Doesn't look too bad
My stomach is awaiting dinner and it quite fancied the look of that.
Day two of my "Live Below the Line" challenge has kicked off with another two fried egg sarnies and a couple of cuppas, following a long, hungry cooking slog yesterday thanks to some particularly obstinate chickpeas. To recap, I'm subsisting until for five days on just £1 a day for nosh as part of "an innovative awareness and …
Seriously we should all do more of this. You can get fantastic nutrition out of cheap veg and pulses and I do get tired of hearing "poor people are malnourished because they can only afford mac fry king burgers."
Slight shock when I speed-read the article as "while peeing occasionally into the bubbling broth"
>>"poor people are malnourished because they can only afford mac fry king burgers." <<
I must confess that I did watch Jamie Oliver's programmes about trying to improve the quality of food served in schools; and the one particular epsiode that stood out was when a mother said that she could serve her children Cottage Pie because it was "too posh" for them.
As it happens, I cooked a Cottage Pie a couple of weekends ago and produced 6 good sized portions for a smidge over £3 the lot. Yes it had a lot of veg in it, but was very tasty and everyone was full up after.
White coat, apron and starched white chef's hat please!
"As it happens, I cooked a Cottage Pie a couple of weekends ago and produced 6 good sized portions for a smidge over £3 the lot. Yes it had a lot of veg in it, but was very tasty and everyone was full up after."
You, sir, don't own an energy monitor! Sorry, the cooking process would have cost 40-50p alone. Decent mince costs £2 minimum. Brits really have no clue of the cost of, well, anything, it seems.
AC never went to uni then. Mince of unspecified origin can usually be had for circa 70p a pound, less if you buy from the woops bin section. Yes if you have the money you can pay 2 quid or more for a pound, but if you don't have the money there are ways to pay less.
As for cooking costs, it depends on electric or gas but yes the cost of energy is a factor. I'm not sure it would be that high for gas but I suppose it could be. I know it's not that high when camping and that stuff costs a freaking fortune.
> how much does it cost in fuel to boil the living daylights out of those pulses for six hours?
sweet FA., near enough. Bring them to the boil then wrap the pan (helps to have a heavy one) totally in anything heatproof & leave overnight. Okay, you've got to plan ahead a bit but still.
As to your diet, I'd have gone less on the protein and more on the calories. In the short term you need the latter more. You can survive comfortably with minimal protein for 5 days, sans calories, not so easy.
Well done and best of luck.
Due to current budget constraints I've been living for the past month on £1 a day or less.
It's reached the point now I simply forget I'm hungry, don't bother eating at all for a few days, then use the additional coins to 'treat' myself to a more substantial meal... like beer or doughnuts.
This works really well with soup. If you keep adding leftovers to a big pot of soup, and simmer for 45 minutes or so a day, it'll keep forever and after about a week gets really, really tasty.
If you manage to keep the pot going for more than about three weeks the flavours do tend to merge into generic brown, but we rarely got to that point as we kept finishing it while it was at peak soup. At which point, of course, you have to start again.
Hell, if you're willing to add water and re-boil it at least daily before eating, it can stay in the lidded pot and never get moved into refrigeration at all. You can probably even just add half a quid's worth of other food to it daily and keep the thing going quite a long time. (My personal record for a stew is just under four weeks. Only quit because I was headed out on a holiday and wouldn't be around to maintain it.)
As an aside, 10kg of rice is often only about 5-6 times the cost of 1kg of rice. The real trick to getting people into a state where they're able to manage poverty is to make sure they live indoors with cooking facilities and storage space, and have a lump of cash to initially acquire cookware and set up the pantry, mostly because dry staples (flour, dry milk, sugar, rice, oats, salt) cost so much less in substantial quantities. Dry staples, a supply of eggs, and some vitamin supplements and your diet is monotonous but sustaining.
"Dry staples, a supply of eggs, and some vitamin supplements and your diet is monotonous but sustaining."
Which is where hot sauces come into their own. If (like me) you're losing a few pounds by cutting the calories, then the miserly portion size and limited interest of dollop of lentil broth can be completely hidden by adding sufficient hot sauce to give it a real bite.
Remember the old childrens' nursery rhyme?
Pease porridge hot
Pease porridge cold
Pease porridge in the pot
Nine days old.
What Lester has cooked up here is essentially "pease porridge". It doesn't go off as long as you keep it on the slow boil at least some of the time. It might start getting a bit manky after nine days, but it would still be edible if not palatable!
