The Awful Truth About Improvised Pasta Meals

Posted by Brody

I'm getting sick of potatoes and onions, so I made pasta (OK... I put it in a pot with water and heated it). I avoided the reality that I had no sauce until I had a pot of cooked pasta lightly seasoned with salt, by which time there was no turning back... I had a pot of pasta, but what to do with only a teaspoon of any condiment? A little creativity was called for -- the solution? A teaspoon of each:
























Definitely a solution, but maybe not the best solution.

Here we have:

1. Wholegrain mustard
2. American mustard
3. Dijon mustard
   
4. Mustard pickle (did I mention I like mustard?)
5. Vegemite
6. Piccalilli
7. Lime pickle
8. Marmalade
9. One jalapeno slice
   
10. Hot chilli sauce
    

Ranked by appeal out of 10:

1. 7/10 -- Marmalade, American mustard, Dijon
2. 6/10 --Piccalilli, plain
3. 5/10 -- Mustard pickle, Vegemite
   
4. 4/10 -- Jalapeno slice
5. 3/10 -- Lime pickle, hot chilli sauce

Pasta doesn't have much of its own flavour, so a lot of this came down to how palatable the condiment was by itself, although these are all favourite ingredients when used for toast, sandwiches, barbecues, etc. But these ingredients mix in different circles, only gathering when forced. The results are mostly awful, so don't try them. I eat weird stuff so you don't have to.

Did I Make It?

My challenge this week was to spend just $20 on food.

Did I achieve it?

I ate $8.64 worth of the $11.71 food that I bought. I still have over a kilogram of rice and half a kilogram of flour left, plus one and a half onions.

Here is the food I ate:

$ 1.99 — Cereal

$ 1.47 — Flour ($0.78 worth left)

$ 1.63 — Rice ($2.06 worth left)

$ 2.00 — Potatoes

$ 1.05 — Spaghetti

$ 0.39 — Apples

$ 0.11 — Onions ($0.23 worth left)

$ 8.64 — Eaten

$11.71—Spent

I could have saved a little by buying less rice and cheaper flour, but it would be a matter of cents rather than dollars.

What I've learned is that I can eat very cheaply with regular ingredients—none of my purchases were discounted—if I am prepared to spend time cooking and searching for good deals in stores.

Another thing I've learned is that serious self-denial is INCREDIBLY frustrating. On the last day of the challenge I walked past dozens of cafes, bars, restaurants, and fast food outlets after eating rice for breakfast and anticipating nothing but rice for lunch. Later I walked through the supermarket without buying anything. It drove home the fact that I spend more on food in a typical day than I have over this last week, and I do it so thoughtlessly. When the decisions became deliberate and came with a real cost, the focus switched to what I couldn't have rather than what I could, and a poverty mentality kicked in.

I began thinking about what I would eat next, and talking about food with others. It had become a non-casual subject. My life pivoted on the acquisition and preparation of food. I would imagine in some regions of the world it is this way every day.

So, did I make it? Well, I finished the week and came in under budget. It was a loooooong week. It threw up new challenges, and detrivialised the spending of money. This may be a lasting change, and a good one.

Day 7: Beaten To Pita

I woke up this morning without cereal, nor did I have apples or potatoes or pasta. I did have an onion and a bag of flour and a bag of rice. But mostly I had a big pot of cold rice.
Actually, half of a big pot of cold rice, because I had some yesterday and then kind of left it there. I put a lid on it—I mean jeez, I'm not an animal. I'm just not very conscientious when it comes to Tupperwaring things.

There is a limit to what can be achieved with flour, rice, and an onion.
After having rice for breakfast, second breakfast, and lunch, I put the bag of rice far, far away from the food preparation area. The onion got just a cursory glance before being dismissed as a viable ingredient. This left a kilogram of plain white flour. This was my material, my canvas, my tabula rasa. I would take this bag of powdered grain and make it extraordinary. Or at least eatable with a fork.

My early work in the medium of flour proved disappointing, except for adhering pieces of paper together. I had learned much, however, in the interim about the mysterious process of embreadishing. The yeast, you see, needs food and it needs comfort. It is alive; it is a living, bubbling thing, and it requires succor.
Yeast eats sugar, and basks warmly in hot water. Yeast should be treated like a corrupt senator in the dying days of Rome, fed delicate sweetness and drizzled with steaming fluids. Just because it is small and brown and granulated does not mean that it cannot know luxury.

