Cheap Fast Food

A great favourite for dinner in our house is pasta and tuna. Everyone likes it and as the cook I really like it because it takes about ten minutes and very little work to prepare. It is also a very cheap dinner, all the prices below are current Lidl prices. To feed four I use the following

250 grams of Pasta 0.25 cents
1 tin of Tuna 0.80 cents
A few spoons of Mayonnaise 0.50 cents

Boil water, add pasta, cook for 10 minutes. Drain, add tuna and mayonnaise, stir it up. Add a little fresh parsley if you have it. Serve.

Total time ten minutes, total cost 1 euro 55 cents.

The Real Cost of a Sandwich

During the Irish economic bubble I worked for a busy fencing company in a small town. I was the only member of staff who brought a home made lunch to work. All my colleagues went down town at lunchtime, and bought sandwiches in a supermarket deli.

Over lunch one day we discussed the merits of buying lunch versus making it at home. I said that for the cost of one deli sandwich I could make lunch for five days. A colleague suggested the deli sandwich was more convenient. Wrong I said, it takes me about two minutes to make a sandwich each morning. To get a deli sandwich I would have to go downtown, queue at the deli counter, wait for the sandwich to be made, queue at the checkout and get back to the office. This would take ten maybe fifteen minutes.

Not only did it take time to get a deli sandwich, it took time to earn the money to pay for it. Given my rate of take home pay at the time it would have taken twenty minutes labour to pay for a deli sandwich. Add ten minutes to get the sandwich and the total cost in time would have been thirty minutes a day, or two and half hours per week.

It took twenty minutes labour to pay for a weeks worth of home made sandwiches and ten minutes a week to make them. I was investing thirty minutes a week to pay the lunch bill. My colleagues deli sandwiches were costing them at least thirty minutes a day.

In fact it was even more than that, because they usually bought a donut or Danish pastry and maybe a soft drink. In reality the deli sandwich was costing about forty minutes a day or three and half hours a week. Over a year about one hundred and sixty eight hours, or twenty one working days, or over four working weeks, just to pay the lunch bill.

One of the most extraordinary things about the modern world is how much inconvenience people will endure in the pursuit of the illusion of convenience. When you spend money in pursuit of convenience, don’t forgot to count the real cost in time and money. A tank of oil may seem convenient compared to cutting and burning timber. It is convenient to flick a switch and heat your house, but don’t forget all the hours of labour it takes to keep the oil tank filled. When calculating the true costs never forget that time and money are interchangable resources.

Harvesting Sunlight

As I write this I’m sitting in my house it’s late morning on the 7th of November and the kitchen is 22.5 degrees centigrade (71 Fahrenheit). Outside it’s 4 degrees. The only source of heat apart from a tiny amount of my own body heat and the waste heat from the computer I’m typing on, is the sunlight streaming through the windows.

11am November 7th

Our house is only 800 sq foot and well insulated. Most of the glass in the building is in the south gable and when we layed out the building we orientated it to maximise solar gain.

A lot of winter days in this part of the world are like today, under clear skys the nights are frosty and the days are sunny. By harvesting sunlight with a passive solar design, we do not need to light the stove until dark. By the time the stove is lit the house will still be over 20 degrees and a little firewood will keep it warm at night.

If you have already built your house it maybe possible to add some kind of passive solar collection, like a sunroom. If you are thinking of building a new house, think seriously about making you house a passive solar building. Space heating is expensive but sunlight is free.

Passive Solar Design

Solar Gain

Why Scott Olsen is my hero

I grew up during the latter days of the Cold War, and as a European I was always very aware that my freedom from Soviet tyranny was guaranteed by the military might of the USA. I grew up on a diet of John Wayne movies and all that went with that. As a European child of the 1970s my barometer of heroic was the US marines in the “Sands of Iwo Jima”.

As a young man I developed a much more cynical view of US military policy, but I never lost my admiration for the service men and women who had to carry out the imperial military policy. While my generation was lost in a myopic, narcissistic, nebulous, consumerist culture those who joined the military services lived their lives by a different code.

The greatest irony is that the moronic, self centered, robbers barons of Wall Street can only plunder the world because they are protected by the incredible self sacrifice of service men and women. When Thatcher and Regan assumed that every person in society would act to protect their own self interest and encouraged us all to follow that model, as most of us did, the military upheld a different ethic.

While war is all about killing your fellow man and woman, there is at the heart of the military ethic an ancient tribal idea about self sacrifice for the common good. When compared to the self service the rest of have been up to for the last 30 years, there is something heroic about the self sacrifice of service men and women.

Scott Olsen is an idealistic young man, he joined an organization dedicated to protecting his nation and put himself in harms way for the common good. There is no doubt the war in Iraq was a half baked imperialist adventure, dreamed up by the greatest collection of cynical morons that ever governed a great country. All the negative things you can say about the Iraq war are true. And yet that does not detract from the heroic nature of Scott Olsen’s sacrifice in going to Iraq.

The Irish patriot martyr Terence McSwiney who died after 74 days on hunger strike, during the 1919-21 Irish War of Independence, said that “victory in this war will not go to those who can inflict the most suffering, but to those who can endure the most suffering”.

