Living Below the Line - Day 3

Halfway through the week today. It's not been as hard as yesterday was, I haven't had to battle as much with temptation until after lunch when there were a load of trays of free food from a meeting. That was a bit tough.

Breakfast was porridge again, and once again it tried to empty itself all over the microwave, but I just about managed to save it, and scraped it all back into the bowl.

Breakfast - Porridge

I spent most of the morning working on my turbine rig in uni (see here) adding a few extra functionalities to it, to allow it to more completely cover the speed range I'm interested in. This meant wiring up a switch to allow it to short circuit the generator and open circuit the generator. This allowed me to distract myself from the thought of food until lunchtime. Lunch, again, was chickpea and cauliflower, with chapattis (I forgot to take a photo, so here's the one from Monday).

Lunch - Chickpea, cauliflower and chapatti

The afternoon did drag a bit more. I was writing notes to accompany my presentation for the World Renewable Energy Congress Conference next week. Then, later on in the afternoon I attended some undergraduate presentations on low carbon technologies. Some were good, some were not so, but all gave something to think about. Tea was jacket potato and vegetables in tomato sauce, which had a strange after-taste to it, but not in a completely bad way.

Tea - Jacket potato with vegetables in tomato sauce

After tea, I cooked some chapatti with Hannah for tomorrow's lunch. We're just over half way through now and I'm getting in to it a bit more. I am hungry, and struggling a little with temptation - a piece of cake would be great now - but overall it's going OK. Tomorrow is another day though!

SAM

Living Below the Line - Day 2

Today has been a bit tricky. I was back in to work, and struggled to resist the mid-afternoon trip to the chocolate machine. I did though!

I woke up shortly after 5am. My stomach was rumbling. Not a good sign. I went into uni as early as I could to stave off any temptation in eating early. I returned from uni at 11am to meet Mel who is off to Nepal (JEALOUS!) and to have some breakfast - porridge again. This morning's porridge was a bit of a disaster. After yesterday's slightly stodgy effort - all my fault for guessing the wrong amount of water - today I added too much water and it boiled over. Dope. Half of the porridge was in the microwave, which left me even more hungry.

Breakfast - Porridge that boiled over (it wasn't really that green!)

Lunch was made yesterday, so to my office I took one pint of potato and leek soup. After giving it a taste test yesterday, it was fairly boring and bland - no vegetable stock - so I wasn't necessarily enthralled by the prospect of eating it. But with the chapatti it actually tasted very good.

Lunch - Potato and Leek soup with Chapatti

In the afternoon, my will was tested quite hard. I felt the hunger starting to kick in, especially as the work I was doing at the time, writing a presentation for a conference next week, got into the really nit-picking phase of making sure that everything looked the same. I felt the call of the chocolate machine. Then, I headed into Bristol to meet up with my housegroup from Church for a round of crazy golf. On the way through the city centre I passed hundreds of fast food restaurants selling all kinds of greasy and horrible but amazing smelling foods. Kebab shops, KFC, McDonalds, they were all there. When I reached the crazy golf course, Hannah was there with tea. She had promised me it was the best meal we'd had so far - fried rice with vegetables. And I have to admit, she probably was right.

Tea - Fried Rice with Vegetables (I was so hungry I ate some of it before remembering to photograph it…)

This is turning out to be more tricky than I thought. It's not the hunger. I've dealt with hunger before - my calorie counting days of my early twenties are still in recent memory. It's not the blandness of the food. My learning-to-cook-for-myself years of 18-23 were a series of bland meal after bland meal, the only excitement being a takeaway when I could afford it. It's not the lack of caffeine. I despise tea and coffee, so my caffeine intake is fairly small anyway. The biggest problem is the temptation, trying to resist when I know there's money in my pocket that would get rid of the feeling immediately.

Let's see how tomorrow goes…

SAM

Living Below the Line - Day 1

This morning we made the chapatti for lunch before cooking the porridge. The chapatti proved to be quite tricky, especially rolling out, as our cottage didn't have a rolling pin, so instead I used a glass. Most of them cooked OK, and some puffed up slightly. I had forgot what the water to porridge ratio should be, and so had a guess, which turned out to be wrong. After 2 minutes in the microwave, the porridge had the consistency of a flapjack. However, Hannah managed to save it, adding more water and by the time it came to eating it porridge came out satisfactorily.

Breakfast - Porridge (made with water not milk)

We left our holiday cottage and headed into Abergavenny for a cycle along the Brecon-Monmouth Canal before heading back to Bristol for lunch. It was quite dry but I enjoyed it, very much like some of the khaja I eat whilst in Nepal.