There is another side to ancient Rome, and that is the brutal degradation of the Colliseum. I kept my yeasted flour in a dark place, I cut it in two with a knife, and I dumped it in a pot with burning oil. I beat it with a spatula and crushed it with a pot, and after it was spreadeagled and bruised I threw it in the air and did it all over again.

It was delicious.

The End ... is nearer.

Posted by Brody

Tonight I accomplished something great; I finished my last meal of the challenge. A week ago I was getting pangs of fear that I might run out of food -- a strange feeling, one I'd never really had occasion to feel before the challenge. I wasn't too keen on running through a mall wearing the balaclava either, but that was a more rational, less instinctive fear than the fear of starvation. But I weighed up the remaining food, and there's still a bit to spare. Actually there's a lot to spare -- 34% by weight of the original share, so I'm going to try to stretch this crazy stunt out another 3 days, which would sit me on about $2/day for 10 days. It won't be much fun now that Logan is eating normally, but at least my food is OK; Logan's diet over the last week consisted mostly of flour and water arranged in various ways, none appealing. I don't know how long I'd survive on dough.Without the requisite ingredients, flour and water turn into a rubbery ball of glue, so some might say pancakes are a little ambitious... Here are some photos of Logan's attempt to make a pancake by flattening a ball of dough into a frying pan using a saucepan:



















The result: a saucepancake. Bon appetit!

Day 6: Potato Soup

Late last night I took stock and prepared for the home stretch. I had a lot of rice, probably too much flour, about a third of the 4kg potato sack, and one and a half onions.
Of these, the potatoes looked the most promising. I had just bought a chopping set that looked like a pair of oversized garlic presses and was keen to try them out.
I emptied all the potatoes into the sink. About a quarter had squidgy bits that I had to cut out. I had not obeyed potato storage ettiquette, and this was my penance. I then ran them through the choppers with great pleasure and boiled the hell out of them.
My largest pot was almost equal to the task of 1.3kg of chopped potatoes, only boiling over six times. I had sliced half an onion into the mix, so the acrid smoke curling from the stovetop was delicately flavoured, adding a touch of class to my usual routine of food destruction.

After what seemed like half an hour, the potatoes had given up completely. I looked at their limp remains and was struck by a brilliant idea. 1am ideas are like that. I would turn this pot of tatoes into a soup.
I'm not really sure how soups are made, but I do know that they always have about ten things in them. I added chicken stock, oil, salt, pepper, cornflour, garlic salt, and possibly some other things that seemed like a good idea at the time. I swizzled it all together until the water thickened up and changed colour, but hang on, the potatoes were too big for soup. I ran a big knife back and forth until they looked small enough, and ta da! Soup.

In this picture, the soup looks more like slightly diseased mashed potatoes. This is because the World Cup came on and I put the pot to one side while Germany destroyed English hopes of sporting glory.
Two hours later it had dried out really quite a lot in the warm pot and turned into strongly-flavoured potatoes. Still nice, but not strictly soup.


The method looked to be solid. Today I tried exactly the same thing with rice, and to my utter surprise it worked flawlessly. Every other bite has a large strip of onion that makes its presence strongly felt, but otherwise a stand-up effort.

Food eaten today:

25c — last of my oatmeal

44c — potatoes

37c — rice

$1.06 — Total: first time I've gone over a dollar.

Day 5: The Error Of My Ways

I made some seasoned potato wedges today, or at least I did on my second attempt.

My first attempt was going swimmingly until I put paprika on the wedges. This is coming out quite fast, I thought. Oh well, that just makes my job easier. I put the shaker back and caught a glimpse of the label: cinnamon.

If you have never before seen cinnamon wedges in your life, you have now.
Much as I am averse to wasting food, there was no way in holy hell that I was going to eat cinnamon on potato. Into the bin they went.

Breakfast was cereal, lunch was the rest of yesterday's spaghetti, and dinner, apart from the second batch of wedges, was a pile of pancakes.
Now when I say 'pancakes' I mean a combination of flour, water and sugar that is fried in a circular shape. Regular pancakes have milk and eggs, which give them cohesion, flavour, and impart a general fluffiness. I did not have that sort of pancake.

