Food II

Well the first week of my attempt at food frugality is up. Herein lies the report.

After some thought I decided to start off slow, eschew the ascetic $25 budget, and concentrate on eliminating food waste instead. A lift to the Subiaco Station Street Markets, and Woolworths, later I had spent $35.

Included was what I thought was a weeks worth of food. Bran cereal, two litres of milk, a lettuce, a bunch of English spinach, bag of tomatoes, three onions, bag of carrots, choy sum, potatoes, a dozen eggs, two 450 g cans of crushed tomatoes, a large handful of field mushrooms, a couple of apples, a couple of pears, a few bananas, five Kiwi fruit, and a whole chicken.

It started off smashingly, with a roast chicken and vegetables stretching out for three meals, and the remainder chicken thrown in to some leftover soup from some weeks earlier. Large amounts of salad were consumed, two fruit were eaten a day, carrots provided great snacks. Then it started to break down around Wednesday night.

I slept about four hours on each of Tuesday and Wednesday nights because of lab work and trying to get some reports done to apply for a completion scholarship. Thursday was around 10 hours of more report writing, and by that evening I needed a drink. Drinks were had, then pizza paid for and eaten. I slept through breakfast on Friday, and just Could Not Be Bothered with preparing a salad for lunch. Take away Curry Laksa was sourced, and dinner was mostly provided by The University. However, drinks were also provided, and eventually I paid for more pizza!

Saturday I slept through breakfast again, and was decidedly too hung over to be bothered with preparing food. A kebab was eaten around lunch time in between lab work. A service station meat pie was a late dinner. Today I once again slept through breakfast, less hung over, but in a rush to get to the lab. No lunch prepared, kebab it was. Tonight I aim to cook *something*.

A list of food that has as yet been uneaten is: all twelve eggs, two potatoes, three Kiwi fruit, a pear, an apple, an orange, about one salad's lot of lettuce and spinach, most of the bunch of choy sum, both cans of crushed tomatoes, half the bran cereal, one litre of milk, and half the carrots.

No trip to the markets was made this week, which is good as I've still got all that food to get through. All in all, I have missed or replaced meals with take-away nine times. Even withstanding the naughtiness, I still probably bought a little too much food. Next time around I'm going to try and buy a little less and see how that goes. I mean if I run out of food, there is always service station meat pies to tide me over.

Time management

It has occurred to me lately that I spend an inordinate amount of time reading about current events and Australian politics; an amount of time that is not compatible with the time needs of everything else in my life.

I am toying with the idea of limiting my politics and current events reading to one contiguous hour a day. I believe this is doable, but will mean that I won't be able to read through the hundreds of comments on political blogs anymore. My trimmed reading list would then be:

Mostly daily

• ABC News Online 
• Club Troppo
• Crikey daily newsletter
• Grog's Gamut
• John Quiggin
• Larvatus Prodeo
• Meganomics
• Paul Krugman
• Peter Martin
• The Political Sword
• Politically Homeless
• Possum Pollytics
• Pure Poison
• Sydney Morning Herald
• The Stump
• vexnews (mostly just the hilarious headlines)
• Wonk News

Occasionally

• The Economist
• The Guardian Weekly
• The Monthly
• Quadrant

I guess I should stop watching ABC News 24 so much as well.

Food

I like eating. I like eating good, tasty food. However, I detest my biological urge to eat, and I do not like paying money for food. There is not much I can do about my first problem, however the second does have some recourse. Quite a few months ago I tried to eat on $4 a day. It was actually fairly easy, for the first two weeks.

To achieve the scale of cooking needed to reach such a miserly goal I resorted to cooking vats of food and freezing it down into portions. The majority of these meals were vegetable, lentil, and potato curries of different flavours. Eggs and free bread (thanks do David's brother) also made notable appearances. As noted above, this was fine for around two weeks. However, even having cooked around five different meals, variety became a problem. Furthermore, I discovered that frozen then microwaved rice doesn't have a very nice texture. I started leaving the regime for take-away food more, and more often.

Because my life seems to be governed by waves of apathy and enthusiasm, I am once again considering an ascetic diet. This time I expect it will still be mostly made up of vegetables, lentils, potatoes, and rice. In fact, I still have a bunch of rice and lentils left over from the last endeavour. I'm not sure how to overcome the tedium of such a diet, but I have some ideas that I think will help.

• Salads (skeptical here, not cheap to make a decent tasting salad)
• Noodles
• Some meat, perhaps a roast chicken every week?
• Tofu/tempeh 
• No frozen then reheated rice
• Try and fit in some fruit into the budget 

I'll think more this conundrum through the week, before I go shopping at the markets for cheap fruit, vegetables, eggs, and cereal. I'll also have to think up some way of making cheap and tasty lunch, because that's the most likely time I'm going to ditch the rigour and grab a burger instead.