Lunch - Chickpea and Cauliflower Curry with Chapatti

After lunch Hannah, I and Becky prepared some of the food for the rest of the week. I made 36 chapatti (some for the next couple of days) whilst the girls made the leek and potato soup for tomorrow, which I now have a pint of in my fridge. Tea was to be jacket potato and vegetables in a tomato sauce. The jacket potatoes were disappointingly small, but the vegetables made up for it and had a good amount of taste to it, made even more so when we added some garlic (an extra 1/2 a clove per person, about 1p).

Tea - Jacket Potato With vegetables in a Tomato Sauce

Day one is over now. It was surprising how much we talked about food, considering it's something that we can't have any more. I am in need of a little chocolate though…

SAM

Living Below the Line - The Day Before…

So, tomorrow starts the living below the line challenge. I'm quite glad it's here as I've been thinking about it for a while now and really want to get going.

I'm really glad I won't be the only one doing this, it's always fun to have others going through the same pain and misery as you. When Hannah said she would do it, I was really happy, when she said she had managed to convince her family to do it as well I was amazed. So, we're all going to be surviving on £1 a day each for food, trying to battle hungriness, temptation and grumpiness together.

I'm on holiday in the Black Mountains at the moment, going back home tomorrow, so will have to eat the low cost breakfast (porridge) and lunch (chickpea, cauliflower and chapatti) here.

We still had a stack of food left last night so instead of going out, as we had planned, we stayed in and ate the remaining food. It seemed slightly silly if we were going to be trying to live frugally for a week if we started by throwing away a load of food. So, we had a mish mash of salad, boiled potatoes, crisps and cake. It was very good although I seemed to eat a surprisingly large amount of salad leaves...

I'm looking forward to tomorrow. Who know's what will happen!

SAM

Living Below the Line - The Joys of Shopping

So, tonight Hannah and I went to the dreaded Asda to shop. I never like going to Asda, especially at Cribbs Causeway. This is because it is far too big, I have no idea where anything is, it's full of people that don't care about anyone else, the food never tastes that great and I really can't stand their TV adverts. However, to get the cheapest food, it is normally the best place to go. So, on a large dose of valium and shopping list in hand, Hannah and I went into Asda hoping to find all the food we need for next week.

With such a tight budget, we had very little chance to allow any food to be over the price we researched from the internet. We started looking for the fresh vegetables. We had allowed ourselves 21p for carrots, which equated to 300g. It took 4 or 5 attempts to find the right combination of carrots to get this amount. We had a similar issue with the leeks. The potatoes were a bit easier, as these came in pre-priced packs. When we reached the onions we found a huge problem. The price we saw on the internet on Monday was an offer price, and now they were double the price/. What should we do? Did we buy the same amount of onions and just take a hit on something else, or use have the amount? In the end we decided we'd just have to use half the amount as the pricing was so tight we couldn't allow for it anywhere else. When we found the mushrooms, there were none left at the price we saw on the internet, 250g for 83p. However, there were some cheaper mushrooms - 400g for 79p, so we went for these instead, which would help a little bit allowing for a bit of slack in the budget, or allow us to eat a few more mushrooms for the same price!

Most other items we found OK, until we came to the rice. Now, from our internet research we had found the cheapest rice was 49p for 1kg bag. However, as we were coming up to another pair of bank holidays, all this rice had been sold. The next cheapest rice was  more than double the price. This would add an extra 3.5p onto our total for Tuesday and Thursday (see the menu), which would tip us over the £1 a day level. What should we do? Do we reduce the amount of rice we eat and risk going hungry? Hannah asked one of the shelf stackers if they had any in stock. He looked at us a bit strangely, why did we want this compared to any of the other products? It made me feel embarrassed and shy - should it have done so? I don't really know. When he said they didn't have any in stock, we had to make a decision, so we decided to buy the rice and figure out what we'd do later (a cross-that-bridge-when-I-come-to-it attitude). A similar issue happened when we came to the biscuits. We were going to buy cheap own brand chocolate biscuits to treat ourselves during the week when there was some spare money (I'm a bit of a chocoholic). However, there were none left. In fact, the only cheap biscuits left were Rich Tea biscuits, so we took these. It wouldn't be as much of a treat, but still any biscuits are better than none at all.

At the checkout, we looked at all the food we had for the next week. It wasn't much. And on the face of it, it didn't look like it was going to be particularly tasty.

