Movie Posters: Seven Salami

Rather than come up with a whole blog post to entertain you today, I've prepared an elaborate movie poster parody based upon a bad pun. Here is the classic Japanese movie Seven Salami:

Thriftuary (Part 5)

This is it!  What you've all be waiting for: the grand finale of Thriftuary. Today, all your questions will be answered*.

It actually ended a couple of days ago, but I thought I would hold off 'til the weekend to get some lovely graphs and statistics ready for you.  Graphs and statistics are ace.

Lets start by getting the spending chart out of the way:

Ahh. Lovely.

As you can see, I spent considerably less than our Ben over the month. £38.09 less, in fact. That's almost a 30% difference.

So what went wrong?

Pizza.  That's what went wrong.  Pizza and then curry.

For anyone planning to subsist on a tiny budget, here's a hint: don't go to Pizza Hut! While you gobble up their lovely pizza, they'll be gobbling up your lovely money! In all fairness, Ben and his missus did go for a relatively cheap pizza - the whole meal only came to £13.  I expect it was the nasty pizza at the bottom of the menu that only students order because it's made with questionable cheese and pubic hair!  Yum.

You can tell by the shape of his cumulative line that he lost quite a lot of enthusiasm for Thriftuary around about Pizza Day.  Even with those two huge spikes though, he still came out at an average daily spend of £4.85, for two people which I think is pretty good!

Enough about Ben, anyway. This blog is my vanity project, not his. How did I get on in Thriftuary? Here are some bullet points:

• Total monthly spend for two people: £97.69
• Average daily spend for two people: £3.48
• Most expensive day: £6.69 (We had a joint of pork!)
• Cheapest day: 0.63 (Hooray for edible Christmas Presents!)
• Cheapest day what didn't involve edible gifts: £1.39 (Pancakes for the win!)

Yesterday, by sheer coincidence, I read that Labour MP Helen Goodman decided to spend a week living on a food budget of £18 in order to protest about how the bedroom tax wasn't going to leave her constituents with enough to live on.  You can read about it here and see her video diaries here.

At the end of the week, she had only a small swede and a can of kidney beans with which to construct a sumptuous meal! In an article here, she is quoted as saying "I had to eat the same food over and over and over again. [...] I made a stew at the beginning of the week, and I ate the same food four nights a week [...] It was completely impossible to have meat or fish; that was out of the question [...] I found myself waking up in the middle of the night absolutely ravenous, having to make cups of tea and eat biscuits. I had a headache for five days in that week, and I was completely lethargic and exhausted by 4 pm."

While her protest was an interesting and well meaning stunt that doesn't seem to be getting the media attention it deserves, I suspect her problems were due more to bad planning and too many midnight biscuits than her budget. After all, I was living on £12.21 a week for a month and had varied meals.  Yes, I was kinda hungry for a lot of it, but not even remotely ravenous, despite my intermittent complaining.

But we had plenty of vegetables and it was very possible to have meat, although I would not recommend they very cheapest frozen mince - I found myself hoping that the news would declare that it contained horse  as that would mean that there was, at least, some meat in it! I soon started cutting it with slightly meatier meat.  My final food list is at the bottom of this post.

Now for some additional bits and bobs.  Dr K very kindly did a few sums for me using a calorie counting app on her ipad.  This gave an approximate calorie count for each day:

• I ate an average of 1382 calories a day. This is a fair bit below the average recommended intake for a big, hairy man like me, but as I am fairly sedentary, it didn't cause any problems.  In fact it had a somewhat predictable and beneficial side effect, which I'll get to in a moment.
• Highest day's calories: 1909
• Lowest day's calories: 805

Of course, all those calories I wasn't eating caused a bit of of weight loss.  Now, instead of being very fat, I'm just quite fat.

