Two weeks and counting ... time for some serious investigations

With a couple of weeks left I decided I needed to go off and work out just how I plan to survive the five days other than eating a lot of pasta. The trouble I'm having is that two of the rules I listed in a previous post seem to contradict each other:

• The full cost of all the items you consume must be included in your budget. This means budgeting for whole packets of food items such as rice, pasta, noodles and eggs etc.
•  For items such as salt, pepper, herbs and spices, simply work out the cost of each item per gram and budget your shopping proportionally. Separate your items before the challenge so there’s no need to be digging around in your cupboards.

The first one suggests to me that if I buy an item I have to include the cost of the entire item in my weeks budget - so for example if I buy a loaf of bread for $1.50 which has 24 slices of bread - it doesnt matter if I eat 12 slices or all 24 slices - the bread costs $1.50 of the total budget of $11.25. But if this is the case then the second point seems to make no sense, because you are never going to use up a whole pot of salt, pepper or herbs in a week - so why would you bother?

Erring on the side of caution and not wishing to in anyway be seen to be cheating, I have therefore decided that if I use and item I must factor in the entire amount it cost me to purchase it, even if I only end up using a part of it.

With this in mid I headed off to Pak'N'Save (New Zealand's cheapest supermarket chain for those of you living overseas) and had a look around...

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I actually always shop at Pak'N'Save - I tend care more about price than glamour - so wandering around on concrete floors and under fluorescent lights is well worth the savings I make overall. And as with any vist to Pak'N'Save I started in the 'Aisle of Value"....

 Actually it was a rather disappointing AoV this week however I did manage to find more tinned tomatoes...

Yes. Yes. Yes. I now have a pantry full of tomatoes... but these were only 69c a can compared to 79c which was the cost of the ones I bought previously. Trust me when I say that 40c is a huge difference when its nearly 4% of your entire budget and drops the cost the pasta dish mention early to just $1.05c. I feel this justifies never needing to purcase tinned tomatoes again this decade.

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Quickly passing through the fruit and veg section I headed over to the pick and mix area of the store.
I rarely buy from here on a weekly basis. But the thought had occurred to me earlier in the week that this was the solution to the problem mentioned above - if I have to account for the cost of everything I purchase even if I wont eat it all, then I'll just buy what I intend to eat. Sound logic I thought...

Porridge... I've been thinking about adding in breakfast to my weeks challenge and porridge seemed the most sensible option. The whole of Scotland cant be wrong can it? Except for haggis obviously. And bagpipes.

Porridge is easy to make:
50g of Rolled Oats
250ml milk/water (whichever you prefer)
Sugar to taste (or not if you are on a budget)

It seemed a cheap breakfast - so I went and had a look at the rolled oats in the Pick and Mix.

 At 56c per 100g that seemed like a bargain. 28c per serving (plus the milk/sugar if used) and surely its cheaper to buy pick and mix than prepacked.

Well actually no. Not even close:

750g of Rolled Oats $2.39 = 32c per 100g

1.5kg of Rolled Oats $3.49 = 23c per 100g

SO I would be foolish to put the smaller amount. But am I ever going to eat15 bowls of porridge, let alone 30, in five days? I walked away despondent, wondering what the best solution was. But I have two weeks left to decide.

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Other things I learnt on my visit. Yes mixed herbs is definitely out - at $1.99 its just not a luxury I can afford.

I will need bread I feel. A loaf should see me through the week at $1.50 - and with 22 slices (including crusts) that's around 7c a slice.

I just made a sandwich with ham I purchased. It was 99c for 100g and I put 40g in the sandwich. So excluding margarine (I wont go through an entire tub in 5 days so its off the menu) the sandwich cost 54c. I can reduce this for the challenge using luncheon meat - so yes sandwiches are a viable lunchtime meal.

Frozen mixed vegetables... 1kg for $1.99... I'm still undecided about this purchase but I think I might. Thrown in with the pasta and to bulk things out, get a few vitamins and add some additional flavours for 40c seems worth it. Whether I'll eat 200g a day... well we'll see...

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After all that I came home. Without buying a coffee.

*glares at the elephant*