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.

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.

After studying briefly the menu, fortunately with more decisiveness than she had shown initially in the clothes store, Aria ordered a Caesar salad. I ordered a cheeseburger. We received an odd look from the woman behind the desk when we told her we would sit outside, but she said nothing and went away to get our food ready. We exited the café and took a seat at one of the elegantly welded metal chairs, Aria making sure she could see the ship she had indicated before. With her elbow on the table and the backs of her fingers curled against her lips, she stared out and seemed to become lost deep in thought.

“Are you nervous?” I asked, breaking the local silence that extended as far as some people walking by on the cobbled street, some fishermen shouting to each other from their rusty boats and the wind whistling gently through signs, through loose bits of wire, through the clothes people wore, and across the calm surface of the ocean.