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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

Inside the café was dimly lit, but not in an uninviting run-down way, more of a dusty, characterful way, which was accentuated by the smell of the air: a faint lavender mixed with the woody aroma of espresso. Against one wall was a large blackboard with the day’s specials written in Norwegian in thick white letters. In smaller letters underneath the dishes all had translations into English. For several of the dishes, such as ‘hamburger’ or the Italian pastas and pizzas, the translations were exactly the same as the original. Whoever wrote the menu might have been accused of redundancy, but with the general atmosphere of the place it came across more as a gentle sarcasm, particularly with this café being atypically situated on the dockside amongst the touristy restaurants and of the kind Aria seemed to have a knack for finding.

(more…)