Pictures and Words

Hello! My name is Peter C. Hayward, and for the month of February, I’m eating twenty-eight dollars worth of food. That is not a lot of food. I hope I do not die!

This is one of the foods that I don't miss.

While I was eating my dinner tonight, my cousin had a pizza from Eagle Boys, and also one of their Dessert Thingies. (that’s actually what they’re called.)

It was actually really good sitting next to him while he had the pizza, because I got to sit there and inhale the smell of it, a satisfying experience in itself. While I was eating my spaghetti, he had an apple crumble “Dessert Thingie” (pictured above) which smelled nice, but I’ve had them before, and they’re not great.

Sweet foods on a pizza base. It just doesn’t work for me.

I forgot to mention a meal yesterday – after I had the sardines, I was still hungry, so I gave the “Yum Yum” noodles another shot, based on commenter Oz’s suggestion:

The way to cook them is to cook the noodles then drain the water out, then add the Flavoring! then mix it around and they might actualy taste YUM!

They somehow managed to be worse than before. The flavouring that comes with the noodles (as I mentioned the first time I tried it) is spicy, and I am not a spicy foods kind of guy. What’s more, the spicy flavouring somehow completely failed to mask the greasy unplesantness of the noodles.

I’m going to give them another go some day, but I’ve worked out a way of making them delicious – cooking them up, and then frying them. I used to do it all the time as a kid, let’s see if the magic still works.

Today, after tasting (and subsequently spitting out) one of Cannibal Kate’s lime biscuits, I made myself a container full of rice, and went to help out with some filming. My job consisted of a lot of sitting (not much energy at all) and since I had an impro class directly after, I decided to hold back on the rice until then.

The diet become a lot easier – I assume that this is because my stomach has shrunk. I’ve heard that phrase a lot, but I can’t help but wonder – is that genuinely what happens? After two days, your stomach reduces in size? If you stop thinking for a day or two, your brain doesn’t shrink. What’s the deal? Any stomach experts out there, weigh in!

I had half my rice before the class started (rice releases its energy almost immediately) and the other half during the break. It was quite a physical class, but at no point did I feel tired or light-headed.

When we got home, I had my first bowl of spaghetti with tomato soup:

I added the butter because the rest of the meal just looked too depressing by itself.

It was edible, but not great. I preferred bread and butter…I think the main problem was the tomato soup. It’s the cheapest one there, and for good reason. It’s actually quite unpleasant – I added the butter, in an attempt to add some flavour, but it didn’t seem to make a lot of difference. 3/10. Tomorrow I think I’ll try the spaghetti on its own, and maybe the soup with some boiling water, separately (though I can’t see it being much better.)

In other news, Cannibal Kate texted me today, saying that she had dropped out of our bet. (I bet her twenty-eight dollars that she wouldn’t be able to live for five days on five dollars. She didn’t even last two.)

That means that at the end of this month, I will have spent $0 of my own money on food. I am not the richest fish in the bucket, so this is good news for me!

From the comments:

In reply to yesterday’s daily weigh-in, “RIUM+” comments:

Scales are usually funky things. Where you stand on them will usually give you a different weight measurement due to the way they work, with bending/stressing of materials and having only one force measurer . Try standing on them in different places and you’ll notice the number changes around

I stood on my scales in every way I could think of, and it gave me the exact same number every time. (I also fell off the scales twice.) Perhaps this works better with larger scales?

Plus, the more expensive scales use electrical resistance to determine your fat/water content if you tell them your height, gender and age. These scales are trying to look like those expensive ones so you think they’re worth more than they are.

That sounds like a much more likely solution.

From “goddess_amy”, over at the livejournal mirror:

Not that this is much help now, but the cheapest kind of pasta sauce is Passata (sp?). It’s Italian and basically just tomatoes, water and salt in a large 700ML bottle. Usually found at (Italian) greengrocers for about $1.00.

Oh, I don’t mind paying a bit more for spaghetti. I really, really like spaghetti. Beyond all reason, one could say.

For your budget, UHT milk is the cheapest with the home brands normally running at $1.09 per litre. If you had more money to spend on it, the cheapest way is actually milk powder. $4.60 for 1KG which makes 10L, or $0.46 per litre.

