Live Below The Line

I haven't posted on this blog for a VERY long while as we don't have the allotment anymore, and for the last nearly 2 years we haven't even had a bit of garden.

But we're planning on taking part in Live Below the Line this year and this seemed like the place to write about it, as it is all to do with food and eking out as much as you can from as little as possible.

https://www.livebelowtheline.com/uk

So that is £1 per person each day for 5 days, for all food and drink. We'll give the difference between that and our normal food budget to charity, and hopefully it'll focus our minds on food waste, and food poverty here in the UK and in other places too. Some kind people might also sponsor us!

At the moment we're plotting and planning to see if we can do it as a family, without the kids losing out too much. They are way too young to understand (not quite 3 years and 1.5 years) and don't really do lentils/split peas/beans/chick peas, so the options we would take just for ourselves are out of the window!

I'm not sure if it will really work if we're trying to cook like normal for them but on on £1 a day for ourselves, so that is our focus just now.

Our plan just now is to try and buy a whole chicken, rice, veg, split peas, oats, milk, sugar, flour, frozen sweetcorn, oil, (maybe yeast too) and a few spices with our budget to feed us all, and the spend the boys' £10 on fruit, cheese, macaroni, and yoghurt to top them up.

Today's experiment was trying to make biscuits. If I have biscuits for morning and afternoon snacks alongside a bit of cheese, then they probably won't even notice anything has changed!

My Live Below the Line experimental recipe is 2 glasses of oats, 2 glasses of milk (not quite as full), 1 apple, 1tbsp sugar, 1tbsp water, 1/4 tsp ground cinnamon.

I cooked the chopped apple in a pan with the sugar and water until soft. Then added the cinnamon.

In another bowl I mixed the oats and milk left them for a bit, then microwaved them to thicken them a bit.

Then I mixed them both together and split the mixture into 24 dollops onto oiled baking trays. 15mins in a 150C oven saw them brown nicely on top, and they are now cooling.

They look OK, but we'll have to wait for the taste test to be sure!