£1 a day per person for food

[Amaranth]

In the Jamie's Game posts on cooking a main meal for four people for £5, several people mentioned cooking in the range of £1 or 1 euro per person a day for food.

If you do this sometimes, what are some of your favourite daily menus?

Here are some of ours:

***Daily Menu 1***
Egg on toast from Homemade bread
Tea (reuse tea bag for other meals)

Vegetable Lentil soup
Carrot sticks

Chicken and Broccoli in White Sauce over Baked potatoes
Baked Apple

***Daily Menu 2***
Oatmeal (with foraged or garden berries in season)
Tea (reuse tea bag for other meals)

Chicken Pasta Salad with frugal/seasonal vegetables

Cassoulet (frugal version)
Salad or cooked green vegetable


Also, does anyone know of any blogs or websites with £1 or 1euro a day per person for food or similar from other countries? I know of four from different regions of the US, one where the people mostly just went for the least expensive food, one where the blogger ate as healthily as possible and one that was in between the two, and a fourth where they focused on an African cuisine.

I'd also be interested in French or Italian blogs like that as well. Depending on the season and what's ripe in the garden, some months of the year it's easier to cook UK style meals and a few months we have more French, or Italian ingredients.

[Islay]

Would you be able to post the websites you've seen so far for doing this? I've been toying with the idea of doing it for one week on my blog, more to see if there are any frugal ideas I can carry through to 'normal' life than to do it long term. I currently do more like £7 per day (organic and local), which is rubbish!

[Amaranth]

Here are the blogs and websites I have found so far.

Central US and African (separate months for each)
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Dollar-A-Day?format=xml
and they now have a website where they do a different challenge each month. The end of the African challenge might be at the beginning of the website.
http://hope-heals.org/


West coast US. This is the least healthy version I have seen so far. Unfortunately, they seem to have taken down all the posts from the $1 a day challenge now that they are working on a book about it. But you can get some ideas from the media references that are still posted.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Dollar-A-Day?format=xml


Eastern US
Here she planned carefully to get the most nutrition.
http://lessisenough.wordpress.com/2009/02/page/4/
Her introduction is on February 9, 2009
So far this is my favourite as she has the most whole foods.

[Islay]

Thanks very much for those links, I'll have a proper read of them later!

[Pixie]

For me that is about $1.85 Canadian

So today I would eat:

Breakfast:
Two Eggs (next year from my chickens hopefully!)
Toast (homemade)

Lunch:
Sticky Rice with raisens

Supper:
Pasta with butter (made from milk) and parmasean cheese or tomato sauce (home made)

Plus I have enough left over for a snack of 3 pieces of pure chocolate and a few dried dates or figs.

[missy]

would definately be interested in reading what people have on a £1 budget for an Italian menu.

much easier to test out now that the children are on summer holidays and not taking lunch boxes to school.

[Islay]

I'm having a toned down version of £1 per day for this week - £1.78 per day! And I'm allowing myself access to the store cupboard. All of which probably makes it completely cheating, but I'm easing myself into the concept slowly!

[patR]

Hmmm we tend to eat like this most of the time, again its easier as we grow our own and although we are not veggies we eat very little meat, but what we do eat is extremely cheap over here, I can buy a corn fed chicken for a couple of euros, roast it for two people one day, cut the remaining meat off and freeze for another day (two meals) then make a stew with the scraps and bones plus dried beans and veg another day... 6 meals- add the veggies from the garden a few dried beans... still not more than 3 euros all together, 50cents a head... its my all time budget...
Aubergine bake,

All veg from garden...
3 aubergines sliced.
2 onions, sliced.
1/2 jar homemade tomato passata.
cheese sauce.

fry aubergines till slightly golden, onions till soft, layer in a baking dish with passata, cover with cheesy sauce and sprinkle of thyme and bake till soft and brown and bubbling.
serve with rice and beans (boiled rice with sliced green onoin added, and cooked dried black eyed beans ) carrots and cauli.
yummy.

Works well with beetroot too... just substitute the aubergines for beets and take out passata add mushrooms if you have....

[patR]

I dont know about the uk nowadays but generally pulses, are a fantastic cheap meal, high in protein and good for you too... very versatile too... add to veggies from the garden and a pound a day should be attainable...

Again, look at the meat you eat (if you do) we did, and halved it... I look back now and cannot believe the amount of meat we'd eat in one meal... wow , now we have meat maybe only once a week at most and then a small amount, but as in post above, pork chops here are less then 2 euros a kilo!! we have one each... 50 cents or less each....

[ina]

Meat free is definitely cheaper - but fruit and veg is still the expensive part of it; even if you do grow your own, it's not really "free" - you should take into account anything and everything you buy for your garden, be that compost, tools, seeds of course etc. It really is difficult to get your 5-a-day on a tight budget, even of you only buy the cheap stuff.