My pancakes were amorphous blobs of sweetened glue whipped into a runny paste and coaxed into a pan. When the bottom had cooked sufficiently to form a thin layer, I held my breath and flipped the frail enterprise.
On two occasions my pancakes came down flawlessly and I clapped my hands in girlish glee. On the third occasion it landed like an economics teacher falling off a skateboard. It formed itself into a sluglike roll, but the malleable nature of the medium was my ally. I slapped it repeatedly with a spatula and squished it with a pot.

Sprinkle with sugar. Serves 1.

Food eaten today:

19c — Oatmeal

42c — Spaghetti

11c — Potatoes

15c — Flour

87c — Total

Walls Of Poverty

Brody and I were in a Chinese grocery store earlier this week. It was 8.40pm and the staff were readying themselves for closing time, cleaning floors and wiping benchtops.
We had other concerns. With thoughtful expressions, we gazed at a box of expired fruit covered in cling film and marked $2.50.

"That persimmon is rotten all on that side."

"Yeah, but I could cut that out."

"And there's a ton of apples. That's barely sixty cents' worth of apples."

"But—pears. Those are three pears there."

"And tomatoes. God, I wish I had tomatoes."

A few metres behind us was a bucket of pulverised rotten apples, the cast-offs from a huge crate of 30c per kg Fujis that I had carefully examined the previous day, selecting ten.
I had eschewed the rows of noodles, the packs of soup mix, and the siren song of melons, both prince and rock. I cast a canny eye at the eggs, my mind racing with the devil's calculus; what price would I pay for such indulgence? An ocean of possibility lay before me, but it was a false choice. It would be foolish to take any of it, and I left with my apples alone.

This week we have felt the agony of those pressing their noses up against the glass, seeing opulence and pleasure but knowing that it cannot be had. The price is too high; the price is forgoing every other thing, every little liveable touch that people with money simply have, have never been without, and have never had to risk surrendering.
We have felt the sneaking sense that perhaps there will not be enough food, that hunger is an option and a trade-off for other desires, and that these basic needs are in competition with each other. There is not enough money to forget these things, to forget worry, and to feel free.

Day 4: Al Spaghetti

Late last night, I got very hungry and had some cereal out of schedule, which throws my breakfasting off a little. It brought to light the fact that when my belly gets all rumbley I have no patience for chopping and potting and tending and serving, I just want food now.
To protect myself from further cereal killing sprees, I put the rest of my spaghetti into the biggest pot I could find and followed the instructions. My stovetop was having none of it. It boiled over three times as I delicately adjusted the dial and indelicately told it to go to hell you bastard piece of monkey nugget. (For some reason when I swear I forget that some words aren't very insulting.)
I did recall that someone told me once, about spaghetti, that it was ready when it was al fresco or al dente or al quaeda or something. They didn't tell me what that actually was, however, so I used the other test, which is throwing it against a wall and seeing if it sticks. Yes, this is a REAL THING.
My first strand fell down behind the spice rack, and the second ended up on the sink tap. The third fell off the kitchen wall, but perhaps, the scientist in me pondered, it was the wrong kind of wall. I flung pasta against various walls around the house and accidentally down the hallway.
Success! There are vanishingly few occasions when I am pleased to see food stuck to parts of my living room, but today I have enough spaghetti to drown myself in so Good Housekeeping be damned.

Day 3: Bits Of Wrong Stuff

My breakfast as usual was oatmeal, and then I broke open the spaghetti for lunch, or more correctly I broke off the spaghetti. What you see is a bowl of snapped-off-ends-of-spaghetti. Long strands of pasta are annoying, so I put a stop to that whole business early on.
I added oregano, which are the dark, diseased-looking spots. It was not fresh. It was dried. It was as dry as three-day-old grass clippings, and added as much to the dish.

I really shouldn't have oregano. It's like a nine-year-old going to a karate lesson and being handed a throwing knife. It can only end in tears.

I made a few plates of baked potatoes with salt, oil, and paprika. They are easy to make, but somehow I fouled up the first batch by not using any oil. This left the paprika exposed, and paprika without oil is like George Bush without cue cards.

Dinner was rice.
I sauteed some onions with butter.
At least, that was the idea. Really what happened was that I put onion bits in a hot frypan, then messed about slicing some butter off the block. The onions seized their chance to adhere to the pan. By the time I got the butter melted, all chance of floating the onions had disappeared and they returned to that carbonised state that nature adores. They appear here as small black elements in an otherwise minimalist palette of partially-cooked white rice. Not appearing: the burnt onion shrapnel I flicked halfway across the kitchen while trying to save it from a pre-gustatory death. It is out of frame, stuck to the side of a fruit bowl and a kettle.

