How Cheap Can I Eat?

In the last couple of days I’ve had a load of really great suggestions for eating cheaply and healthily using basic ingredients. A lot of it is news to me but I’ll be putting it to good use next week.

In the meantime I haven’t been shopping and I’m draining what little remains of the food in the house. By the time July 1st rolls around I’m going to be near-starving and desperate for something, anything, to eat. I’m looking forward to my first shop

I find myself in a unique position, my girlfriend has moved out, and for the first time in years I am the master of my own nutrition. I am a bad man who, prior to now, have had the majority of my meals cooked for me, and so I’ve never had to think too hard about what and how much food to buy as long as there was enough for two.

More interestingly, and with my blessing, the girlfriend has taken most of the contents of the larder, on the grounds that she was more likely to eat it than I was.

I have been left with a larder that looks like this:

A fridge that looks like this:

And a freezer that looks like this:

I have no food. A mixed collection of random seasonings, odd half-used pots and other odds and ends, but nothing here that makes a meal. This seems like a great opportunity to see just how cheaply one man by himself can eat for one month.

I’ll set myself some basic rules:

1. I’m allowed to eat anything I’ve currently got in my cupboards as part of my meals without it being included in my monetary total. Don’t worry, there isn’t much.
2. Other grocery shopping isn’t included in any money totals. This blog is all about the cost of food. I’m not buying ‘Tesco Value’ shower gel or ‘Sainsburys Basics’ Arse Scratching Loo roll. Some standards must be maintained.
3. If someone else buys me food or otherwise feeds me, I will give an estimation of what it has cost and add it to my total. In other words I can’t cheat by scrounging off my mates all month, which is just as well because I doubt I’d get more than one meal out of any of them, the miserly shits.
4. I must have variation. This means I can’t buy 30 x 9p tins of beans for £2.70 and eat that for 2 weeks. Bleugh. I’ll have to get creative to avoid eating the same meals over and over.

We start on July 1st, I hope you’ll follow my progress and offer me advice on how to prepare and eat cheap meals with maximum nourishment. My target for the month is anything less than about £75, which will give me about £2.40 a day to spend on lovely food and seems more than achievable on paper.