living on fresh air... Updated

Well not quite "living on fresh air..." but very near to it.This bastard government of ours are being true to their colours in that the majority are Tories and are giving tax cuts to the rich and screwing over the rest of us. Anyway, no more ranting for now. The title of this post is what I expect a lot of people are now having to do such as eat or heat where people are so poor that they have to choose whether to eat food or heat their home which to be honest in thew 21st century in the 4th richest country in the world is quite frankly absolutely disgusting but then when will the Tory led government think about the poor when all of the cabinet members including the Lib Dem ones are all millionaires!!
Anyway, I digress once more.
We only have £100 per month to feed two of us which sounds a lot but for that £100 I will need to provide 186 meals at an average cost of less than 54p per meal. This is 3 meals a day for 2 people for 31 days in the month.
Now we tend to eat porridge most mornings so my first thoughts were we could pinch a bit of money from Breakfast so just out of interest here is the breakdown for a breakfast meal.
I use water and Dried milk for porridge and i buy a 340g tub of dried milk powder  from Aldi at a cost of £1.84.This tub will make 5.96 pints of milk or 3385mils of milk and each serving of porridge uses 275mls of milk and 40g of oats.
Therefore so far the cost is thus:
Porridge oats 1 kg box £2.18 Each serving is 40g so....
Oats cost 8.72p.
Milk is 12.31p.
Sweetener is 4.15p per teaspoon.
So the total cost excluding the cost of the water and the gas to cook it is 25.18p per serving. If we both have porridge oats for breakfast every day the cost per month is £15.62.
We generally have sandwiches for lunch so an average egg mayo sarnie is 3 organic home produced eggs at a cost of 51p plus 8p for Asda smart price mayonnaise. I like to add the juice of a 1/2 a lemon at a cost of 17p per half a lemon. I make bread every day and tend to use James Martin bagged flours at £2.15 per packet. To this you need to add 3 Tbs of olive oil at  a cost of 46p
So if we were to have egg mayo sarnies every day, using half a packet of bread the cost would be £1.04 per day per serving or £64.48 per month. 
Thus the cost of Breakfast and lunch would be £80.10 which doesn't leave much for the evening meal for both of us.
Sometimes we have Tuna mayo sarnies for lunch and toast or cereals for breakfast. I like to try and cook a decent meal for each evening, Monday to Friday as my wife works hard and looks forward to her tea.
For evening meals I try to use meat of some description around 3 times per week. If I were to neck one of the chickens then that could be classed as free but maybe it shouldn't be as we have to feed it and we lose the egg machine. After all we have a cost per egg of 17 p each.

The other two nights of the week are vegetable nights or curries so I can use cheap cuts of meat or scraps of chicken etc.

If we have a joint of pork for one evening meal then it will make sarnies for the next day, a second evening meal and possibly a second round of sarnies depending on the size of the joint.

Cheap cuts of beef like shin, rump or tail can easily be made into scrumptiousus dishes if cooked long and slow in a rich gravy.
We bulk up on vegetables and as such we have maybe 5 or 7 different veg each evening meal. We don't have sugar and salt for dietary concerns but we do use White and Black Pepper and also use fennel seeds in the black pepper grinder. We try to grow fruit and veg in our garden and as such this keeps our food bill down. Last year we were able to grow about 60% of our fruit and veg and we were able to spend £255 a month on shop bought food. I am not looking forward to this £100 challenge but this blog will keep us up to date on the following month starting on the 1st of February and i hope that this will give you some ideas on how to eek out some of your money that you need to spend on food.

  I was  going to start on the 1st of Feb but have brought that forward to  start today. the 29th of January.

Breakfast. 
Home made bread toasted. 28p for 2 people.
Dinner will be ham sarnie with home made bread. Will price later 80p each, £1.60 for 2.
Tea will be a large bagette each filled with some bacon, mushrooms, onions, blue cheeseand topped with roasted sweet peppers. The total cost for this was £1.32 per portion.
Tea drinks throughout the day limited to 5 ( which is an abismal amount to drink) This cost 8.86p per cup which equastes to 5 for me and 3 for my wife  =  71p per day.
Also 3 ltrs of water and sugar free juice. Cost 25p or 50p for the two of us.

Cost running total so far is £5.73. If we carry on like this then our monthly food budget would be £177.33 which we don't have so it will be some veg soup for a couple of meals.

Having said that veg soup can be amazing if made properly. If you have some parmasan cheese then when you get to the rind a lot of people throw this away. Instead what I do is put them in a plastic bag and freeze them. When I am making some soup I put a couple of these rinds into the soup and it really lifts the flavour to another level. 

30th of January
Porridge with some dried fruit on top. 27.2p per serving so that is 54.4p 
Dinner veg soup and crusty home made bun 38.6 p per portion. 77.2p 
Evening meal. Some fresh salmon out of the freezer  that was bought for Christmas but not used. It was on a yellow whoopsie label for 25p.
Some sheets of filo pastry and 1 egg. 40p + 17 p for the egg.
Califlower and broccoli cheese bake 86p per portion. £1.76 for two of us
Tea to drink and juice both as above 71p + 50p. 

Total for today is £5.10 Running total is 10.83  Based on prices so far our month;y bill would be £167.87 so it is coming down. Our daily average food bill needs to be around £3.24 for the two of us. 

31st of January.       

Porridge again but today we only had one bowl between us. We got up late and buy the time we settled down we only had half rations as they say. It will be interesting to see if we are more hungry than yesterday. 
Tonight I'm planning to use the rest of the cali and broccoli bake, some butter and orange carrots, peas and roast potatoes. I will also make some more fresh mixed seed bread 

Breakfast 25.18p 
Lunch. Home made pizza 33p per portion 66p in total.
 The cali bake is £1.76p
The carrots, peas and potatoes are all out of the garden so these will only have cost pennies to produce as my garden is organic and run on a permiculture basis.

Total for today is £2.77 Running total is 13.60  Based on prices so far our month;y bill would be £140.55 so it is coming down.

  1st Of February.

Started this month off with a nice big fat Bacon Sarnie with a pack of asda smart price back bacon and some home made bread from yesterday with 4 cups of tea between us.
 £1.40 +  35.44p for the tea. 
 Total cost  for breakfast £1.76