• Weight at start: 113.1kg (17st 8lbs)
• Weight at end: 106.95kg (16st 8lbs)
• Total weight loss: 6.15kg (1st)

So that's nice.  Here's another chart with calories and weight and shit** on it:

I gave blood on the final day of Thriftuary. I was actually a little bit worried, because I'd been under-eating for  a month and wondered if this would have any effect on my iron count or my ability to stand up afterwards. It did not. I did, however get some free biscuits, with which I was very pleased. I'm not sure how much a pint of blood weighs, but I'm guessing it didn't make a significant difference to my final weigh in as I was pretty much the same weight this morning.

A final set of bullet points, because bullet points are cool, mostly because they have the word 'bullet' in their name:

• Best purchase: £3.80 for a piece of beef skirt that made two very tasty stews. I initially pooh poohed Dr K for coming home with this, but as always she was right and I looked like a fool.
• Second best purchase: Cooking bacon. 81p for shit loads of bacony goodness!
• Tastiest dinner: Liver, bacon and onions. So cheap and so tasty.
• Nastiest dinner: Chilli made with cheap frozen mince. Even making it bastard hot didn't mask the greasy, horrible taste of Soylent Green made from chavs.

So the conclusion to all of this nonsense is that it seems to be perfectly possible for two people to live on £25 a week. Although we were generally under-eating, I suspect better planning and a bit more experience would fix that.

To celebrate the end of Thriftuary, Dr K and I went to Nando's on March 1st. One meal Nando's cost an entire week's food in Thriftuary. It would have made me pause for though if I hadn't been shovelling hot chicken wings into my mouth as fast and as greedily as I could!

Here's my food list for the final few days of Thriftuary.

25/02/13	7x tea	0.21	2.06
	2 weetabix	0.08
	100 ml milk	0.06
	1 can of sardines	0.47
	10 almonds	0.11
	2 banana cookies	0.18
	Tin of beans	0.25
	Leftover lasagne	0
	slice of Victoria sponge (office cake)	0
	2 yoghurts	0.5
	1 apple	0.20
26/02/2013	2 slices bread	0.04	4.46
	27g cheese	0.13
	Ready salted hula hoops	0.11
	1 small apple	0.20
	2x weetabix	0.08
	100ml milk	0.06
	8xtea	0.24
	Avocado	0.37
	10 almonds	0.11
	2 Finn crispbreads	0.12
	30g cream cheese	0.12
	150ml milk	0.09
	1/3 pack liver	0.71
	150g cooking bacon	0.23
	1/3 bag spring greens	0.33
	1/3 bag green beans	0.33
	100g sprouts	0.20
	379g spuds	0.31
	2 small onions	0.16
	16g gravy granules	0.04
	Knob of butter	0.05
	1x yoghurt	0.25
	2x banana cookies	0.18
27/02/13	2x weetabix	0.08	3.92
	100ml milk	0.06
	4x tea	0.12
	2 slices bread	0.04
	1 apple	0.20
	1 bag hula hoops	0.11
	11g 'meat' paste	0.05
	246g beef skirt	1.72
	Leftover liver & bacon	0.00
	16g gravy granules	0.04
	100g sprouts	0.20
	2 small onions	0.16
	161 g carrots	0.16
	154g spud	0.36
	1 tin tomatoes	0.31
	1tsp chilli powder	0.02
	1 tsp oregano	0.04
	1 yoghurt	0.25
	4x free hotel biscuits	0.00
	Buffet food	0.00
28/2/2013	2 weetabix	0.08	2.04
	100ml milk	0.06
	2 slices bread	0.04
	1 apple	0.20
	1 bag hula hoops	0.11
	11g 'meat' paste	0.05
	Avocado	0.37
	10 almonds	0.11
	2 Finn crispbreads	0.12
	30g cream cheese	0.12
	6 teas	0.18
	100g sprouts	0.20
	1 tin tomatoes	0.31
	Yesterday's stew.	0.00
	Banana cookie	0.09
	2 lotus biscuits from blood van	0.00
	Handful of chocolate buttons from Hannah.	0.00
	2free lemon curd biscuits	0.00

* By 'all' I actually mean few. Or none.
** Not actual shit... just lines and stuff.

Thriftuary (Part Four)

Here we are again.

