This has been my lunch for the past 5 days. Sardine and tomato pasta sauce with pangrattato.

I made a massive batch of the pasta sauce on Sunday and then weighed out my pasta so I knew how much I could have each day:



I got so fed up with this by the end of the week that just the smell of the sauce made me feel ill.
The pangrattato was a good idea though. It's an Italian trick for when you can't afford parmesan cheese, just bread crumbs fried in oil and sprinkled over the pasta.

This is what I have had for breakfast every morning:
Water porridge with half an apple and a bit of sugar.
28p

This is what £5, 4 hours, 3 different Tescos and a long trek around East London bought me!
I decided to avoid value ranges because I figured they probably did more bad to the world than my sponsorship money could ever make up for.

Turns out the hardest thing about such a small budget was the lack of choice. I'd planned on getting some £1 eggs from a local farm, but they'd run out and my whole meal plan for the week was ruined. Normally I'd just accept that I had to spend a few pence more and buy eggs somewhere else, but obviously this wasn't an option. I had the same nightmare with buying fruit and veg. I couldn't afford Tesco prices so I needed a market, but finding one on a Sunday was really stressful. I ended up going round every corner shop in the area finding out who sold carrots the cheapest per kilo.

I'll show you what I made with all this in another post. The only way I managed to make everything fit into the budget was by planning to have the same thing everyday so I'm dragging the whole 'reveal' out a bit. Trying to make three dishes of varying slushyness fill a blog and look vaguely interesting isn't going to be easy!

Hello!
So for the next five days I'm going to be living on £5 for all my food and drink.
Considering I spent this on a coffee and cake the other day the realisation of what I've got myself in for has started to hit home!

I'm doing this as part of the live below the line £1 a day challenge to raise money for anti-poverty charities. If have already sponsored me thank you ever so much, if you would like to you can click the logo on the right. You can find out more about where the money goes here.

I'm actually already in Day 2 of the challenge, but it took so long to sort out my food yesterday that I didn't actually get a chance to start on this blog! I'll put up pictures of what I bought later.
In the meantime here is a little video about the campaign...