I found our local farmers market does awesome bulk organic chickpeas \ pinto beans \ kidney beans etc really cheap (like supermarket own brand cheap) and they soak really quickly. Compared to the supermarket type which can be hit and miss with the soaking times. Lentils and splitpeas are also great for those on a budget (perhaps not so great for those that have to share a confined space with you). Lentil curry and splitpea soup are pretty samn cheap to make and very tasty (and thats coming from a meat eater).
is that they need soaking before you boil them. Put them in a pan or bowl with at least 6 times their own volume of cold water and leave them overnight, or start in the morning and they're ready to wash and cook in the evening. (Leave them at ambient temperature, or if you want to speed things up, they rehydrate splendidly in 2 hours at 40 to 45 C, if you have a space at that temperature.
To really keep the flavour in your soup and minimise energy consumption, you need a pressure cooker.
8 minutes at 1 Bar cooks chickpeas to the point where they're ready to gently fry with oil, garlic and cumin.
(Quick! Buy a pressure cooker before they get banned in the "Free World":)
Where's the Chef's Hat icon?
Another factor to consider is the water hardness. Soaking and boiling the chickpeas in hard water is much less effective. A possible solution is to add 1 or two teaspoons of lemon juice to the water the day before you're going to use it.
A good pressure cooker also helps a lot, and it will save you lots of energy and time. And now that I think of it, eating chickpeas for five days in a row will also help you to save a ton of cash in heating costs in this cold spring though you´ll probably have to spend more than that in air fresheners.
My sister-in-laws family have developed a water resistant chick pea, no amount of soaking or boiling will soften them. If these ever got to be sold in a shop and you bought a pressure cooker at the same time, you'd be asked for id and put on a terrorist watch list.
Would a tablespoon of bicarbonate of soda have helped in both the soaking and cooking water? They used to have tablets of these for making mushy peas.
Lester wrote: "I did soak the chickpeas for 10 hours. Didn't make much difference, evidently."
I don't know why I failed to notice that you had soaked them, sorry. In that case you may be right about what the shopkeeper has done. Maybe your dried chickpeas are literally dead. You need healthy chickpeas that would germinate if you planted them. However, the ones in the photograph do look as if the majority have swelled to some extent. Did you use them all and make a week's stew? If so it's probably too late to suggest that you soak them for a couple of days (and change the water twice a day).
I'll leave you Paris as food for thought.
You didn't put salt in before they were fully cooked, did you Lester? Most pulses harden up if there's salt added before they're soaked and cooked, and all the books I've read on the subject (as a curry fiend) are explicit that salt goes in only when the pulses are fully done.
That only leaves one answer then: You've been flogged plastic chick peas. Possibly the output of some municipal plastic recycling programme, where the processed chopped and pelletised plastic was a light brown, and looked like chick peas, and somebody thought "I know how to make a bob or two on those!"
Good luck with the rest of the bag!
Consisted of 6 days of Pasta, tinned tomatoes and baked spuds, followed by one day of beer. Of course, that was in the good ol' days when the LEA would happily pay for both fees and a grant, so I ended up out of university without any debt at all, and an appreciation of how to make a little money go a long way.
£1 a day was a luxury back then. 56lb bag of spuds, enough for 2 months worth, was £4. Tomatoes were 15p a tin at safeway and would do your main meal. Pasta was about 10p a portion. 50p would feed you for the day and allow you to save a fiver to simply waste on beer at the Neslon Mandela student union building* on a friday night. The weekend was spend sleeping. I don't ever recall buying meat and I don't understand the whole Pot Noodle reference as they were too expensive for me to afford.
*yep...it was called that.
I tended to have 6 days of chicken. Asda keps having sales on chickens, £3 each or two for £5 (Really good deal) so i'd buy the chicken, cook it on day 1, have a leg, have the second leg the next day and the rest would go into a soup pot, boil the bones to get out as much broth as possible. Add some spices etc.
That £3 of chicken would last me a week easily. Buy a few packs of instant noodles and you have chicken noodle soup.
Sadly I'd still be screwed for breakfast and lunch if I were aiming for £1 a day. Cannot find a dozen eggs for £1 anymore,
Seem to recall our college hall could serve mince all week for lunch and call it something different depending on what it was served with
mince + mash on top == cottage pie
mince + spaghetti == spaghetti bolognese
mince + red kidney beans + rice == chillie con carne
mince + flat pasta + cheese == lasagna
mince + red peppter + rice == savoury mince
mince + potatoes == mince & potatoes
etc
Worse then that it seems some of them lived in halls and ate in the canteens! Posh buggers ;-)
Leeds (proper) had one of the better su's. Trying to think back to the other unis I went to, I don't think I went in the su's more than once. More fun to be had elsewhere for less money. A rileys membership was a must however! That and at least one trip to club bongo international just so you know how bad things can get.
