Day 6 – Pound Shop Dinner Party

El Maestro came up with a great suggestion yesterday: I should host a dinner party only using ingredients from the pound shop. I have found six willing guinea pi…cough…guests and so in a weeks time will be the World’s First Pound Shop Dinner Party!

So any suggestions and recipes of dishes I can create for this wondrous evening would be gratefully received. I will also be adding a recipe page to the blog in case you are crazy enough to want to recreate anything you read about

Baked beans and rice?

Corned beef and tikka masala sauce?

Madeira cake and tinned tomato?

Day 5 – Shaped Beef

It seemed like suitable punishment for my lapse on Day 3 to find the worst possible meal in the pound shop. I had my pick of at least a dozen horrors-on-a-plate but one appealed to me least. Beef curry: chopped and shaped beef with soya mince, vegetables and rice in a cardboard box. Let me repeat that: meat in a BOX. Eurgh.

So I opened the packet of powder and dried meat cubes and simmered in water as instructed. Surprisingly it smelt nice. Nice enough for my brother to be drawn into the kitchen. I think he would have even been tempted to try some until he saw what it looked like. It was gloppy and brown with bits – not dissimilar I imagine to the contents of a baby’s nappy after a particularly enthusiastic go at the milk bottle.

I knew there was only one thing that could save this meal. One device that every junior chef learns to make a dish attractive. A sprig of parsley.

Ta dah! A tasty treat indeed.

 

Day 4 – Morganatic Wives

 

 You know how it is. You go into the pound shop for your usual tin of meat and come out with a novella by 19th Century American writer Henry James.

There were three books to choose from. A guide to French B&Bs (the 2003 edition naturally), a history of BBC Radio 4’s the Today program and The Europeans by Henry James. Since I wasn’t planning to time travel back four years for my next holiday and since I already listen to too much Radio 4 to be reading about it as well, I picked up The Europeans.

I haven’t read any Henry James before despite The Turn of the Screw having sat on my bookshelf for quite a while now.  The pound shop is the Land of Firsts. My first can of corned beef, my first taste of dehydrated ‘shaped’ beef (more on that another day) an now my first Henry James.  The blurb on the back:

Eugenia, an expatriated American, is a morganatic wife of a German prince, who is about to reject her in favour of a state marriage. With her artist brother she travels to Boston to visit relatives she had never seen before, in hopes of making a wealthy marriage.     

 I had to look up morganatic in the OED:  

 A marriage between a man of high rank and a woman of low rank who retains her former status, their children having no claim to the father’s possessions or title.   

So like Charles and Camilla. Will post a review of The Europeans when I finish it. 

Day 3 – Acorn Eating Pigs

 

A confession. I cracked and cracked big time. I knew it was bound to happen at some point during this month but I didn’t think it would happen by the third day. I think the pineapply-ness of day 2 coupled with the mandarin incident on Day 1 and the realisation that this would be the closest I got to fruit was just too depressing.

 So on Day 3 I went to Brighton to visit a friend and ate and ate and ate. In the morning we went to a great restaurant The Real Eating Company and were seated in the deli section surrounded by legs of Pata Naga Ham and smelly cheese. The Pata Naga is produced from a Iberian pig who spend their final days feasting on acorns. You could buy black squid ink (used for colouring dishes like paella) and a fine sherry vinegar from Spain. There was artisan chocolate sprinkled with salt and caramel flakes. Basically this place was the antithesis of a pound shop. I had a big english breakfast with the works, a banana and berry smoothie and chai tea. With each bite and slurp I was heading further away from the world of tinned processed meats and back to food reality.

For lunch I headed down to the seafront for cockles and mussels (alive alive-o). Oh jump into my mouth you lovely briney sea creatures! I thought we’d seen the last of the warm weather but it was a beautiful sunny day in Brighton. So I had a glass of white wine naturally.

It was a friends birthday that evening so i headed to the ‘burbs (Surbiton) for curry. Lamb Passanda in all its sweet glory with Peshwari nan.

 When I got home I had a rum and coke.

 Only then, fully sated, did I begin to feel guilty.

So I confess I failed miserably. But the bet is not over! With the permission of the maestro of the bet (my brother) I will start the month again. That’s right, it’s back to Day 1 for me. The bet will now finish on the 3rd of December rather than the end of Novemeber. Oh joy of joys!

 Repeat every day: I will enjoy the pinapple juice, I will savour the dehydrated vegetables, I will not stare greedily through the windows of waitrose……….

Total £s spent: Lots but none in a pound shop

Day 2 – Pineapple Overload

Breakfast: pineapple juice

Lunch: pineapple juice and packet of smokey bacon crisps

Dinner: pineapple juice and rice with dehydrated vegetables

Situation at end of day 2: full of pineapple juice

Total £s spent: 3 

 

DAY 1 – Mandarins

Today is the first day of what looks like being a pretty tough month. I went into my local pound shop today after work. The first thing that caught my eye was a purple plant. Hmm, I thought, that would would look nice in my window box. This was quickly followed by the fact that I can’t eat it. Food is clearly going to be my biggest obstacle in surviving November so I ignored the now half price Halloween masks and headed straight to the food aisle.

And what a bounty it was. Never has there been in the history of shops a greater selection of tasty sugary processed food. I did a quick scan for anything green (nothing) and then picked up the next best thing. A jar of mandarins in syrup. The nearest thing to a fruit you will find in a pound shop i suspect. Not having the heart to venture further I thought that would make a fine dinner so paid my pound and left.

Now I’m back at my apartment and I CAN’T OPEN THE JAR OF MANDARINS. No really I tried the elastic-band-around-lid trick. I called on the power of Grayskull. It still won’t open. I can now see why an otherwise perfectly good jarred fruit product has found its way to the pound shop shelves. So instead of starving tonight I have decided to forget my own rules and eat the last of the tomatoes from my fridge and hope tomorrow will be a better day.

Total £s spent today: 1