Shopping on the checkout conveyor belt

Receipt - £15.59 for everything, but some bits only a proportion is required

On the way home, I crunched a few numbers and found that the savings we had made on the mushrooms would allow us to eat the same amount of the more expensive rice. However, some of the price increases we found really would sting a little - the doubling of price of the onions, meaning we would only be able to use half the amount of onions would definitely change the taste of the food.

I thought about the problems with shopping at somewhere like Asda. Yes, they did have very cheap food. But because they have cheap food, lots of people go there to buy it, and so it is quite regularly sold out. If you are cash poor, then you probably aren't able to stockpile food, and probably most of the food you eat is perishable. So, what happens when you go to a store to buy the food and they don't have the food you require for the price you can pay in stock? Do you go buy the next cheapest food, but possibly financially burdening yourself for the next week? Do you try and find a replacement - although what sort of replacement could you get for something like rice? Or do you just go hungry and hope that the next time you go shopping it is in?

I wondered what would happen if I actually did live in extreme poverty. Would things like this happen all the time? I felt so stressed trying to work out what to do about the rice, the embarrassment I felt when we asked if they had any of the cheaper rice in stock. If this was a matter of eating or not eating then I hope I would just take it on the chin, but it must add to the worries.

I'm slowly trying to climb into someone else's skin.

SAM

The food for the week

Living Below the Line - Preparations…

Some of you may be aware of the Living Below The Line campaign. The challenge is to live on £1 a day for all your food and drink for the first working week of May (2nd - 6th), which equates to £5 for the week. The £1 a day come from the limit of extreme poverty, normally given as earning less than $1.25 a day. This is roughly the same as £0.75 a day, but not only must this pay for food, it also has to pay for everything else - rent, water, electricity, household items etc. For more information on this see here.

Now, living on just £1 a day for food is going to be quite a challenge, and the idea is to get an appreciation of how people live in the developing world. I can never pretend that by doing this I'm going to understand what it is like to live in extreme poverty. As I found in Nepal, I knew at the end of the day I have an emergency stop button, a Get Out Of Jail Free card, which i know I can pick up and cash in. To my rescue will come the bank, my parents or even the government. I will never be able to understand what it is like to live without that. However, I hope that it will be able to start to give me an understanding of the issues that affect people living in real poverty. To me, this isn't about raising money for MRDF or whoever the final funds will go to - although I am going to donate in all the money I'm going to save on food next week to MRDF's partners - it is about understanding people that little bit more, seeing things from their point of view, as Atticus Finch said "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view - until you climb into his skin and walk around in it." (Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird). By the way, if you have never read To Kill A Mockingbird, read it. It is one of the most amazing books I think I have ever read.

I managed to convince Hannah to join me in doing it, and so we decided to try and share some of the cost. So, the first job was to come up with a menu. Looking at the recipes online, we came up with versions of our own. So the menu for next week looks something like this:

Menu

• Monday (Cost 93.9p)
• Breakfast - Porridge Honey/Jam
• Lunch - Chickpea and Cauliflower with Chapatti
• Dinner - Jacket Potato with a Vegetable and Tomato Sauce
• Tuesday (Cost 96.5p)
• Breakfast - Porridge Honey/Jam
• Lunch - Potato and Leek Soup with Chapatti
• Dinner - Fried Rice and Vegetables
• Wednesday (Cost 93.9p)
• Breakfast - Porridge Honey/Jam
• Lunch - Chickpea and Cauliflower with Chapatti
• Dinner - Jacket Potato with a Vegetable and Tomato Sauce
• Thursday (Cost 96.5p)
• Breakfast - Porridge Honey/Jam
• Lunch - Potato and Leek Soup with Chapatti
• Dinner - Fried Rice and Vegetables
• Friday (Cost 96.8p)
• Breakfast - Porridge Honey/Jam
• Lunch - Chickpea and Cauliflower with Chapatti
• Dinner - Pasta with a Vegetable and Tomato Sauce and cheese

As there is a little left over each day, this can allow tea drinkers to drink some tea, or biscuit eaters such as myself, to indulge a little. From this menu, we scoured the internet trying to find the best deals on all food. Unfortunately, the cheapest seemed to come from Asda, not my most favourite of supermarkets (although probably more popular in Bristol that Tesco at the moment (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-13167041)). So, our shopping list and costs became as follows:

Shopping List

• Honey - £1.06
• Jam – 38p
• Porridge Oats 1kg – 75p
• Plain Flour 1.5kg – 52p
• Salt 750g – 40p
• Vegetable Oil 1l - £1.44
• Baking Potatoes (bag of 4) – 70p x2
• Onion 1kg – 50p
• Leek – 62p x2
• Frozen Cauliflower 900g – 76p
• Dried Chickpeas 500g – 78p
• Chilli Flakes 28g – 57p
• Cumin 41g – 40p
• Pasta 500g – 9p
• Plum Tomatoes – 31p x3 tins
• Mushrooms 250g – 83p
• Carrot – 7p x3
• Long Grain Rice 1kg – 49p
• Tin of Sweetcorn 326g – 32p
• Wyke Farm Extra Mature 200g - £1.50

Now the more keen mathematicians amongst you will notice that this doesn't add up to our allotted £10 between us. However, some of the items (e.g. honey, oats) will only be partially used, so we're only going to take the cost proportional to that which we've used. This may not be strictly speaking fair - could someone living in extreme poverty be able to afford these large items, and would we be saving money by doing it this way? - but as many items can't be bought in any smaller sizes (at least at a reasonable price) then this is the only way I can see of doing it.

Anyway, I'm going to be blogging about the whole experience, the food, the taste, the hunger and everything else all of next week, so keep your eyes out or have a look out on twitter (http://twitter.com/saminnepal) to see how I'm getting on. If you'd like to give some money for this campaign then look here (http://bit.ly/dLqvwP), although as I have said before, raising money is not my prime objective.

We're going to be shopping on Thursday, so I'll report back then.

SAM

Frustration

I went to Longleat Safari Park and Adventure Park at the end of March to celebrate my birthday. So to break up the endless monotony of my writing, I've included some photos in from that.

Longleat house

It's been a tough few weeks in the PhD front. I've done a few runs of the turbine in a couple of positions and got some good torque and power outputs from the turbine. However, when they're compared with the model I've got, they are around 20% out. There are several explanations for this, as discussed last time - see here. However, I've still not been able to rectify these problems over the last couple of weeks and it's been really starting to get on my nerves. It's so frustrating, working on a possible solution for 2 or 3 days then ending up at the same point that I started with. I am determined not to let this get the better of me. So I'm going to try some different methods for modelling and also look at changing my rig a little to see whether there are some things that are causing the model to be very different from the actual results.

Feeding the deer - they were smelly, dirty and very greedy

A warning sign…

I attended a lecture at Bristol University run by Water Aid for World Water Day. There were two speakers, the first from Aquatest, a research group supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They are developing a water testing device that can simplify the detection of pathogens in water. The second speaker was from a new charity called Wellboring, looking at boring wells in Kenya. I have to say I was a little more sceptical about this charity, their intentions were perfect, but their delivery was to just give a community water, there didn't seem to be the sustainability there - it seemed an almost imposed solution - however, I'm sure that they will be successful and they will help many many people and I'll be forced to eat my sceptical words!

A resting lion

The seals jumping for food

I've also had a bit of busy few weeks at church. I produced another talent show in the middle of March in the church under the guidance of several people. We had a very good evening, with some fantastic singers such as Alice Lovell and for once the Scouts provided entertainment rather than just embarrassed laughing. I even did a short poem recital (Roald Dahl's The Pig) as I wanted to get up on stage - my vanity appearing again. We raised a fantastic £170 for the church, and now are going to get ready for the pantomime… We also had the Easter Messy Church, which we had 86 people at. At our messy church, my job is to do the cooking along with Hannah and Becky - I'm not really trusted around children due to my slight potty mouth - and we cooked 15 pizzas in a small oven. We had a panic when all the pizzas stuck to their pans and we couldn't get them out without making most of them disintegrate. So, for an hour we slowly pulled pizza away from pans, and after a stirling effort we finally managed to serve up all the pizza to the hungry punters with very respectable looking food. This was also the first time that we've manage to have all the food eaten - must have a been good!

The hedge maze (we managed to get through it in under 30 mins!)

For those who don't know me, I love to make cakes. For my birthday this year, Hannah made me three most amazing cakes. I spent the days after my birthday feeling sick from cake but somehow not being able to stop myself from eating them. So, for Hannah's birthday the week after mine, I had to try and match hers. I spent an evening baking cakes, and the next day I carved and iced her cake. I had made a Lego-man. I don't think it was as good as last year's effort - the hungry caterpillar cake - but it went down well.

My fantastic birthday cakes!

Legoman cake

Last year's effort - The Hungry Caterpillar

After all that cake, I'm rather more round and weighing a few more kilos than I probably should be. So the next month I'm going to be going on a bit of a healthy eating kick, in an effort to lose some of the cake weight and try and save a bit of money as well - this year's trip to Nepal is not too far away now!

For now

SAM