Food I Ate Today:

37c — Rice

19c — Cereal

17c — Potatoes

8c — Apples

81c — Total

Day 2: Rice

Rice occupies a place in my mind alongside filling in tax returns and walking home drunk when you've spent your taxi money on beer. It promises nothing but drudgery and stodgery. I look at the featureless kernels of rice and see less spark of human kindness than a line of airport security workers.
Rice, somehow sensing this through a cereal form of low animal cunning, has frustrated me in all previous attempts at turning it from a commodity into a food. It has congealed, burned, dried too much, refused to dry enough, turned strange colours, and generally engaged in behaviour unbecoming of a cereal.

Nevertheless, it is cheap as chips and I have two kilograms of it. I followed the instructions on the pack and was soon looking at the business end of a boiling pot of rice (200g, 37c).
My stovetop burners are as capricious as a Spanish girlfriend. They engage at full blast at almost every point on the dial. This is great for boiling things, but simmering is quite another matter. After stirring and enlidding, I tried to find the mildest point on the dial with the strained delicacy of one explaining to Guadalupe that sequined capri pants may not be appropriate work attire. After accidentally turning the heat off entirely twice, I found the sweet spot and settled back patiently.

The rice wasn't burned, exactly; it was more... generously browned in a clumpy layer at the bottom. I let it rest for a while and reflected on where my life had taken a wrong turn, then churned the whole shebang into a bowl. Happily, the clumps were a pleasant mocha shade rather than the espresso tone I had feared.

Given that large parts of the rice were already fried, I took half and fried it by turns with Worcestershire sauce and chicken stock powder. The latter was fine; the former tasted like sarcasm in food form.

Revisiting bready things, I mixed up some more flour and water, but this time the water was hot and mixed properly. I added a few grams of active yeast and a teaspoon of sugar, then let it ruminate and fester for several hours.
When I came back it had risen by about half, so took 35g of the firm and sticky mixture and gave it a ride in the radiation box. While it came out looking surprisingly like food, the consistency was that of a disgruntled turtle.
I left the rest to rise some more while I plotted its demise.

Later, I saw that it had not risen. I was crestfallen and immediately burned it in a pot and ate it in front of the other food, which appeared visibly shaken.

I fried the remainder of the rice with stock and onions. It was a fair whack of food which at the time felt like enough but upon later reflection was not, and I made soup with diced potatoes.

This is the soup. It is heartier than it appears, so watch out.

Cost of food eaten today:

19c — Oatmeal

37c — Rice

12c — Apples

6c — Potatoes

11c — Flour

85c — TOTAL

From $20 per day to $20 per week, and beyond.

Posted by Brody

I buy lunch every day, and sometimes breakfast and dinner. I don't know exactly how much I spend on food, but it's probably around $20 per day. I like the eating, but not so much the preparation, so it makes sense to outsource the planning and assembly and sit comfortably at the end of the supply chain.

People survived on much less than $20 a week before Consumerism, and many still do in parts of the world, but it's hard to imagine what that's like. So what if my circumstances, or the system that provides cheap food, were to change for some reason? How well prepared would I be? If I can go from $20 per day to $20 per week, maybe I could go to $2 per week if I had to, like if the world were overrun by zombies.

So after spending what probably amounts to a hundred dollars' time and petrol bargain hunting, I came up with this; $19.51 worth of homo sapien sustenance:

1. potatoes (4.1kg) -- $2
2. 10 pack of beef instant noodles -- $4.07
3. Loaf of white bread -- $1.45
4. pasta (500g) -- $1
5. mince (524g) -- $3.5
6. rice (500g) -- $2.59
7. pumpkin (1.5kg) -- $1
8. onions x 6 -- 60c
9. rose apples x 12-- $1.30
10. cabbages x 2 -- $1
11. parsley (90g) -- $1
    

If my daily budget works out I won't even have to eat the sculpture.

Day 1: Fighting Food With Fire

I began the day with cereal (80g, 20c) with boiling water and just enough cinnamon to be pretentious.
This amount of cereal will exhaust my supply precisely at the end of the week.