You would be surprised just how many herbs you can find growing wild - most it's just a case of knowing what to look for ... but here in Louisiana we can solve the flavor issues with hot sauce ...and again, locally you can usually grow the peppers all the time.
Basically - the diet may be boring when you try it for one week but over time it becomes much better with a little planning.
I totally agree. In the area were Lester lives people buys/barters most of their food locally from their neighbours, or from some local 'Cooperativa Agraria'. This way you get a better price and and the food is fresher and of a better quality than anything sold in a supermarket. Some winter greens, onions and garlic in your garden will also help. With good planning you could probably spend less than 1,5 Euro a day and still eat quite princely.
My university meals were a model of capitalist enterprise. I'd cook goulash, spag bol or chilli - enough for around 8 people at least. Then have 5 mates round for dinner, charge them £1 each for the nosh which cost about £4-5 and eat for free. Following day I'd eat the leftovers, then start again. Always had a queue of folk asking when I was cooking again and I hardly ever paid for any of my own food. The key was huge portions and hand out free beer (made my own lager as well - 75p a 750ml bottle, sold about 1/2 the 50 bottles on a £5 batch, had a batch ready every week).
I came out of uni with more money than I started with...
My own budgeting has realised there can be a false economy in buying something cheap which then needs a lot of cooking with gas or electricity. I try to make efficient use of the energy by cooking a batch of a stew - or filling the oven with things to roast. The excess is then frozen as individual portions. When needed a portion can be thawed in the fridge and then reheated in the microwave.
Haven't tried the wartime economy method of using a hay box for slow cooking.
The neighbours donkey should worry!
Hunting (bow or knife) is usually a great way of getting free protein. No matter where you are theres usually some invase species or pest people are happy to have you hunt (do check local laws etc). In the uk pidgeons were fair game although not hugely economical to hunt. Here axis deer are a pest and I do my best to slay as many as I can find. Much better for the freezer than fishing (due mostly to over fishing). Wild boar is awesome if you can get it.
"In the uk pidgeons were fair game although not hugely economical to hunt."
The RSPCA have been quick to prosecute people who killed feral pigeons that were in their way in shopping centres. The people were convicted of cruelty to an animal. The same happened to a guy who drowned a grey squirrel as the most efficient way to kill it. Apparently grey squirrel is quite tasty.
City folk do have some funny laws. I made my fair share of pocket money shooting winged rats and they make a decent pie afterwards. Rabbits and Hares are good game and plentiful. A doddle to shoot just as the sun is rising. Most of the game birds are for someone elses pot but rabbits etc are fair game and can be taken with an air rifle which is cheap per shot.
In the uk pidgeons were fair game although not hugely economical to hunt
They're startlingly unappetising to prepare, as their body fat tends towards a lovely yellowy-green colour. City pigeons also eat an awful lot of nasty stuff, so I'd avoid them myself.
Apparently grey squirrel is quite tasty
I've eaten squirrel before. I can't recommend it... I imagine that really good squirrel tastes as nice as low quality bunny. I suspect that the correct way to serve it is as a strong, hot curry, as that might hide the 'flavour'.
Never had squirrel before, mind I was never asked to shoot them.
I hate to think what city pidgeons eat, in the sticks they are fed on prime grains which is pretty much the reason farmers and estate owners want them blown into oblivion. Horsey types also pay good money for rabbit control as the holes screw up their posh donkeys legs.
Sad to think lifes changed so much in a couple of decades, nobody ever used to bat an eyelid if I (or my friends) was roaming about the place in a tractor or a defender at dawn with a bag of shotguns and shells. It was just normal life, now it would likely warrant a manhunt and police helicopters.
When I was proprietor of a failing business, I got by on £2 per week (at today's prices). For two years, between running out of savings and starting to make an income.
If the core nutrition is pulses and value-line pasta (and similar), then extra ingredients that add flavour and goodness - like onions, mushrooms, chillies, green veg - turn it into a tasty meal. And if you use lentils in place of chickpeas, you escape the need for long preparation.
And I'm not even a Yorkshireman.
The recent horsemeat scandal caused a slump in some ready-meal sales at Waitrose - even though they were proved to be ok. Eventually there was no room left in the freezer for any more at the slashed prices. Some of them were on "multiple buy" offers that reduced the cost even further.
