Day 5 Last Day – Live Below The Line

I wasn’t hungry when I woke up. I don’t remember my dreams. But within minutes of starting our day it was obvious we were hangry. Don’t know it? It’s that state when lack of food makes you unreasonably angry and frustrated with almost everything.

We had it bad!

And perhaps we let it show a bit more today because it was our last day!

Food costs for day 5 =  $3.50 ($1.75/person) and we used every last cent today!

Successes

We MADE IT!  Some minor in-challenge edits to our food supply but we made it!

Also our Live Below The Line Team has raised over $1500 for our respective charities. Mine is Cuso International. Great job Andrea Tomkins, Rhonda H, Jayda Siggers, Meghan D’Mello, Vivian Cheng and Bridget Oland We are 9th on the Community Team Leaderboard  – – Bloggers Living Below The Line

Failures

I think this will cover the biggest failures of the day.

Dear Gerry:

Though lunch was also a solid failure for me.

And budgeting got badly screwed up and impacted dinner.

Day 5 Menu

Breakfast

Scrambled eggs & chives w/ Sour Dough Toast 50¢ (99¢/2 servings)

We had 4 eggs left, so eggs for breakfast and Gerry cooked.  When he cracked the eggs into the pan he hollered for me to come running with the camera.  Every single egg was a double yolker.  That’s pretty rare (something like 1 in 1,000 for commercial eggs).

But then again, I did had pick every egg in the dozen we bought.  6 of the 12 turned out to be double yolkers. (Say it out loud “double yolkers”, it’s fun right?)

Lunch

Pasta with Tomato Sauce $1.10  (55¢/2 servings)

I was really looking forward to this dish and saved our entire green pepper for it.  I am SO sorry I did.  It was one of the worst things I ate this week.  My body was not happy with me after this meal.   It tasted okay, though it was obvious from the flavour it was the most processed meal we had  – with dried pasta and canned crushed tomatoes. I don’t know if I had reached my tolerance level for challenging foods. If the combination of eggs and wheat in the day did me in. If the canned crushed tomatoes were or what exactly.  But in addition to stuff I won’t describe, I had to lie down for about an hour to wait for the cramps to stop.  So much for the “good” pasta dish I expected it to be.

Dinner

Pan-fried Pork Chop with Potatoes & Beet Greens 71¢  ($1.41/2 servings)

Our plan was to have a big final meal, but I blew the budgeting. In part because I was food hoarding earlier in the week.  The ingredients for our planned meal turned out to cost $2.84 ($1.41/person) but we only had $1.41 in our daily budget left for both of us to have dinner. So we had to edit. Hard.

This brings up the very real issue people have to face when living like this: one small screw up can mean someone doesn’t eat!  If I was a parent and doing this with my child, guess who would get dinner.  My kid!  No questions asked. Every day, every where in the world, people make this decision.  Though to call it a decision is silly. Because who in their right mind would eat and let their child go hungry? No one, that’s who.

Luckily there was a little bit of both soups left over from earlier in the week. They had already been “paid for” since we counted the full cost of the soup each day, so we each had about 1/2 a cup of free soup which made the meal less of a snack.

We split the pork chop and made a sauce from the garlic and mushroom. We each got 1 boiled potato (cut up small to seem like it was more) and 6.5 beans (each bean was cut up into 4 pieces. To get more bites of beans and again to fool our brains.)  Another trick, using tiny sandwich plates to make the plate look full.

In summary

There were a shocking number of things we didn’t get to eat which were in our budget for the week, but due to poor planning on my part we didn’t get to eat.

We are happy to be done!

We are happy we made it through!

We are thinking about everyone, everywhere who doesn’t have the luxury of counting down to the end!

I will be sharing some recipes over the weekend and doing a wrap up post Monday, so we aren’t quite done yet.

If this journey has engaged or entertained or moved you, please take a second and donate through my Live Below The Line Page, to Second Harvest, to Daily Bread Food Bank, to the Stop or to your local Food Bank or Food Security Charity.  Or learn more through the Community Food Centres of Canada

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Note: this post is part of my Live Below The Line series where I will be on a $1.75 food & drink budget from April 29th-May 3rd.
This is a game for me but a serious reality for 1.4 billion people in our world today.  Help support me by donating, or supporting Second Harvest and Daily Bread Food Bank.  

If you want to know more about what I’m involved in, you can read my disclosure statement here.

 

Image credit: Thanks to Tara Vaughn for the use of her “I’m Sorry For What I Said When I Was Hungry” card. It’s available on her Print Smitten Etsy store for all your apology needs.