.hungry&poor. student food
Cheap, easy, healthy dinners. Breakfasts you thought could only be made in trendy Richmond cafes. Hang over cures. Essentials for your pantry. Lunchbox ideas (don’t scoff, the lunch box is back). Dinner party menus. Cocktails on a budget....
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- Hi friends
- Breaky or brunch
- Lunch and lunch boxes
- What's for dinner?
- Drink drank drunk
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Stalk us
Completely scary article on what happens to our fruit and veg at the supermarket! Time to go to the farmers market instead.
On Living Below the Line..
This week Paula, Nicole and I participated in Live Below the Line, eating on only $2 each per day to raise money for education in Cambodia, Timor Leste and Papua New Guinea.
It was an amazing experience that gave us a small insight into the lives of those living in extreme poverty and so far we’ve raised $1900! We are so grateful to everyone who donated, it really made it worth it. We’d love to make it to $2000, so please consider donating here if you haven’t already.
Here’s what we learnt:
Being in a team in everything in a challenge like this. We spent most of the week on placement in a motel in Healesville, which meant being together a lot of the time. While there were some draw backs to the motel lyf (we only had a microwave to cook with and tupperware to eat from!) being together was a huge help. Nicole kept reminding us how many teachers and students we were helping, Paula kept up the social media posts, which kept the donations rolling in and I stopped us eating all the carrots on day 1! Having $30 between us meant we could invest in more variety too. Comparing our meals to those of others, we realised how much worse it could’ve been!
You cannot be both full and healthy on $2/day. As dietetics students we prioritized having some fruit and veg. But the amount of bread and pasta we had to have to stay full (and butter and salt we needed to add flavour) was truly sickening! I’m not about to go paleo on you, but supermarket bread is yuck. On day two we ate 5 (!) pieces of crappy bread and wow I felt awful. By day 4 and 5 I had chosen hunger over bread and pasta!!
It takes a lot of planning to eat as well as we did. Yes, I’ll admit it, we did well. We had enough food and got in some fruit, veg and taste occasionally. But we went to Coles, Woolworth and Aldi at least three times each! Nicole and I spent hours on day 1 shopping, wondering back and forth from store to store in our hungry, caffeine deprived haze. We made lists and tables, planned every cent and meal and even saved up a few dollars for the last day to buy what we wanted most (fruit!) We know that most people living below the poverty line wouldn’t have the luxury of having quite so much time to plan and shop.
Caffeine withdrawal sucks. As cappuccino addicts, we got some serious headaches over the first couple of days. We had planned to buy green tea to get us through but couldn’t afford it in the end. Our LBL coffee (cups of hot water) just didn’t quite cut it.
We are so lucky. More than anything else, we are full of gratitude. We know we lead privileged lives, but there is no reminder quite like a week of living below the line.
Not only can we afford excellent food, but luxuries like coffee and brunch and wine. Not only did we get to go to school, but we have the privileged of being able to go to uni as well. ‘Lucky’ doesn’t quite seem to cut it.
So it is with gratitude that we finish Live Below the Line, gratitude for everything we have in our lives and gratitude for all those who donated to provide education for those who are less fortunate than we are.
This mornings coffee was quite possibly the best ever. From now on, each morning, I’ll try to take a moment to remember how lucky I am to have the small luxury of being able to buy myself a coffee.
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Life lessons and pumpkin with crispy sage burnt butter
Things I have learnt this year #521: I wasn’t being as healthy as I thought
I’m trying not to go on yet another rant about how my vegie box has changed my life (you can see the first one here), but once I attempted to get through a modest box of vegetables in a week and could barley manage it, I wondered why. What was I eating so much of that there was no room for vegetables?
Quite simply it was bread and pasta. And multigrain/wholemeal/rye bread and pasta with stacks of healthiness on top, but my breakfasts and lunches was based on bread and too often my dinners of pasta. I know lots of people are the same. Some people go for noodles, rice or potatoes instead but it’s the same idea. Pick a carb, add a meat, then season with vegetables. It’s easy to shop for and to plan. But it’s a trap.
