder of the week. This was one of those unlucky breaks, but if that were really my budget I'd have to make do with un-risen bread (which is yucky).
I was lucky in that there was no 'everyday' herbs when I ordered the food, so I received 'normal'(!) herbs for the same price - although not sure of the variance in dried herbs.
The chilli I made was simple, and nice. Without any real chillis available, or anything with heat to add, I put in the 10g of spices I could utilise. It was still fairly bland, but not the worst chilli I've eaten, and by day 2 it had improved. The chips (Tesco 3-way cook chips) were nice enough. I'd eked out the 2 eggs I was permitted, to use part of one as a binding agent for the burger I made on the Thursday evening. Again with a few herbs, and 1/4 of the onion I'd not used in either the bolognaise or chilli, it was a decent burger (which I've made a few times since). Only by Day 5 was it really down to 'anything that was left'. Hence this was the sight that greeted me on Friday evening:
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| Yummy! |
In addition to the 'cheats' above I also didn't count the small amounts of salt and pepper I added to some foods. But I avoided alcohol or pub trips in the five days, as this was meant to be a full budget for those days.
What I did realise was that cutting things up smaller seemed to make them go further (finally chopped onions were the order of the day), and food was rarely put in the bin ... every scrap was eaten.
Life on £1/day was hard (I was hungry), and not very healthy (bananas were the only fruit, and vitamins restricted to that tin of beans, and tin of tomatoes). I went to bed most days with my stomach rumbling, and in a week lost 3lb - imagine that for week after week.
Maybe something you'd like to try some time; not something I think you'd like to live with. But we have the choice of course. Many don't.