It's that time of the week when I update you on the latest exciting goings on in the Thriftuary challenge.  Once again, I'm in the lead, thanks to a couple of meals paid for on expenses when I visited London for a couple of days for work.

Here are some handy tips:

1. Pick a hotel with an all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet.  It's all about quantity, not quality. A mountain of dead pig and aborted chicken will go a long way to alleviating your hunger later in the day. Also it's delicious.
   
   
2. The average suit can hold approximately four muffins from aforementioned breakfast buffet. These will make an excellent pudding later on!
   
   
3. Your workmate's handbag is also an excellent place to hide food. You never know when you're going to need a low fat strawberry yogurt, so you may as well be prepared.

Poor old Ben was unlucky when his planned overnight stay in London fell through. That meant that he had to pay for the curry he'd agreed to join us on, which accounts for one of the two enormous spikes in his spending. The other is a sordid tale of intrigue, betrayal, revenge, revolution and... Pizza Hut. Mostly Pizza Hut.

No pizza for me though.  Well, actually, there was a pizza, but it came from the freezer and I shared it with Dr K. They were 3 for £4, which is slightly cheaper than Pizza Hut.

I have declined several free meals this week, including one that both my boss and my boss' boss wanted to pay for when we went to a local cafe. I sat there drinking a cup of tea (which I did let them pay for), while everyone around me scoffed fry-ups and lasagne and chicken wings. There was a brief moment when I seriously considered murdering them all with a fork and stealing their lunch. And then possibly eating them as well.

In other news, Dr K and I may be suffering from  some sort of nutritional deficiency as we seem to have developed signs of a minor case of scurvy.  Here's a picture:

What's that? You want to see my food list for the week? You want to scrutinise it and pick holes in my terrible diet? Sure, go ahead:

18/2/2013	3 Finn crispbread	0.18	2.38
	30g cream cheese	0.12
	10 almonds	0.11
	7x cups of tea	0.21
	2 pears	0.42
	2 value weetabix	0.08
	100ml milk	0.06
	Last night's pork	0.00
	1 small carrot	0.05
	4 leaves of spring greens	0.10
	3 value wraps	0.30
	1 value pitta	0.10
	1/2 teaspoon of cumin	0.02
	1/2 teaspoon of chilli powder	0.02
	1/2 teaspoon of turmeric	0.02
	1/2 teaspoon of ground coriander	0.02
	2x yoghurts	0.50
	4x free oreos (donated by Ben!)	0.00
	1 mini pork pie	0.07
19/2/2013	4 x tea	0.12	1.76
	1 morrisons avocado	0.25
	Leftover pork	0.00
	10 almonds	0.11
	1 tin of morrisons baked beans	0.25
	35g of cheese	0.16
	50g oats	0.04
	100ml milk	0.06
	1mini pork pie (reduced from Asda)	0.07
	1small apple	0.14
	2x weetabix	0.08
	100ml milk	0.06
	1 pitta bread	0.10
	Sunday pork	0.00
	Hula hoops	0.11
	Pear	0.21
	2x free tea from hotel	0.00
	Chicken shazlik (on expenses)	0.00
	Special fried rice (on expenses)	0.00
	Onion bhaji (on expenses)	0.00
	2x apple juice (on expenses)	0.00
20/2/2013	2x tea (free from hotel)	0.00	2.12
	2x sausages (free from hotel)	0.00
	3 rashers bacon (free from hotel)	0.00
	Scrambled egg (free from hotel)	0.00
	Apple juice (free from hotel)	0.00
	2x blueberry muffins (free from hotel)	0.00
	1x strawberry yoghurt (free from hotel)	0.00
	1x tea (paid for by boss)	0.00
	Avocado	0.25
	10 almonds	0.11
	Leftover pork	0.00
	5x cups of tea	0.15
	Mini pork pie	0.06
	Spinach and ricotta stuffed pasta	1.20
	Tin tomatoes	0.31
	1/2 teaspoon paprika	0.02
	1/2 teaspoon crushed chillies	0.02
21/2/2013	10 almonds	0.11	2.94
	7 cups tea (1 free)	0.18
	2 Finn Crispbreads	0.12
	20g pepper pate	0.28
	2 x blueberry muffin (free)	0.00
	1 pizza	1.33
	1 can of beans	0.25
	1 free pear from work fruit bowl	0.00
	paprika	0.02
	chilli powder	0.02
	2 weetabix	0.08
	100 ml milk	0.06
	2 slices 50p bread	0.04
	20g peanut butter	0.05
	2 banana	0.40
22/12/13	2 weetabix	0.08	5.82
	100ml milk	0.06
	2 slices of 50p bread	0.04
	Peanut butter	0.05
	Hula hoops	0.11
	banana	0.20
	2 free marshmallows	0.00
	7x tea	0.21
	250g shit mince	0.75
	250g nice mince	1.30
	200g onion	0.34
	leek	0.50
	avocado	0.25
	10 almonds	0.11
	30g cream cheese	0.12
	2 Finn Crispbreads	0.12
	1 free hotel muffin	0.00
	1 value pepper	0.12
	1 tsp chilli powder	0.04
	1 tsp cumin	0.04
	1 tsp turmeric	0.04
	1 tsp coriander	0.04
	85g flour	0.21
	85g spread	0.23
	350ml milk	0.21
	3 pasta sheets	0.15
	4 free chillies!	0.00
	2 yoghurts	0.50
	1/2 pint cola (paid for by Paul Reynolds)	0.00
23/02/13	6x tea	0.18	1.75
	2x sausage	0.42
	3x egg	0.25
	212g cooking Bacon	0.34
	1 tin beans	0.25
	2 portions of yesterday's lasagne	0.00
	3 banana oat cookies	0.27
	2 slices of 50p bread	0.04
	Cookie recipe:
	2 bananas	0.40
	Drop of vanilla extract	0.02
	50g ground almonds	0.50
	Knob butter	0.05	per cookie
	100g oats	0.08	0.09
24/02/13	9x tea	0.27	3.25
	2 weetabix	0.08
	100ml milk	0.06
	200g cooking bacon	0.30
	1 bread roll	0.02
	1 avocado	0.25
	1 pear	0.21
	1 banana cookie	0.09
	4 sausages	0.84
	114g self raising flour	0.04
	2 eggs	0.16
	125 ml milk	0.08
	138g spring greens	0.33
	3 small carrots	0.15
	1/3 bag green beans	0.33
	16g gravy granules	0.04
	4x oreos (from ben!)	0.00

Thriftuary (Part Three)

It's time for latest, awesome Thriftuary chart. Look at those sexy columns and those alluring lines. If that chart was in a bar, it would be pulling right left and centre. It's like the Fonz of charts. Phowarr.

We're two weeks in - just over half way. It looks like Ben's catching up, but he hasn't updated the spreadsheet for two days, so I assume he's had a massive curry and cake blowout and exploded! It's the only logical explanation.

If you look closely, you'll see that there was a bit of spike last weekend and, in fact there's a bit of an upward trend in daily spend overall. My average daily spend last week was £3.58 as opposed to £4.29 this week. Whoah, Nellie - we're going to have to reign that in a bit!  

This weekend, I experimented a bit with peanut butter chicken curry (delicious but wow, chicken got expensive!) and then, taking a leaf out of Ben's playbook, had a big pork joint for Sunday dinner. Fortunately, there are leftovers!

A few notes on supermarkets:  I can't figure out when the optimum time to visit them is; I want the reductions - I want more 5p bread.  Yesterday, I had to buy 50p bread. My sandwiches will taste bitter.  I figured that about  and hour before closing on a Saturday evening would be a good time. Apparently not, though.  Morrisons had pretty much nothing reduced and I'd clearly missed the Asda reductions by a mutant* mile!

Here is my plea to readers: If you see any 5p bread, or other awesome deals, buy them for me. I'll pay you back. I'm not proud!