Don’t worry I’m not about to go all carb-police on you, I still eat bread and couldn’t live without pasta. But I have reformed. While bread and pasta are not inherently unhealthy (phew!) they shouldn’t be taking the place of delicious, nutritious veggies.
So now instead of starting to plan my meals based on a carb then a meat, I start with a vegetable and build from there. It means I’m eating more veggies and less meat, wheat and processed foods. And completely unexpectedly, I am also spending less money on food.
Try it. Here’s a lovely lunch based on pumpkin to get you started.
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Green Pasta
Full disclosure: this is a variation of a Donna Hay Recipe from her amazing app, which you should absolutely download. Our version has somehow progressively become more and more veggies and less pasta! We’ve started make a big batch of this during the week to take for lunch (and for the occasional last minute dinners.)
It is one of those recipes that’s both delicious enough + healthy enough to have every single week.
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Lunch box frittatas
Revelation: It’s amazing how much you can achieve on a Sunday when you’re not hungover.
Today I have bought groceries, made a weeks worth of frittata lunch packs and breakfast bircher plus a pasta sauce, written a blog post AND managed to go out for breaky without ordering something covered in melted cheese. Winning all round really. I should try this more often.
But just in case you are suffering in an alcohol induced world-of-pain, there’s still time to do something productive and start the week feeling like you have your shit together. You can even whip these up in half an hour while you wait for your take away pizza. Deal?
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“Which means that a beef-and-leaf paleo diet is the worst choice going, environmentally speaking”
Mushrooms on toast- my new favourite dinner
When I first started getting my veggie box from Ceres fair food earlier this year, I quickly developed a love-hate relationship with it. I loved getting a massive box of organic, seasonal produce every week, I loved how affordable it was and I loved the excitement of seeing what fresh, organic surprises were packed in that recycled cardboard box of goodness every Thursday afternoon. But I hated the weekly bunch of silverbeet that would inevitably droop before I could use it - I mean how much spanikopita can you really have?! And I hated the bags of mushrooms, masses of broccoli and the excess of cabbage. How would I ever get through them before the next lot appeared?
I started to realise that before I got my veggie box, I ate the same boring fruit and vegetables every week. Mostly bananas, rocket, avo and tomatoes, punctuated by a few carrots and beetroots occasionally. Of course these are all delicious and healthy but the lack of variety was uninspiring and actually quite unhealthy too.
So the veggie box became a weekly mystery box challenge. It forced me to be creative, to cook and eat the vegetables I normal didn’t bother with. I got inspired. I learnt to freeze the silverbeet and add it to soups, I learnt that a box of steamed broccoli is an easy and yummy lunch and I learnt that mushrooms on toast is my new favourite dinner. The only thing I’m still struggling with is the cabbage but now I look forward to the challenge, you never know, it might just become my new favourite vegetable.
It’s safe to say my love-hate relationship has disappeared, I’m completely head over heels. If you’re not yet convinced, perhaps try this simple Italian inspired mushroom dish, the love child of my veggie romance.
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Kangaroo and Carrot Sausage Rolls
I won’t blame you if the thought of eating skippy doesn’t make you salivate. I was the same. As a ten year old I stole the kangaroo meat from the freezer and hid it in the laundry in protest. A few days later an awful smell begun to permeate the house, it didn’t take long for meat to go bad in hot, outback Australia. Eventually the meat was recovered and I remembered I’d hidden it behind the beer in a moment of morality. My mother likes to remind me this when I go into full marketing mode for my now favourite red meat. Kangaroo is lean, packed with iron and zinc, one of the cheapest meats around. Its also juicy and delicious if cooked right what’s more they’re free range and sustainable. Surely you can’t beat that? I’m clearly a convert.
Ps. these are sausage rolls, i make them and freeze them for emergency meals and of course to take to the footy.
