Shopping hell -- a challenge for you all

So you know your normal weekly grocery shop? The one where you write a list but leave it at home accidentally and forget your bags and have the kids with you nagging for comics and it costs you double what you think because you haven’t planned meals and have fallen victim to every two-for-one offer there is? It’s not a barrell of laughs is it?

Or perhaps you are a meal planner. Perhaps you cleverly think out what you’re going to make each day and how you’ll use the leftovers in the next meal. And you save yourself a good wodge of money. But it’s still exhausting and by Friday you’ve given up and get a curry take out anyway.

Well try this.

Planning the meals for 18 people. Breakfast. Lunch. Supper. Snacks. FOR 31 DAYS.

These 18 people will be burning through roughly 5000 calories each, every day.  They need energy. These meals will need to be made on a tiny camping size stove that will swing wildly as the boat it’s on crashes over waves. It’s impossible to fit more than one pot on it at a time. You also need to use a stove ring to boil water as there isn’t any hot water for washing up.  The oven is too hot at the back and not hot enough at the front, making cooking anything in it an interesting juggling act.

These meals cannot include any ingredients that need to be refrigerated. So that rules out fresh meats, fresh vegetables (bar a few that have good staying power) and dairy. Because there isn’t a fridge. And it’s not like it’s cool on a fibreglass boat in the tropics, so things don’t exactly last.  Which means we’re dependent on tins and long life stuff.

You need to take into account allergies, dietary preferences like vegetarianism, religious food restrictions and general fussiness.

And just when you cooking/shopping planners par excellence start rifling through your survival cook books ready to prove to me how easy it all is, let me present you with our budget:

£3.50 per person per day. Yes folks. That’s £3.50 for breakfast, lunch, dinner, drinks and snacks. I do believe that prisoners get a bigger budget than that for their daily meal intake. And they aren’t paying all their earnings for the priviledge.

I am one of three people on the victualling team. The team who decides what everyone is going to eat everyday. Meals have to be planned down to the very last ingredient because their aren’t many M&S Simply Foods in the Atlantic. Day bags need to be made up of the ingredients for every meal in a given day. Tins need to have labels removed and their contents written on in permanent marker as labels at sea just fall off.

Until now I’ve been a spectator rather than an actively involved person because I don’t have enough hours in the day. However, today I headed off to Costco (with children - joy!) to do an initial reckie on pricing and what’s available.

We’re screwed.

I’d like to say that it’s beans on toast for 31 days, only that requires bread and a toaster, neither of which we’ll have. We will have a bread oven, but we need some recipes to make bread simply. And we won’t have butter. Because obviously that requires a fridge, so no bread and butter either.

So I challenge all of you to share your best long life recipes with me. They need to fit the criteria outlined above. I’m particularly interested in:

Desserts with tinned fruit that don’t require butter or too many eggs (as we’ll have to use powdered eggs). For example: Crumble without butter. how?
Baked goods that don’t require butter or eggs
Things to do with lentils. That blokes will want to eat.
Your best bread recipes that are simple and fool-proof
Any tinned items you’ve discovered that are the dogs hairy bollocks (rather than actual dogs hairy bollocks) which you’d like to recommend
And just for a final twist, we must be able to replicate these recipes with ingredients purchased in countries across the world where the language on the labels isn’t necessarily English.

Crack on and blind me with your brilliance please.

Home Office Mum resides in West Berkshire. Take one tired mum. Add two small boys. Mix in one manic home business and one long suffering husband. A simple recipe for chaos. Read all about it at her blog. She is also embarking on the Clipper Around the World Race, you can keep up with her at More to Life Than Laundry.

Photo credit: spiderpop
 

Comments

[Insomniac Mummy]

I'm afraid I have no brilliance to blind you with and have pretty much had a total meltdown even trying to think of any ideas!

The best I can offer is to wish you good luck!

[leslieanne]

wow. that's a challenge & a half!
are you actually going on the boat trip yourself? what's it all in aid of? sounds very very brave!!

as for ideas, hmm.
i used to live on tesco value pasta & chopped tinned tomatoes at uni - cheap & filling!
And tinned macaroni cheese is a lot tastier than you'd think!

and as for milk - I don't know how long that super long life stuff lasts for? but i don't *think* you have to keep it in the fridge?

or what about powdered milk?

and for baked goods - would probably have to be a treat & it's a bit spendy - but what about those cupcake mixes that you just add water to?

Good luck!!