At the beginning of the month, I was tempted to splash out for a kilogram of milk powder – I’ve found 100 teabags for a dollar, so I could have afforded both tea and milk to go in it! (I hate milkless tea, and would rather just go without.)

At that point though, I had no idea how far the $28 would stretch. Buying milk for the much was too large a risk – it felt a little like saying “I would rather have tea then food for 5.6 days.”

If I were doing “60 dollars, 60 days” or something like that, I’d definitely splash out on the powdered milk, but over a month, I don’t think I’d use it all, and it’s not ultimately worth it.

Re the chicken throwing out – I can see why dumpster diving is so popular. Did you try scouting the bread aisle at this point? Bread normally gets marked down to $1.00 and then you could get a more nutritious wholemeal or multigrain loaf instead of white for slightly less money.

While I was wandering around, trying not to look too suspicious, I did notice bread for a dollar. But it was all stuff like “four spiced buns”, or “tea bread with icing” – it was all treat food. The $1 apple pie tempted me, but I can’t really afford to spend a day’s worth of food (still how I’m thinking) on a dessert.

Next month, I am going to pig out like it’s nobody’s business. I’ve started to mentally make lists of what I’m going to have, when. I probably won’t be seen without a chocolate bar in my hands for the entire first week.

The 28th is actually a Saturday night, and so at midnight, you’ll find me at the Pancake Manor – you’re all most welcome to join me there. I shall be having a celebratory feast! More on that closer to the date.

I lost another waterbottle today. That makes four waterbottles in four days. It’s really getting ridiculous. I am spending far too much of my “out and about” time thirsty, simply because I can’t hold onto a piece of plastic. My dreams have stopped being about food lately – the biggest effect that this experiment is having on my life at the moment is the amount of time it takes to write these blog posts, and the question I have to answer when people offer me food, or notice me eating rice in the city. The diet has become fairly routine.

I have started to say that I’m allergic to everything but rice, if I don’t feel like explaining the whole experiment.

In other news, I found Luka’s email address. Turns out that I was aware of how bad I am with paper, and I gave it to Cannibal Kate to hold. You can call off the search!

As always, leave any questions you have in the comments, and I’ll get around to them in tomorrow’s post.

Tomorrow: Daily Weigh-in.

(total money spent so far – $19.22)

Hello! My name is Peter C. Hayward, and this month, I’m only eating twenty-eight dollars worth of food. What a crazy idea! I hope I don’t die!

The Weight of Day Eight.

71.4kg (1 pound) today. That’s down again from yesterday, at roughly the same rate, as this graph conveniently shows:

Ah, graphs. Where would we be without them? Not on this website, that's for sure! It's all science and graphs around here!

After staying up into the wee hours of the morning writing last night’s mammoth post, I had to get up early this morning (I’m involved with some filming) so pardon my lack of enthusiasm in today’s photos:

Ten points to whoever can recognise the DVD on the floor and the book on the table (without already knowing what they are.)

In other news, Cannibal Kate made her first batch of Lime Biscuits! (she plans on making two batches.)

She made exactly 64. 32 each.

They are truly disgusting. They are completely inedible. She has somehow made a slight slip-up somewhere, because instead of making “delicious biscuits”, she has made horrible little sour bombs.

I wonder if I can trick my cousin into eating one.

This is not, I am assured, how they were meant to turn out – she’s going to make another batch, but I think I’ll take my money back. (this brings me back down to $19.22) I’ll survive without the lime biscuits (especially without those lime biscuits) and though I was rather looking forward to them, I think I’d rather have the money, in case of some kind of foodal emergency.

I did try one biscuit, but since I couldn’t swallow it (literally inedible) I’m not counting it as part of the 28 Dollars (I’ll say it was a trade-off for the butter I gave Kate for her sandwich last night.)

I’ll point out that Cannibal Kate is normally an exceptional baker. She makes the world’s greatest fudge (that’s actually how she got her nickname) and I’ve never seen a recipe of hers go wrong before. Normally, you must understand, she’s not cooking with ridiculous restrictions on her ingredients. I don’t want to insult her baking ability, it’s just that these, for whatever reason, fall strongly into the “did not work” camp.

Anyway, I’m filming today, followed by impro classes. I’ve packed myself a container full of rice, and I’m bringing my soy sauce along, so I should be set!

Tonight: Daily food blog!

(total money spent so far – $19.22)