Here, for your edification (and mild distaste) is what we ate over the last 7 days:

11/2/2013	2 value weetabix	0.08	1.39
	100ml milk	0.06
	2 slices of 5p bread	0.01
	15g peanut butter	0.03
	Kiwi fruit	0.17
	Cheese and onion hula hoops.	0.11
	1 orange from the work fruit bowl (free)	0.00
	8 almonds & 3 Brazil nuts	0.20
	2 ryvita crispbreads	0.12
	~20g of spicy Mexican pepper pâté	0.28
	11x cups of tea	0.33
	Leftover Lasagne	0.00
12/2/2013	2 value weetabix	0.08	3.70
	100ml milk	0.06
	2 slices of 5p bread	0.01
	15g peanut butter	0.03
	Kiwi fruit	0.17
	Beef hula hoops.	0.11
	50g smoked salmom	0.70
	1 avocado	0.38
	3 x cups of tea	0.09
	1 frozen pizza	1.33
	2 eggs	0.17
	200ml milk	0.12
	110g plain flour	0.08
	15g sugar	0.20
	1/2 lemon	0.17
13/2/2013	3 value weetabix	0.12	4.63
	150ml milk	0.09
	50g cheese	0.22
	2 slices 5p bread	0.01
	Salt & vinegar hula hoops	0.11
	Kiwi fruit	0.17
	5x tea	0.15
	1 free apple from the work fruit bowl	0.00
	1 ryvita crispbread	0.06
	~10g of spicy Mexican pepper pâté	0.14
	8 almonds & 3 Brazil nuts	0.20
	30g smoked salmon	0.42
	446g spuds	0.45
	1 onion	0.17
	1 tin corned beef (less enough for sandwiches tomorrow)	1.54
	1 tin baked beans	0.28
	2 coconut yoghurts	0.50
14/2/2013	5x cups of tea	0.15	5.48
	1pear	0.21
	45g of Smoked Salmon	0.63
	1 avocado	0.37
	2 slices 5p bread	0.01
	corned beef & onion stolen from last night's dinner	0.00
	ready salted hula hoops	0.11
	the last kiwi fruit	0.17
	approx 250g beef skirt	1.72
	1 stock cube	0.20
	onion	0.17
	2 carrots	0.12
	3 small potatoes	0.35
	tin kidney beans	0.18
	50g frozen peas	0.10
	tin tomatoes	0.31
	2x yohurts	0.50
	2 value weetabix	0.08
	100ml milk	0.06
	1 tsp paprika	0.02
	1/2 tsp chilli powder	0.02
15/02/2013	9x tea	0.27	2.69
	3x value weetabix	0.12
	150ml milk	0.09
	1 tin tomatoes (added to last night's leftover stew)	0.31
	1 Finn crispbread	0.06
	~10g of spicy Mexican pepper pâté	0.14
	8 almonds & 3 Brazil nuts	0.20
	45g smoked salmon	0.63
	2x yoghurts	0.50
	2 small apples	0.27
	4 pieces of shortbread we were given at christmas and forgot about!	0.10
16/02/2013	2x free coffees at the mini garage waiting for MOT	0.00	5.45
	1free small biscuit at the mini garage	0.00
	2 sausages	0.42
	4 rashers of bacon	0.05
	3 eggs	0.25
	1 tin value beans	0.28
	5 teas	0.15
	2 chicken breasts (for peanut butter chicken curry)	2.33
	5 cloves garlic	0.15
	2 spoons peanut butter	0.11
	74g greek yoghurt	0.11
	2 tablespoons curry powder	0.05
	1 tablespoon cayenne pepper	0.03
	1/2 tablespoon cinnamon	0.20
	1/ tablespoon chilli powder	0.20
	juice of 1/2 lemon	0.17
	chicken oxo cube	0.20
	1 onion	0.17
	100g basmati rice	0.16
	2x pears	0.42
17/02/2013	100g oats	0.08	6.69
	250ml milk	0.15
	6x tea	0.18
	Pork joint	4.25
	3 small carrots	0.15
	1/3 bag of green beans	0.33
	1/3 bag spring greens	0.33
	3 potatoes	0.31
	1 avocado	0.37
	2coconut yoghurts	0.50
	16g gravy granules	0.04

( * Asda being primarily frequented by mutants...)