Pictures and Words

Hello! My name is Peter C. Hayward, and for the month of February, I’m only spending twenty-eight dollars on food. I hope I do not die!

For my first meal, I tried some "Yum Yum" noodles. Will they live up to their name?

I had to run straight from shopping with Em to an impro workshop (run by Edge Improv, if any Brisbanites are interested in learning improvisation) so I didn’t get a chance to bust out the rice and cook that. What’s more, being completely without a microwave, a kettle, an stove-top, a saucepan…even a bowl, I had to eat the noodles raw.

Back in Primary school (grades 3-6 in New South Wales, where I’m from) this was actually a standard lunch for me – I hated sandwiches, so mum would put a packet of Maggi 2-minute noodles in my lunch-box instead, which I would then eat straight out of the packet. I was telling Em this – she works in schools, and she tells me that this is still a common habit, but it’s dreadfully unhealthy.

These aren’t Maggi 2-minute noodles, however, these are Asian Supermarket Yum Yum noodles, and I was surprised to discover a difference as soon as I opened the packet:

It definitely gets points for spelling "flavour" correctly.

Maggi noodles (“just like mum used to make”) don’t come with a small packet of oil. They come with a small packet of flavouring, a brown powder that is quite delicious when put into boiling water with the noodles, but are just incredibly overpowering when dumped on top of the uncooked noodles.

Flavoured oil? That was new to me, and I ripped open the packet to see what it looked like:

I try to avoid crudities on my blog, but you can't deny: it looks like shit.

I tentatively tasted the brown, oozing liquid (“flavoured oil”)  and discovered that it was incredibly spicy.

Me, I’m not a spicy food kind of guy. Whenever I get Nandos chicken, I don’t order hot, I don’t even order mild – I order “lemon and herb”, the option included for 90 year-old men or very small children. I avoid curries, I avoid anything with chillis in it, I am not a spicy food kind of guy.

Thinking about it, the poo ”flavoured oil” probably wasn’t even that spicy. I’m just a complete wimp when it comes to hot food.

So my face screwed up, and I resisted the temptation to spit it out, and instead spread the rest of the packet all over the noodles, hoping that it (like the Maggi noodles of my youth) would be counteracted by the utter blandness of the noodles themselves.

The packet also came with a small sachet of herbs (or something resembling herbs, anyway.) so I sprinkled them on as well, and in the middle of a busy Brisbane street, on a Saturday afternoon, proceeded to eat my first meal of February.

Cuisine it ain't.

It wasn’t too bad. With each bite, I was reminded more of my childhood, running around Glenbrook Primary School, pretending we had guns and shooting each other. Hassling teachers, pretending we were superheroes and shooting each other, drawing, sketching, pretending we were cops, and shooting each other…

I was also reminded that noodles and strange spicy substances (poo) don’t really make an amazing meal. I’d probably give it 3/10, but it only cost me $0.44, so I’m not complaining too much. I kept reaching for my bottle of water, but anyone with any experience with hot foods probably wouldn’t even notice the flavour. 

You could probably live on them, but I wouldn’t ever like to.

After I finish my impro workshop, I’m going to go home and weigh myself! I would have done it here, but my cameraman refused to take a photo of me stripped down to my boxers and socks in the middle of the street. Prude.

Up next: The initial weigh-in!

(total money spent so far – $12.20)

Hello! My name is Peter C. Hayward, and for the month of February, 2009, I am only going to spend twenty-eight dollars on food. I hope I do not die!

Checkin' out rice.

This morning, myself and my friend Em went shopping. My housemate Cannibal Kate, in collaboration with my sister, MeatGirl, had made a list of foods that they thought would be cheap and full of all the necessary food-words: vitamins, minerals, protein, carbohydrates,progesterone, enzymes, combinatorics, ergodics, riemannian, and some fats. (but not too many!)

• Rice
• Kidney Beans
• Oranges/orange juice
• Fabric softener

Em knows her way around the Asian supermarkets – she used to challenge herself by buying something that she didn’t recognise every week, and learning the correct way to cook it – so we compared large sacks of rice in a few different places, before finding a 5kg bag of “sticky” rice (the stuff used in sushi) for $10:

This was the second photo I took - after the first one, I said "You look surprised," which I think she took as an instruction.

You’ll notice it’s extra super quality.

The bag conveniently told you how many servings of rice it provided:

82 servings is just under 3/day for the entire month!

A number of people had suggested getting two-minute (or “ramen”) noodles of some kind, so while we were buying the rice, we thought we’d look around for something. We hit the jackpot:

TOO MUCH CHOICE

They were all $2.20 for five packets, which is fairly reasonable. After much debate and decision-making, we decided on the brand called “Yum Yum”, purely for the name.

We checked out kidney beans, but we weren’t quite sure what kidney beans were. Thanks to a quick Wikipedia search, I’ve discovered that we were correct in our assumption that they were the ones that looked like kidneys.

I completely forgot to look for oranges until I started typing this up. No Vitamin C for me for a few days!

After making our purchases, we went to the local food court, where Em decided to mock my hungry state by having a diet boke:

The bitch.

She also saw the irony in the fact  that we were sitting in a food court, a little temple to food, and took a photo accordingly:

"FOOD", the signs scream, "IT'S WHAT'S FOR DINNER". I thought it would be amusing to don a sad face, because I was actually having quite a marvellous day.

I’m going to go and have my first meal – one of the “yum yum” packets of noodles, because I won’t be home until this evening. I will come back and report on the taste!

Ever since I came up with the idea for this project a few weeks back, I’ve been pricing everything according to “days worth of food.” I spent $8 on a kebab the other day – all the time I was eating it, I was thinking “in February, this is more than a week’s worth of food.” I had some steak at a pub, and it almost cost more than a month’s worth of food.

Next time you’re buying fast food, think to yourself, “How many days worth is this?”

Up next: The first meal.

(total money spent so far – $12.20)

Hello! My name is Peter C. Hayward, and for the month of February, I’m only spending $28 on food! I hope that I do not die.

I am not actually hungry in this photo. That is called "acting". I had just filled up on a large meal of terrific pancakes, and terrible sausages. Apparently it's a Canadian combination. Oh, those wacky Canucks.

It’s just passed midnight, and at the beginning of 28 Days, 28 Dollars I find myself at Brisbane’s Pancake Manor – it’s a big old church, that was converted into a 24-hour house of pancakes. They also cook steak, for reasons that I don’t fully understand.

At the end of the experiment, at 11:59pm on February 28th, I plan to return to the Pancake Manor and celebrate the end of the project by ordering my favourite meal – Bavarian Apple Crepes. Pancake Manor does some damned good crepes.

Two people that will be helping me out on this project, Em (she’s new around here) and Cannibal Kate (you may remember her from such experiments as StinkyPete, and StinkyPete 1.5) were there too. As soon as it turned midnight, they started really enjoying their meal:

"Mmmm, Peter, it's so gooood. Oh yum. Do you want some? Oh that's right you can't, can you? Oh, your loss...it's soooo nice."

Tomorrow: Em is taking me shopping for cheap food, and also a set of scales. (I don’t own any, and thus have no idea how much I weigh at the moment.)

(total money spent so far - $0)