Cut to Oakland, October 25th 2011, there stands Scott Olsen, Marine Corp war veteran, standing in harms way, between the people and the police. Like Gandhi he does not have a gun, he is placid, bearing witness. He displayed physical and mental courage in going to Iraq. That night in Oakland he displayed moral courage. There is a strange serenity about him in the moments before he is shot.

Next moment he is on the ground with blood pumping from his head and the cops throw a flash grenade at those seeking to assist him. I don’t know why Scott Olsen captures it all so clearly for me, it’s just iconic, an image of a society at war with its finest, most idealistic young people.

Lincoln said a “house divided against itself cannot long stand”. We in the western world are now at war with our young people. They are on the streets telling us they have no future living in this system, a system that keeps many of us middle aged and elderly people in comfort. His heroic sacrifice is a measure by which our generation (I'm 48) can gauge our failure to act, when we were his age.

A very wise man about 25 years ago (a year before Scott Olsen was born) told me that for every easy decision we make now, those who come after us will have to make an equal and opposite hard decision. I thought of this when I saw Scott Olsen’s blood, he is paying the price I and my generation were too cowardly or stupid to pay. He is bearing witness to our shortcomings. His suffering calls on us all to act. He is my hero. Ooh-rah

A Bed of Leeks

When we moved into our house nine years ago, I built some raised beds for vegetable production. I have never dug the beds since, just mulched them once a year and used a small hand cultivator to make a seed bed.

The photo shows a bed of leeks on november 1st 2011. These leeks were sown direct in April. I priced leeks last week and at current cost this bed of leeks is worth about 30 euros.

For about twenty five years from the late 1980s until 2009 there was no really cold winter weather in Ireland and an incredible range of vegetables would thrive in the Irish winter. But in the recent two cold winters leeks are one of the few vegetables that survived in my garden.

In our household leek and potato soup is a standard winter dish.

Two Cheap Dinners

I do pretty much all the cooking in our house and we never buy processed food. In late summer and early autumn we eat a lot of food from our garden and orchard and some wild food, like blackberries. But for most of the year a lot of our food comes from our local branch of the German supermarket chain Lidl.

When we have no home produced food and depend totally on bought food, feeding our household of four costs just over ten euros per day.

Here are two chicken recipes, based on a five euro pack of chicken breasts. These two recipes are a particular favourites in our house. Chicken chow mein and chicken curry, both of these recipes will provide a main meal for four people at a cost of just over five euros. Take out the chicken and you have nice vegeterian meals at a cost of about two euro fifty cents or about sixty two cents per head.

Ingredients

Chicken	€5.00
Rice	€0.40
Noodles	€0.60
Mushrooms	€0.99
Onions	€0.60
Carrots	€0.20
Garlic	€0.30
Curry	€1.00
Soy Sause	€0.20
Milk	€0.50
Flour	€0.20
Olive Oil	€0.30
	€10.29

Chicken Curry

Fry two carrots, two onions and three or four cloves of garlic on a hot stove for several minutes. Add curry powder, we like it hot and add three heaped dessert spoons of medium hot curry powder. Fry for another few minutes. Add a half litre of milk and flour to thicken. Leave to simmer.

Fry two chicken breasts and chop into small pieces. Add to curry. Chop half a punnet of mushrooms and add to curry. Bring four cups of water to the boil and add one cup of rice. Boil rice until cooked. Serve

Chicken Chow Mein

Fry two carrots, two onions, three or four cloves of garlic and a half a punnet of mushrooms on a hot stove for several minutes. Add soy sauce to taste.

In another pan fry off two chicken breasts and chop into small pieces. Add to vegetables.

Boil water, cover packet of noodles in boiling water. Wait five minutes. Serve

Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread

Last January we bought a Morphy Richards bread makers in Argos for 107 euros, it currently sells for 116 euros. With the bread maker it costs 1.85 euros to make a two pound loaf, we bake about one of these a day. This works out perfect for our four person household and keeps us in daily bread.

We use Odlums strong white flour which currently costs 2.69 euros for a two kilo bag, which will make 3.3 loaves. McDougalls yeast cost 2.95 euros a pack, which will make 16 loaves. The other main ingredient is Marvel powered milk at 1.98 euros for 198 grams, enough to make about 6.6 loaves. A pinch of salt, 4 spoons of oil and a spoon of sugar complete the ingredients. Total cost of ingredients 1.55 euros.

It takes about 1.5 units of electricity to mix, prove and bake the loaf, cost about 30 cents including vat. Total cost 1.85 euros per day for bread. Or 12.95 euros a week, or 56 euros a month, or 673.95 euros a year.

I love the bread maker, it takes all the skill and work out of making bread. Just throw in the ingredients, set the program and three hours later it’s ready. In some post peak oil future when I have to make bread in my solid fuel range I will think back wistfully to the age of plenty when I had a bread maker. This is one kind of modern convenience I will miss.

The Morphy Richards comes with a 2 year guarantee. Ours has now made around 300 perfect loaves and has worked flawlessly so far.


Available at Argos

Morphy Richards