BLOG: Day two – Could you live on £5 for five days?

It’s been a lot tougher today. There have been several times during the day when I have felt hungry. TV seems to be full of adverts for food I can’t have and I’ve got no energy at all.
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Breakfast was ok, eggs and beans on toast, pretty normal for me except I can’t afford tea bags so I’ve been putting a bit of mint from the garden in boiling water and drinking mint tea.

At 11am I made a sponge cake from the 22p Tescos sponge cake mix, one egg and some water. Clearly I’m no chef, and I’ve since been told I probably didn’t enough air in it as it was very flat, but it tasted ok with a scrape of chocolate spread across it.

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Before lunch I went foraging in the garden to see how many edible weeds I have growing. I made a salad from plantain leaves, hairy bittercress, wild garlic, dandelion leaves and flowers and a little cow parsley. (With cow parsley you have to really be sure what it is before eating as it looks almost identical to hemlock which is deadly, so be careful!)

For lunch I had eggs on toast, a mushroom, the weed salad and some wild rocket from the garden. It was delicious and I would definitely have it again even after this week.

It was in the afternoon I started to feel hungry. My normal diet is very high in protein and wholegrain bread, rice and pasta so I never feel hungry and my blood sugar stays even throughout the day so I don’t crave sugary foods. This week I’m filling up on way more sugar than usual in the form of chocolate spread on toast and the cake I made. It’s only been two days so far but it is noticeably having an effect on cravings and feelings of hunger.

Dinner was a chilli with spaghetti. The chilli consisted of a tin of kidney beans, a tin of baked beans, an onion and two chillies from the garden. It looked gross at this point so I decided to manage without the extra loaf of bread I was intending to buy and use the money instead for a tin of tomatoes. I used half the tin of tomatoes and I have to say the resulting chilli wasn’t too bad at all. Normally I would use quorn, more assorted pulses and lots of seasoning so it didn’t resemble my normal chilli, but it was fine and filled me up!

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I was grateful again today for the food I could eat from my garden and it was particularly satisfying as a gardener to eat weeds! A recent foraging trip that Incredible Edible Pevensey and Westham did in Anderida Park, Pevensey resulted in finding lots of food to forage, there’s a lot of food growing wild that we have forgotten is useful so try to find a foraging group near you and give it a go, it makes for a very productive walk!

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