Friday 2 May 2014

The end of the line

So, my week of living below the line has finally come to an end. It's been a tough week, but I'm really pleased I did it. It's made me appreciate once again, how much we take for granted, and the physical and mental side-effects of living off an extremely low budget diet.

So what did I have for my first meal after LBTL? Well it was at a motorway service station so there wasn't a huge amount of choice. M&S had also run out of lemon.cheesecake which I was quite sad about. But here it is....


And...


It tastes good - but cost more than the last five days worth of food put together. Which really makes you stop and think. 

Thank you to everyone who's sponsored me and the Hullion through the challenge - it's really made a huge difference and kept us going through the tough times! And I'll probably be back next year, with a different shop and different meals - by all for the same £1 a day budget.

Live Below the Line - snack attack!

I feel like I have spent pretty much all my non-working, waking hours this week cooking! That's the thing when you only have a £1 a day - it doesn't just have to cover 3 meals a day, but all your snacks in between. I'm used to cooking my breakfasts, lunches and dinners, but tend to rely on fruit, dried fruit/nuts and cereal bars for snacks. Not this week...

In addition, despite eating monster portions at meals, they just haven't been keeping me full for long enough, so snacks have been vital to try and keep me going.

So, here are some of the snacks I've been having this week:


First up, lemon biscuits. Well, kind of biscuits...really noticed the lack of butter and sugar in these. They were quite nice fresh out of the oven, but not so great a few days later.


I made some split pea dip out of leftover dahl on Tuesday (extra ginger and some olive oil) which was delicious. The salt crackers were ok, but not quite crunchy enough (poor bake!). The second batch I baked on Wednesday were much better and helped get my salt intake up a bit.


These may be the winner! After I had my windfall of bananas on Wednesday night, I then needed to work out how to use all the battered bananas....the answer - banana cakes! With a heavily adapted recipe as had no baking powder, sugar or much fat. But I bunged some lemon curd in and they didn't turn out too bad - a nice treat to end the week.