Live Below the Line - Day One

Well, here we are.  End of Day One.  Thanks so much to those people who have donated!   My original goal of £100 was clearly a lowball, as I've already raised £155! I'd love to get it to £200 by the end of the week.  Remember that you can give me a donation in person, or donate to ActionAid via my LBL page.

So, onto the bit that several people have asked about.  How on earth do we eat on £10 for 5 days?!  We gained some experience last year and researched a lot more before we did it.

Here is our grocery shop:

And here's our list:

Shopping List	Amount	Cost
Aldi porridge	1 kg	0.75
Aldi plain flour	1.5 kg	0.45
Aldi eggs	15	1.35
Aldi long grain rice	1 kg	0.4
Aldi penne pasta	500g	0.29
basics pasta sauce	500g	0.5
onions	500g	0.69
basics grapes	500g	1.25
basics bananas	8	1.15
basics carrots	1 kg	0.69
basics stock cubes	10	0.2
basics tea bags	100g	0.2
basics pb	340g	0.62
red lentils	500g	1.1
	Total	9.64

We are allowed to use yeast, soy sauce, spices, salt, pepper and oil by the gram and can include that in our cost without buying the whole package.

Today's menu included:

Breakfast - 125g porridge made with water, 1/2 banana and a tbsp of peanut butter

(and the requisite cup of black tea)

Lunch - carrot soup with homemade flatbreads

 Dinner - Egg Fried Rice

The carrot soup was really simple (and will be 3 lunches worth for each of us), so here's the recipe.  This is something that could easily be adapted for daily use.  If you've never made soup, DO IT!  You can't mess this up.

LBL Carrot Soup

Some sliced carrots (we used about 1 kg - less or more will work too)

2 onions chopped

Spices - I used 1/2 tsp of chili powder, 1/2 tsp of cumin and cumin seeds

Salt and pepper

2 stock cubes

1 liter boiling water

1.  Put 1 tablespoon of oil in a pan and fry the spices on med-high heat for a minute or two until they smell really good.  

2.  Add the carrots and onions and stir to coat with the oil and spices.  Leave on medium heat for five minutes, until the onions have softened and are starting to brown.  Keep stirring so that the spices don't stick to the pan and burn.  Make sure to season with salt and pepper.

3.  Crumble two stock cubes over the veg and add 1 liter of boiling water.  Bring to a simmer on medium heat and cook until the carrots are soft.

4.  Use a hand blender (Josh calls it an immersion blender) to make it soupy.  If you don't have one of those, let the mixture cool and just mash it loads with a potato masher until it's soupy.

This recipe made six portions of roughly 280ml, which is a decent-sized lunch when paired with our homemade LBL flatbreads.  I'll post a step-by-step of that recipe later in the week.

Again, thanks for supporting us through giving, prayers and kind words.  Same time tomorrow!