Budget Food: Scrambled Egg on Toast

Carrying on my budget food theme, a quick and easy breakfast to make is scrambled egg on toast.

For one person:

1 egg             13p            My eggs are free range because I refuse to support caged hens. So they are 13p an egg.
Splash of milk if you like.    5p
Seasoning.          1p
1 slice of toast      5p
Knob of butter for the toast and to cook the egg.         10p

Toast the toast.
Whisk up the egg in a bowl and add seasoning and a splash of milk. This makes it much lighter. Leave out the milk if you are a purist. Cook in a frying pan and turn out on to the buttered toast.

Total cost of the breakfast: 34p

 

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Book a 1 hour session with me at only $25 per hour, give me a UK time at which to call and I will phone you.

There is no need to leave your real name or even to talk about specific things. Sometimes it just helps to talk things through with someone else to get a clearer picture in your own mind of what to do.

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Budget Food: Tortilla – Spanish Omelette

Ingredients:
1       medium onion          6.5p
1       medium potatoes     10p
3       eggs                        39p
1       knob of butter           20p
seasoning to taste

Preparation:
Finely chop a medium onion and gently fry it in a frying pan. We want it to soften and not go brown.
Peel two small or one medium potato and slice it as thinly as possible. Add this to the onion in the pan and cook both of them gently until soft. Depending on the potato, this should take between 10-20 minutes. If the potato is not cooking, then add a splash of water and simmer with a cover until done.

In a bowl, break three eggs and beat together. Add seasoning to taste.

When the onions and potatoes are done, and slightly cool, transfer them to the egg and mix.

Wipe the pan and add some butter or oil. Add the whole egg, onion and potato mixture and cook gently for around 20 minutes. Turn the mixture over and cook on both sides until the egg is completely cooked.

Total cost 75.5p

 

Budget Food: Chewy Cookies

The first budget food recipe I have researched is those big fat chewy cookies which you can buy in supermarkets and from stalls. These can cost up to £1 each in some places, so I was wondering how much it costs to make them. The prices are from Aldi and are correct on the 10th of February 2012.

This is the recipe:
250g    self raising flour                     9p
125g    butter                                 59.5p
200g    sugar                                  47.5p
1         egg                                     13p

plus anything else you like such as chocolate chips, raisins, dried fruit, etc.

Preparation:
Preheat the oven to Gas mark 3/170 degrees C. Grease a baking sheet lightly.
Melt the butter and add the sugar. Stir until it is well mixed and begins to be a little lighter in colour. Wait until it is cool then add the egg and mix again until it is creamy and light. It does not look like cake mixture, just a little lighter. Then mix in all the flour until it is a smooth consistency.

Drop largeish amounts of the mixture onto the baking sheet with a tablespoon taking care to keep them around 5-6cm apart because they will spread out in the oven.

Bake for 15 minutes. The chewy, soft consistency comes from underbaking them slightly. They will be large, flat slightly sticky cookies when they come out, but when cool, they are fine.

Using this recipe, I made 17 medium sized cookies for £1.29.

That is 7.6p per cookie.
(Include energy costs if you can work them out for the length of time that the oven is switched on).

 

Budget Food

These times are very hard for a lot of people. Someone who is living on benefits must survive on around £60 a week. So, in this series on budget food, I have decided to see how to live on less.

All my prices are based on shopping at Aldi, which is the cheapest supermarket in this area. Once in a while I will also do a comparison with other supermarket prices.

The objective is to make more things at home, rather than buying things which have been ready made, like pre cooked meals, and just to see whether it is possible to have a happy variety of foods and how much they cost us to eat.

I don’t plan to preach about healthy eating or what you should or should not be giving to children. There are a lot of other websites like that around. We all live in the real world and do the best we can. We all eat chocolate and cake and unhealthy snacks from time to time because we enjoy them. This is meant to be purely an exercise in the cost of the food.

 

Misheard Song Lyrics

Which songs are these lyrics from?

Suck a little green pea soup

This is the doggie moggie age of Aquarius

Which songs have you been singing which turn out to say something completely different?

 

Famous Failures

There is nothing to fear but fear itself

The world is full of famous failures:

James Dyson

He famously tried to develop his famous vacuum cleaner 5000 times. This means that he failed 4999 times. What would have happened to him if he had given up on the 4998th time? Failure just was not an option for him. He just kept going until the end result was the right one and he had the design which was right.

Even then, he failed to get anyone to accept his new design! No-one wanted it. They did not want to manufacture it, they did not want to distribute it.

It is only by going through this type of failure that we now have the Dyson Vacuum Cleaner.

No-one wanted it here, so he went to Japan, where it won an award. He has his own manufacturing company, he has a knighthood. He did not face the fear, and rejection and failure by hiding in his room, shivering under the duvet. Perhaps for him, it was not a failure, but just another step towards his goal.

The way we survive massive failures like this, is by having self belief. By not letting our reactions go overboard when we have failed.

Do not forget that the world and our view of the world is very much made up of how we ourselves perceive it.

If someone is walking along the street and something terrible happens to them. What happens? Let us say that they fall over, or they do a huge sneeze which causes all the snot to erupt from their noses. For the person, this might be a hugely humiliating experience because they are the superstars in their own world. But for other people around them, who are also the superstars in their own worlds, it is just something minor happening to someone walking past.

It could be a short anecdote when they get home and tell their friends, but that is all.

Re-examine your failure and see what you have learned. Is it just a question of trying again somewhere else? Do you have to adjust something? Re-write? re-design?

From our failures sometimes, come our best successes.

 

Poem about being taken for Granted

There is a bag on the floor.
It is staring at me with its zippered eyelashes surrounding its mono eye.
Winking at the only one it knows will PICK IT UP!

Will zip it up and hang it up upon the hook which was put there JUST FOR IT!

This hook which hangs upon a DAY of arguments and shields the fragile silence which befell after the BANGING of the hook up on the wall.

This hook is the result of FIFTEEN YEARS.
Of silently following the wake of possessions like a little tug boat.
Flotsam and jetsam on the living room floor…
And bathroom floor…
And bedroom floor…
And kitchen floor…

Fifteen whole years and just one day
Of ‘OK! Stop nagging! I’ll do it!’
One tension-filled day, and then…
One EMPTY hook.

Copyright Survival Jones 2012. You are welcome to reproduce any or all of this poem, but please include an attribution and a link back to this page.

 

Examine your blog as if you were the Hotel Inspector

I love the Hotel Inspector. She goes into failing, horrible hotels and businesses which are mostly run by, (how to put this tactfully?) fruitcases. And with her searing insight and years of undaunted experience, she is able to spot exactly what needs to be changed to completely turn the whole thing around and give it all a completely new lease of life.

This typically involves getting rid of the horrible colours that the owners think are cute. Destroying unnecessary decorations, in one case, a ‘museum’ of other people’s unwanted junk! And covering everything in sight with such an air of freshness and newness that people can not resist staying there and being happy to do so.

She resolves family issues, and staffing problems and then at the end they have a brilliant re-launch party.

Tomorrow, take a step back from your blog. Sign out and visit it as if you were a casual visitor, just surfing on by on the look out for something useful or interesting to read.

1. What are your first impressions?
2. Is it clean and crisp?
3. Are your ‘best bits’ on display in prominent places, where they can be easily found?
4. Do the colours or the images clash on the page or in the brain?
5. Do you have a ‘museum’ of unwanted junk which needs to be removed?

So you know what needs to be fixed. Done that?

Good. As Alex Polizzi would say: “That’s brilliant dahling”.