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Day 4 Day 4 and we were still eating well. Even managed a bit of homemade pasta.
Yes, this was us a week ago. A whole week ago! I was going to stop here because life got busy and then I didn’t think anyone was reading. But then someone asked me about day 4 and whether it happened on Facebook. And then I read a fantastic post by All About Balance that was inspired by my challenge (wow, yes I inspired this amazing blogger).
So, here it is – day 4.
Day 4 and we were really stretching out our supplies. We are on the home stretch, and we are doing well.
I tried making another sourdough starter, but perhaps due to the cold weather snap, it didn’t do anything. Instead, I made damper. It was not the best batch of damper ever. In fact, it was a bit crusty. But it went down nicely with leftover soup at lunch, and it went really well as a base for bruschetta that evening (bruschetta was made with margarine, one chopped tomato and half a chopped onion – no lovely fresh basil or olive oil or ciabatta bread, but it still was yummy.)
But before I got to dinner, there was breakfast (porridge) and lunch (leftover chicken soup) with damper and some leftover muffins. Actually, I had some leftover brown rice at work as well so it was a bit of a feast of leftovers.
For dinner – ta da – we had an entree of bruschetta followed by homemade fettucini with a marinara tomato sauce.
I even made the fettucini myself – or at least I should say WE made it because I had help in the kitchen.
Yes, we just whipped up homemade fettucini mid-week.
This is not something we do every day. Actually, truth be told the pasta machine has been in the back of the cupboard for some time now. Usually, we would be happy to break out a packet of pasta. But you see, we didn’t have 65c to splurge on pasta so I had to use our existing eggs and flour to make our own.
Nor was this perfect: because I used normal plain flour rather than a ‘hard’ Italian flour, the pasta was a bit soft and sticky. You can’t tell from the pictures, but it would not pass an Italian mama test.
The effort involved was a big take away from our frugal cooking week. Well, take away as in a lesson learnt rather than fast food. You can cook frugally if you avoid processed foods and do things from scratch. It is rewarding and rustic and unlike anything you can buy in a shop. But it does take a lot of effort. I was already tired from working all day (I didn’t even change out of my bright yellow cycling gear). I can imagine what it would feel like to be working in more than one job, not having much food, and then having to put in a lot of effort to make things from scratch. It is hard to be creative when your stomach is rumbling and you are tired.
So this was day four of our challenge. What do you think? Could you make pasta mid week?