Back on 'normal' food after a week eating below the line

We kept our calculators to hand as we wandered the aisles of Tesco and Sainsbury's looking for five days' worth of food for two for £10 as part of our experiment in living below the line. We much prefer Sainsbury's normally, but were passing both so took advantage of the slight differences in their ranges - when you're watching every penny, you notice when one has a slightly bigger pack, pushing it beyond our budget. As we happened to be in Tesco first, most things that were priced the same came from there but I'm sure the Sainsbury's ones would have been just as good. We'd largely planned our purchases in advance - I don't think we'd have had a chance of sticking to the tenner otherwise.


This was our final tally of purchases, excluding potatoes (as we had an unopened 2.5kg bag in the pantry - we charged ourselves the Sainsbury's basics price of 97p) and salt (we charged ourselves 10p for a box in the pantry that had cost no more than that at Lidl).


You'll see lots of scribbles on the Sainsbury's receipt....


As luck would have it on a day when ever penny counted, something must have been sitting on the scales as our carrot (singular!), three mushrooms and extra onion each weighed 60g too much. Normally, we wouldn't even have noticed but that 27p was a vital part of our budget! We charged ourselves what they should have cost - our scales agreed exactly with Tesco's where we'd bought the other onions.


We contacted Sainsbury's in case the scales had a fault and got into a very friendly discussion with their customer services, who had the store's scales checked. We concluded that someone had perhaps left something like a pad of vouchers the scales. And Sainsbury's did reimburse us to our Nectar card, though we said they needn't have bothered.

The total came to £10.11 after adjusting for the overweighing, so we had to put an onion back in the pantry to bring it to under £10!

It was quite amusing in Tesco's when the checkout assistant began to give us a schools voucher - only to realise that our two big bags of food came to less than £8 and so we were some way off being eligible. This gave us the opportunity to explain the initiative to her too.

Breakfast each day was toast with marmalade (no spare budget for marg or butter but the marmalade was, at 27p, one of the outstanding bargains) plus 47p-a-jar coffee (we'd just got used to having an espresso machine so this was a particular ordeal!) with UHT milk (cheaper than proper milk).


Lunch was homemade bread (value flour didn't make great bread but it was edible) with an outstanding bargain - Tesco's sliced mild cheddar, 10 slices (240g) for 59p. Not a great deal of flavour but pleasant tasting and far cheaper than any other cheese available. It went well with the sweet pickle (great for 24p).


A bottle of orange squash for less than 30p proved very welcome and homemade potato soup rounded off some meals.

The five evening meals were:
- chili made with Sainsbury's basics mince plus baked beans, corn and onion and served with jacket potatoes. The investment in a bottle of chili sauce made this perfectly acceptable - his favourite meal of the week and my second.


- potato and pea curry, made with Sainsbury's 9p-a-jar curry sauce and served with rice. OK - the sauce was pleasant enough but the curry would have benefitted from more onions and no peas.


- meat and potato bake - mince cooked in 18p-a-jar pasta sauce, with the addition of some of our limited supply of veg; then baked in the oven with layers of thinly sliced potatoes. This was very tasty - my favourite meal of the week.


- 'rice and beans' - something we make regularly anyway - rice and kidney beans in a savoury sauce of passata and stock. It had onion and half our can of sweetcorn in it too, plus peas. Quite nice, if possibly less flavoursome than normal.


- pizza - almost to our regular recipe but we'd normally add olive oil to the dough and passata mix, and would have had more interesting toppings than the three mushrooms, half an onion and scattering of leftover mince. It was perfectly edible but rather reminiscent of cheap frozen pizza - strong bread flour and the oil really do make a difference.


The flour did do well in making some snacks - little dough balls flavoured with chili sauce, salt and chives ('foraged' from the garden)


and strips a bit like pitta, flavoured with the chili sauce. These in particular were rather good.


Had we continued for a second week, we'd have been a little better off, as we had a few things left over - yeast, chili sauce, coffee, salt, rice. That would have freed up just over £2, which would have been a great help.


I'm sure that we'll revisit some of the lessons learnt from the week in a similar - if less draconian exercise - in a future week. Of course it's a somewhat artificial exercise to do in a kitchen with a well-stocked pantry that would become available again five days later, but it did at least make us think.

You can sign up at Live below the Line and have a go yourself, choosing a charity to support. The site is primarily geared to encouraging people to seek sponsorship but you can just give a donation.

The extravagance of normal living was brought home on Saturday, the day after we finished, when we were out for the afternoon in Greenwich. Lunch and a soft drink each came to £19 for two, then a couple of pints in a pub came to £8 - equating to more than a week's food money just for the drinks.