At lunchtime I was hungry, and my lack of caffeine had made me grumpy. I threw 100g (15c) of flour into a bowl and added water until it stirred properly.

I had created half a kilogram of glue.

Flour has magical properties, right? I mean, you put it in an oven and then you have bread; how does that work? I don't know. I don't have an stove, but I do have a stovetop. I poured some of my glue into a frypan and pretended it was a neophyte pancake.
It was not. It glommed onto the pan and then fell to bits when I tried to flip it. I used two forks to get it upside down. My glue practiced passive resistance at every juncture.

Eventually I burned it sufficiently on both sides that it held together. Unfortunately it was still squidgy in the middle, so I blasted it in the microwave for two minutes to show it who was boss. I was boss.
Having achieved success in my very first attempt, I made another one with nothing but microwave power, then a further two small versions of my first effort.
The picture to the right shows #1 on the right, #2 at the bottom, and #3 and #4 on the left.
The gustatory experience was mixed. The fried+nuked gluecakes were rubbery, while the nuke-only version was hard in the middle and wobbly on the edges, like a UFO.

This was alarming enough to my system that it made no further demands on me until dinnertime.
I looked at my huge bag of potatoes and set about chopping them up, down, sideways, and gratingly. I put the sliced and scattered potato pieces onto a plate and microwaved them until they started making noises like a fat man climbing the stairs, then I sprinkled them with salt and paprika and blasted them some more.
I grated a potato and threw half the bits in a frypan. Then I grated some onion and put it in too, but I couldn't see properly because my eyes were stinging. They stuck together and burned, but that just made them easier to flip.
I like flipping things.
The rest of the grated potato went into what remained of my lunchtime glue. I hoped that the gratings would provide the concoction with structural integrity.
In the name of Science I scraped it all into a frypan and left it there to think about what it had put me through earlier. It responded magnificently, and after a little encouragement flipped as one cohesive piece of food! I did a fist-pump and then kept flipping it. And then it burned a bit. Oh dear.

The microwaved potato slices were delicious, the grated oniony bits were crunchy, and the wattle-and-daub pancake was surprisingly not horrendous. Not a bad dinner for 23c.

Later I ate an apple (4c) and had some baked potatoes (21c).
My first day's total: $0.83.

My food

I initially made the bold move of buying ingredients rather than easy-to-eat food. This may prove a mistake.

$2.25 — Flour, 1.5kg

$2.69 — Rice, 2kg

$1.05 — Spaghetti, 500g

$1.99 — Oatmeal, 575g

$2.00 — Potatoes, 4.1kg

I weakened this afternoon and bought some produce.

$0.39 — Apples, 1.3kg

$0.34 — Onions, 300g

The Challenge

My flatmate and I are undertaking a culinary challenge: to each live on less than $20 worth of food for one week.

Here are the rules:

1. If you spend over $20 for the week's food, you must pay $20 forfeit.
   Further, if you go over $25, you must put on a balaclava and walk through a shopping center.
   
2. You may add seasoning you already own, but no more than 1 teaspoon per meal of an item
   (e.g. oil, salt, sugar, spices).
   This only applies to things you would never eat by themselves.
   
3. All food eaten must be paid for, and at the price that Joe Public would pay.
   No gifts, loans, bartering, or asking for special treatment.
   
4. No sharing/split food purchases—your food should be separately prepared and purchased.
   Receipts or witnesses required.

 This challenge is an exercise by two people with plenty of money, for a short period, with a focus on cooking (which we are bad at). It's not about a frugal lifestyle or a balanced diet; it is a curiosity for the internet and an interesting departure from the status quo.

About Me
I am a terrible cook.
The few times I have attempted rice, the resulting congealed mess was rendered interesting only by the blackened base providing the morass with structural integrity. I once cooked a chicken dinner by frying frozen chicken, and then—when nothing good came of it—placing the frypan and its contents in the oven. The chicken was largely cooked, though it was flavored by the aroma of the wooden handle, which came out well done.
I subsist largely on sandwiches, fried eggs, oatmeal, fruit and coffee. Every once in a while I throw some spices at frying beef and hope that it somehow influences the taste through processes unknown.
I bought some cheese a while ago. What color is new cheese?
In short, I need this challenge to drag my culinary skills, like a caveman's knuckles, out of the grim wilderness and into the warm hearth of civilisation.


PHOTO CREDIT: http://www.ojbratland.com.ar/