Well, I got bored of reading the recipe, and decided I could go forth and forge something edible. So I chopped up a couple of large potatoes and began to fry them (keeping them moving so they wouldn’t stick, as I was informed to do). Once they were all brown and nice, I threw in some sliced mushrooms, mushrooms being the kind of cheap ingredient you should always have to hand, and then two eggs.

Oh, I also poured in what was left of my Basics Herb Mix following the copious amounts I used to make the pasta sauce edible. Finally, I threw in some cheese for extra flavour. Then I was worried there mightn’t be enough food in the pan, so I fried some bread as an extra.

Well, for a recipe I’d never tried before, it worked well. It actually looked pretty appetising, and, since it had both protein and carbohydrates, was a fairly well-balanced meal. Admittedly, it could have used some bacon or some ham or something just to add a little more flavour, maybe even onions or something, but it was still tasty, and it was what I would call ‘good food’, which is a term I have a little difficultly qualifying. By it, I mean food that you can shovel down and it fills you up, like stew or curry or egg-fried rice or fish-shop chips; food that doesn’t assault you with flavour or require fiddly manipulation like steak or peas, but just warms you from the inside and leaves you feeling full.

So I’m thinking, I’m going at add this ‘Spanish Scrambled Eggs’ to my roster of meals, particularly as it’s also pretty cheap. Let’s see… about 30p for the two eggs, 10p worth of mushrooms and maybe 15p of cheese, and about another 15p worth of potatoes, this might even be the cheapest meal yet, and possibly the tastiest this week. If only my luncheon had been as successful: that consisted of Basics 45p Baked Beans and Sausages. They didn’t taste too bad while I was eating them, but afterwards they leave your teeth feeling sort of coated, while you just feel dirty.

The curry I had just tasted of generic mild curry, with a better flavour than the sauce’s 7 pence price tag would have suggested. As for the chicken, which was again of the budget variety that didn’t taste any different from any other packaged chicken breast once it was cut up and cooked. I also threw in a Basics Naan bread, which made it basically like a proper curry only cheaper.

Apart from that there’s not a lot I can say about the curry: I can’t berate
it like the pasta sauce, and neither can I commend it on any outstanding qualities, except the price: I’m reckoning that the curry I made is about three portions, so that works out at about £1.07 per portion.

That breaks down as:

7p for the sauce

£2.39 for the chicken

59p for the Naan breads

about 30p worth of rice

So anyone needing to save money on food, a cheap curry is a fairly viable proposition.

It’s beginning to look like I’m going to be eating this curry at least twice more this week and not a lot else: it’s possibly a little harder than I imagined to live on £10 for a week, since the curry and the pasta were my two main planned meals, and all I seem left with is an amount of pasta, potatoes, rice, cheese and eggs, which will most likely lead to some rather bland meals without supplement.

I have been helped along however since my housemate came back from work at the Co-op on Monday with a bag of about fifteen or twenty packets of out-of-date ‘Rainbow Cookies’. Looking at the amount of E-numbers in them, I can see why they didn’t sell, but, hey, they’re free, so we’re all eating them.

As it turned out, the sauce barely had: while it is composed of 50% tomato puree, of actual tomatoes it is only 6%, and then I suspect they were hardly the pick of the crop. And then there was the texture of the source: gelatinous like Chinese takeaway sweet-and-sour after its gone cold, only without the MSG that makes that so guiltily delicious.

Combined, the flavour at the texture overwhelmed even the fresh mushrooms and the copious amounts of cheese. I had to add nearly half a tube of Sainsbury’s Basics Herb Mix just to make the meal bearable, and by that I do mean bearable, not palatable. And despite forcing down the whole lot, I still feel an emptiness in my stomach, almost a hollowness as of broken promises.

Consequently, I would not recommend Basic Pasta sauce to anyone, and who would buy it more than once remains a mystery to me. Then again, perhaps the whole sale of it is built around customers purchasing a single jar out of curiosity. I will however, at some point post a recipe for a cheap and good pasta sauce, which I may or may not have developed myself (this will be a part of my new types of features where I pass on the few things I have learned in life to anyone willing to read).

As a side note, the Basics ‘Biscuit Selection’ seems a far better proposition. I’ve only partaken of the Nice biscuits so far. Not only is there an appreciable quantity of them in the packet, they’re actually not bad. My housemate’s comment on that was that “they’re biscuits, how could you mess biscuits up?” Well, it can be done, it’s entirely possible, but these are not such a biscuit.

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.

My single extravagance was the £2.39 packet of chicken pieces for the curry sauce, the 52 pence biscuit selection naturally being a necessity. Consequently, my food-supply for the next seven days will consist of the following:

The cost of all this was £8.01. With the £1 I docked for using some stuff I already have, that leaves me with 99 pence until next Sunday. Now I would consider myself quite frugal in my shopping, but my usual weekly shop at Sainsbury’s is almost twice that, and then I often ‘top-up’ during the week with one or two things from Tesco.

Still, I don’t think this little experiment should pose much of a challenge to me, unless all the food is truly, inedibly awful. And I must confess, I’m already quite used to the 10p noodles, a fan even: they taste fine, they take two minutes to prepare and they’re cheap carbohydrates. Providing the novelty doesn’t wear off, this semi-self-enforced poverty for a week should be a breeze, which is fortunate because I did order a new computer yesterday as well, my grandmother having graciously offered to front the money for it.

I’ll be sure to keep you all posted on what are sure to be the riveting developments in this saga of low-cost survival, omitting for the benefit of conciseness the meals, such as the chicken curry, that span multiple days.

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.

But still, I thought, why not see what it’s like living on £10 for a week? After all, isn’t that what bloggers do: pointless personal, subjective experiments that they can then go type up to the internet masses with the assumption that anyone would care to read about them. I hear that Steve Pavlina makes a tidy sum that way.

So, though it’s been done before, probably in a less ironically irreverent way, I shall attempt, and blog about, living for a single week on ten pounds sterling, which mightn’t be too hard, or might be really restrictive.

There are rules of course to this ‘experiment’: Although I’m going to not spend more than £10 for seven days, I am allowed to use some things I already have: not the half-bottle of Jack Daniel’s in my room, nor the frozen BBQ chicken pizza in my freezer, nor the bag of deliciously addictive chocolate raisins I keep, but the small piece of cheese and the orange juice that I don’t want to waste, the tea I have in my cupboard and the toiletries in the bathroom. Also, the potatoes and the rice and the pasta I have, since these things are cheap anyway and it would be senseless to buy more.

However, for the ‘privilege’ of using these pre-acquired items, I am removing a pound from my stock, bringing me down to £9 for everything else I need.

So, the ‘experiment’ begins.