Four days into my week of cheap food, I’m starting to run out of ideas and am left with little more than rice, pasta, potatoes and eggs, apart from the leftovers of the cheap curry from a couple of nights ago. So I thought, maybe some sort of omelette with a side of potatoes? Before embarking on this I typed ‘potatoes and eggs’ into google, which lead me here. Apparently, you can combine the two; it’s called a Spanish omelette.

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I had the second of my cheap meals yesterday as part of this exciting ‘living on ten pounds for a week’ blogging venture, and it actually wasn’t that bad, at least in comparison to the previous night’s pasta. It was a chicken curry with sauce analogous to the curry sauce you get in chip shops, only with sultanas. It reminded me a lot of something similar we used to have for school dinner at primary school sometimes, back when they were like proper old-fashioned school dinners in metal trays on proper plates, before the school changed catering contractors and started serving turkey drummers on plastic trays.

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I ate last night the first of my cheap meals, Penne pasta with Sainsbury’s Basics Pasta Sauce. I added mushrooms and cheese for a little more flavour and protein. Unfortunately the attempt proved futile: that was possibly the worst meal I have had in my life. Worse than flavourlessly bland, it had a lingering cloying flavour that only faintly evoked either tomato or basil, the two primary ingredients of many such sauces. I began to wonder if the sauce had ever seen a tomato, much less been graced with the inclusion of one.

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Yesterday, Sunday, instilled with a sense of boyish novelty and studentish irony, I set out with my housemate Luke McNeil to Sainsbury’s, single ten-pound-note folded expectantly in my wallet. Owing to a lack of organisation, we arrived at the shop twenty-five minutes before closing-time and were obliged to rush our shopping more than I would have liked, denying me the opportunity to stand and pedantically weigh up the benefits of each product over another.

Still, I loaded up my basket with white-and-orange labels, finding particular amusement in the 7 pence jar of ‘curry sauce’ and the 45 pence tin of baked beans and ‘sausages’. Meanwhile, Luke filled his basket with items from the Taste the Difference Range, abstaining from any packaging that sported less than ten adjectives below its name, as if as a counterpoint to my thrifty food procuration.

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I worked out other day that after I’ve paid my rent for the next two months, with the money I have left over from my student loan and if I don’t get a job, withdraw from my savings, scrounge money from my parents or come by funds some other way, I would have about £10 per week to live on.

I’m sure I’ll be fine for money, if it gets dire I can always go back home for a few weeks and eat all the food there until September and the next installment of my student loan (which, thinking about it, I should probably sort out), and I’m still optimistic of getting a job, ideally making money blogging but otherwise in a shop somewhere.

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