I hesitate to ask, but any update or report on what happens at the other end? I imagine that a predominantly pulse-based diet would mean you are able to turn the heating down, admittedly off-set against needing to leave a couple of windows open to create a fairly hefty draft.
Then there's the added expense of having to re-paper the walls.
We'll pretend he went out gathering sticks from the coppices and coal from the beach...
It's an exercise in limitation to motivate minds and wallets, I must motivate mine. Especially guilt-wracked as the cost of the packet of biscuits I bought last night would have paid for Lester to eat for two days....
If you try and find holes in an exercise like this you will find many. This isn't supposed to be somebody parachuting into the mara and having to survive for 2 weeks with only a piece of string, a tampon and a paperclip.
It's supposed to get people thinking and raise awareness. There will always be a huge disparity on peoples experiences of this based on their upbringing and whats around them. Growing up in yorkshire and being tighter than a ducks arse would equip you pretty well experience wise, living in the countryside or by an ocean would hopefully provide you with 'free' food and periods of unemployment would also assist in 'urban' foraging in woops bins. I don't see any harm in this type of exercise. I don't think he believes it's sustainable without further effort, but it's a great eye opener for folks that have always taken waitrose and a full larder for granted.
Dr Gage, the Kilwinning doctor in the latter half of last century, happened to be called to the local poor house where one old lady complained about the quality of the soup. "It's no' biled right. Try this," she said, producing from her pocket a pea. The doctor duly popped it into his mouth and agreed that it was rock hard. "Weel doactor, that's exactly how it came through me this morning." The lady informed him.
*Found previously nicked at http://discuss.glasgowguide.co.uk/lofiversion/index.php/t68-100.html
...having read further, I suppose translations may be required.
"Word reaches us of a squaddie from Kilbirnie in Ayrshire whose
regiment was involved in the push towards Basra in the Iraqi war. En
route they were waved down by an Iraqi lad looking for food and water.
The unit gave him what they could spare, but he still made signs that he
wanted more water for his family. So the Ayrshire corporal scribbled him
a large printed sign to hold up to the next unit that came along.
Which is why the following crew found a lone Arab boy in the middle of
the desert waving a placard which read: "Gie's yer water, ya bawbags."
Not food related, but clearly survival related.
A stalwart lad of the Black Watch marches into the chemist's and produces a French letter, and asks "How much to rrrepair it?"
The apothecary inspects the condom and replies "10p."
"And how much to rrreplace it?"
"15p," replies the apothecary.
"I'll be back," says the lad, collecting the condom and marching out the door.
Several days later the lad returns to the chemist's and produces the condom, saying "The rrregiment voted to rrrepair it."
An impoverished physics-student friend who wanted to save gas when rehydrating/cooking chickpeas came up with the 'brilliant' idea of putting them in a Thermos-flask and filling said flask with boiling water, screwing on the lid then leaving it overnight, the idea being that the peas would stay hotter for longer and without the need for continuous low-level heating.
Alas, he forgot about the hydrational expansion-coefficient of pulses and so needed a new vacuum-flask the following morning.
Just leave some space at the top of the flask. This was a common method for the overnight preparation of dried tares and hemp seeds for use as fishing bait when I was a kid. We only had glass flasks back then but now you can get 'unbreakable' metal ones which should help too.
I know it's more difficult in Spain, because my experience is that the UK has much better supermarkets, but buying a loaf of bread for a euro when you are on a restricted budget, madness.
ASDA will sell you 1.5kg of bread flour for 80p, you can make a sour dough starter and have three loaves for the price of one shop bought one. You just need to add a pinch or two of salt, some water and find somewhere to bake it. Again, in Spain, you should be able to build a clay oven and use spare wood lying around :)
We can't all live by scavenging - and we can't all wear second-hand clothes; there won't be second-hand clothes if no one's buying new.
And we can't all supplement our income by doing next door's washing - as probably somebody famous described most serious or partly serious attempts to devise a real economic utopia on paper.
For the yankies, costco does 25bs of bread flour for about $8 and I think 75lbs? of ap\plain for under $20.
Making your own bread, even with electric costs included can be cheap and no crap thrown in there to make it last forever. 4lbs of dry yeast was about $10. You can even capture your own wild yeast if you fancy saving on that. Beyond that its salt (you can get this for free, just need clean seawater and sunlight)\ sugar (honey's free if you fancy risking taking it) and a little oil or butter is optional. Bread is insanely priced here (normally around $5 a loaf) so making your own makes sense not only for health reasons.
