Day 2 of Live Below the Line

BREAKFAST: Boiled egg
on toast and a cup of tea 16p

Ringing the changes, we had a boiled egg on toast each for
breakfast, washed down with more value tea bags with a dash of UHT simmed milk. 

No ketchup, no salt and pepper, no butter. I’m getting all wistful
about condiments again. 

Now you see it, now you don’t…

Maybe better to mourn condiments than consider the
living conditions of the Iceland chickens providing eggs at £1.25 for a box of
12. 

I scarfed mine so quickly I forgot to take a photo (plate on
left) so here’s a reconstruction with a stunt egg and stand in bread.

Ooh floorboards. A career in food photography awaits

LUNCH: Chickpea and potato
curry with rice 22p

Second portion of yesterday’s chickpea and potato curry with
value rice.  

Still warm, still filling, still
unconvinced by tinned potatoes but tastier than I had expected.

SNACK: Pea, bacon and
cauliflower soup with a slice of bread 14p

Tasted better than it looks, honest

In true “here’s one I prepared earlier” style, I cooked some
pea, bacon and cauliflower soup on Sunday night ready for my husband to take to work on Day 2 and eat with another slice of bread. 

The breadline budget means that my husband has
to take packed lunches every day, rather than eating at the work canteen, and I
have to be organised enough to deliver a packed lunch before 7.15am in the
morning.  

I was trying to riff on the theme of thick, delicious pea
and ham soup.

However, my Live Below the Line version involved 60g of the cooking
bacon, padded out with  cauliflower from the bag of frozen mixed
veg, as I wanted to save some of the peas for a risotto later in the week. 

I added
a litre of stock along with half an onion and a clove of garlic, but then only
boiled the veg for 5 minutes to avoid disintegration, so it ended up more
watery than I’d hoped. 

Still, it tasted OK and helped me avoid hoovering up the
crusts from my son’s ham sandwich.

DINNER: Bacon,
mushroom and tomato pasta 46p

Value bacon in starring role

Bacon always raises morale in my household, so when I
discovered I could get a variant of bacon for only 81p it seemed worth a punt. 

This is my version of bacon, mushroom and tomato pasta, and something we’ve
eaten in the past, even if with fancier bacon.

The Live Below the Line tweaks were that I used spaghetti
(only 19p a pack) compared to penne (30p a pack), bunged in yet more frozen
carrot cubes from the mixed veg bag to bulk it out, rather than the grated
carrot I’d normally use and couldn’t add any of the magic ingredient aka wine. 

I chopped up 150g of the thicker bits of bacon from the
packet and fried it in a bit of veg stock with onion, garlic, mushrooms. Then
added most of the tin of chopped tomatoes, carrot and some veg stock, and
simmered for as long as it took the spaghetti to cook.  

I boiled up 200g raw spaghetti for the two of us, which is
quite a lot, and had intended the pasta sauce to cover three portions. In the
end, we both felt pretty hungry and devoured it all in one meal. Boy,
did it taste strongly of bacon, but again it was warm and filling.

Otherwise, my husband came home craving gin and stilton and missed
parmesan on the pasta.

I skipped a slice of jam on toast, hoarding bread to have
with the omelette planned for tomorrow as well as soup and snacks on other
days.

I felt extremely virtuous handing Mr Pog (aged 3) a sausage roll in
the morning and a reward croissant in the afternoon, and not filching any of it
at all. Very unsure how long that will last.

Day 2 Total:
98p per person

To donate to Unicef at Live Below the Line, the
global poverty project, click here:

www.livebelowtheline.com/me/muchmorewithless