Even in the UK it's worth baking your own bread - it's a third of the price of the shop-bought Chorleywood process predigested pap that passes for bread in the supermarket and an improvement in every meaningful respect.
Lester, I'll sort out something on your fund page when I'm back in the UK next week.
p.s. Soak pulses in boiling water before leaving for work - ten to fifteen minutes in the pressure cooker sorts out the hardest. The salt goes in *after* that, when you add the flavours.
I seem to remember that a diet almost exclusively of chickpeas etc damages the nervous system so maybe not suitable commercial weight loss exploitation though I like the idea. I think these side effects of pulses are only seen in the poor who are eating them to excess, if that is not a contradiction.
Regarding old and hard chickpeas needing longer cooking, that applies to all pulses so this is exactly the wrong time of year to find good quality ones. Your grocer (remember them?) is your friend an will be able to tell you how ancient the pulses are that he is selling at any one time.
Curiously, the older peas are more expensive if you are buying them for poultry feed as they lose more and more water each year they are kept and thus have a higher protein content per kilo. Same principle as salami etc.
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I eat a fair amount of pulses, grains, and beans, and being veggie, they flush through my digestive system smoothly in about 12-18 hours, as the stomach acids aren't "busting a gut" to break them down into energy.. This means that my fartstench index is remarkably low, and only goes up a few notches if I partake of ales.
The foulest farts tend to be due to a combo of sugary lager and junk fried chicken. I once shared an office with someone whose diet consisted entirely of those two items, plus large amounts of high-fructose cola. His inability to fart outside the confines of a small office was matched by his inability to think, work, or wash.. His sacking saved us the effort of digging a shallow grave.
A few weeks back, prior to all this starting, I got annoyed by what Tesco were selling bread for, so I made some in the bread machine and carefully costed the whole lot.
Using a 10kg bag of Atta (chapatti flour) which was substantially less expensive than the 1.5kg bags of bread flour, and costing everything (as I recollect, yeast at 7p), including sticking a wattmeter on the bread machine, the cost of consumables for a 1200g loaf came out at 72p. Admittedly, this didn't allow for the capital cost of the breadmaker.
The result is a really nice well-risen, well-textured loaf which, when I have a couple of thick wedges toasted for breakfast, lasts about 5 days. I've yet to have a failure using Atta, so it would seem that the brands sold in the UK tend to have pretty good gluten levels and the texture comes out well. YMMV.
Let's try that here in the US.... (Note, $1 is worth about 75 eurocents., I get $7.80!)
Loaf of bread -- 99 cents. (Hard to find compared to ~$1.50 bread but it exists.)
--- looking good! Under budget!
Dozen eggs -- 99 cents on sale (usual price $1.50) (National average is $1.92 though!)
--- Hey this isn't looking too bad!
Milk -- $3.00/gallon or about $1.50 a quart (yes, a quart is half the cost instead of a quarter the cost.) National average is $3.43 right now.
-- Hmm....a little over budget perhaps, but not bad.
Kilo of chickpeas -- these are $1.79 a pound -- $4 a kilo.
-- Oh hell.
Kilo of rice -- average now is 0.71 a pound (but not sold in individual pounds, usually at least 2 pounds.) $1.57 a kilo or so
--OK...
100 pack of Lipton "tea" -- $4.89 (1.45 for 30 bags). I'm not tea afficionado but the general bags of tea you find on the shelf here in the states are vile and undrinkable.
-- Whatevs.
Welp, using the lowest prices that puts me at $10.50, and I have not bought bones, onion, garlic, paprika, and herbs yet. I don't think you can just buy bones here anywhere, and herbs? Heh. The big scam recently around here is they stock these tiny tiny spice containers for like $1 or $2 a piece -- did I mention they are tiny? They hold 5 grams. Fresh garlic cloves and onions (whichever type you'd like) are in fact available too, although it might be hard to use the onion up before it turned.
-- No flavor for you.
Of course you're $1.20 in the hole anyway after bread, eggs, milk, chickpeas, and rice so it may not matter.
-- Indeed. Might have to load up on 30 cent Ramen noodles i guess. Just get them at a Chinese grocery store and not the generic "salt flavored" ramens from the normal grocery store. That's some good eating! 8-)
Just to follow the spirit rather than the letter... well, chickpeas ARE in fact as cheap or cheaper (usually MUCH cheaper) than peanuts, or soybeans... almonds of course are right out...i.e. I'm not overlooking some other staple that just happens to be cheaper in the US.