The 3 Meals a Day for £1 in 2026 Food - Part One

 

The Aldi Shopping Trolley

So, following on from the last post, today I am starting to show you the way that I used the foods that I bought.  If you missed the first post in this series explaining what I'm doing and why and showing the receipts and the rest of the food ... it's HERE.

I'm keeping it simple and just showing the food and some of the preparation photos.  I am well out of practice with challenges and I have to admit to forgetting to take some photos, so I am simply going to use the same photo over and over when necessary.  

Breakfast was a particular forgetful moment!!

MONDAY

Breakfast - Porridge

I thought that as I had a full kilo of porridge oats, I would try to eat 75g each day instead of my usual 50g.  It was way too much for me, so some was saved to be used the next day in a slightly different way and I stuck to 50g for the rest of the week.

As I am not usually a big fruit eater and yet I wanted to keep this challenge as healthy as possible, I decided that rather than make myself eat an apple a day I would simply cook up all six of the little apples that I bought from Aldi. I do love stewed apple/apple sauce and I thought it would be a brilliant addition to my morning porridge each day.

On the worktop in the kitchen were these sorry looking specimens that had fallen off the tree in the garden the day before so I decided rather than waste them I would peel, chop and add them to the Aldi apples.

Dinner - Banana and Coffee

After all the chopping and sampling of the stewed apple I just wasn't that hungry at dinner time, so I simply had one of the bananas and a cup of coffee. 

The makings of a good old vegetable stew, with lentils for a bit of added protein.

Almost ready on the hob, but it looked sadly lacking in 'green'.

So you might think this is cheating a bit, but I went to the vegetable bed in the garden and picked three of our spring onions.  We have so many left and I do want to try and use them before the first frost gets to them.

The green tops went into the stew pan and the white ends were saved to be used in another recipe.

Tea - Vegetable Stew

I pulled out two portions of stew and then whizzed up the rest of the pan to make almost a litre of vegetable soup.

TUESDAY

The leftover porridge from the day before had been popped into the fridge overnight, but rather than just reheating it I decided to try frying it.

Breakfast - Porridge Patties and Stewed Apple

It didn't work very well, usually I would have added a spoonful of flour to bind it better but I didn't have any, yes I could potentially have whizzed up some of the oats to make oat flour but we are talking about 7.30 in the morning here!! 😄

It was tasty in it's own way and the apple sauce was delicious.

Lunch - Vegetable Soup

Lunch was half of the soup made on Monday ... yes I forgot to take a photo!!

Straight after lunch I started making the dahl for my tea.  Dahl is always best when cooked slowly and left to stand before eating.

It doesn't look much in my large pan but it made a lot.

Tea - Dahl and Rice

Four more single-serve sized pots of dahl went into the fridge, and two others were put straight into the freezer along with six portions of rice.

My £1 challenge ready meals at their best. 😁 

I always find that it's good to get ahead and make large portions of things at the start of the week before my enthusiasm begins to run out ... and of course it makes for less washing of pots later in the week too.

I'll be back with more days worth of food next time.

Any questions just ask away in the comments, but to nip any portion size comments in the bud, I have made all the portions that I am eating this week to suit me and my usual meal sizes.  If I had wanted bigger portions I could easily have had more porridge oats and a lot more rice, but I cannot physically manage any more than is photographed in these pictures.

Sue xx

Can You Eat 3 Meals a Day for £1 in 2026?

Those of you who know me well, will have realised that blogging the other week about the trend that has recently popped up, mainly on YouTube this time, of asking the question 'Is it possible to eat for £1 a day in 2026?' the way so many of us in blogland did it quite a few years back ... would set me off on a mission to see if it was actually possible.

So I decided to do it last week.

My food buying has gotten very erratic recently, what with buying enough food for both me and Alan to eat together at dinner and teatime while he is so busy renovating our bungalow, so I thought that taking a break to concentrate on something like this while still making Alan good but simple meals of his choosing would be a way around things.

I made plans, checked the pricing out online on both the Aldi and Sainsbury's websites and then I visited them both armed with just £7, to see if I could actually manage it with what was available in our small branches.  I had to do a mixture of both supermarkets as Aldi sell very few things loose, whereas in Sainsbury's I could weigh out produce to fit exactly into my budget.  I did get the baking potatoes from Aldi as there they are priced individually and I could choose the largest ones possible at just 24p each.

The Aldi shopping and my receipt are above.

This is what I managed to pick up from Sainsbury's.

The receipt.

Here is my basic menu plan, the prices of the food and my workings out for the calories, protein and '5 a day' information.  I thought that 1282 calories, 50g of protein and 4 of my '5 a day' per day were all quite reasonable for what was going to be just one week of eating.

I wrote out the ingredients list for my very basic recipes, soup, stew, dahl, carrot soup ...

... pizza sauce, lentil soup and slaw.

I decided that I would allow myself the use of minimal amounts of oil for cooking, and anything I needed from my stash of saved sachets ... and of course to keep my sanity intact over the course of the week, and to try and keep myself as human as possible there was always going to be instant coffee allowed.

Then there was only one thing for it ... time to get stuck in and actually eat the food that I had purchased over the next seven days.

I'll be back next time with a round up of the food that I ate and the leftovers ... yes, unbelievably there were leftovers!!

Sue xx

A Busy Year, A Busy Weekend

 

September from my 2026 Lucy Almey Calendar 

It's been such a busy year and my calendar has seen lots of fillings in over the last nine months.  Fillings in with times and names, and then ticks as each job round at the bungalow is done by the professionals.  We don't keep tabs of all the work that Alan has done ... his poor old knees are telling the story all by themselves.  😐

Art by C.  Burnett

There has been a lot of reading going on this month.  The darker nights and slower mornings are very conducive to it, and I'm into a really good book at the moment.

I can't believe there are only three months left of this year, this past week has really flown by with a very busy weekend at the end of it. We've been selling on Facebook Marketplace, there have been visits to us by ex-family members that we bumped into in town, and visits by us to see Mum.

It's been nice to have a quieter start to the week.

Sue xx

Summer to Winter With Old Clothes

 Autumn, my favourite season.  🤎💛🧡

A very lucky score on the charity book table this week.  

I've always wanted to read this but somehow never gotten around to it, now I can once I finish the book I'm currently halfway through.  Isn't Michelle Obama such a very beautiful person, in looks, intelligence and attitude.  

My Summer to Winter changeover is now almost complete.  My t-shirts were removed from the drawer ...

... and the jumpers and pyjamas replaced them.

Now the weather will turn hot and sunny, but this year I have left a few summer weight things out, it's not fooling me again like last year.  😄

The only drawback to doing this over the past week has been the near constant rain, so things have had to have a quick wash and dry overnight on the airer instead of on the washing line.  Some of my jumpers are ten years old or  maybe more, and a couple around five, but they come out at this time each year and go away again in Spring.  The changeover each year feels like having a new wardrobe of clothes, but at the same time somehow it's like welcoming old friends back into the fold.

I'm not completely against new clothes, and after a completely fruitless trawl of charity shops I have added a couple more new checked shirts from good old M&S to my collection of Autumn wear this year.

I love reusing my 'old' clothes season after season, and I am completely in favour of the ban that France and a lot of Europe are bringing in on the advertising of fast fashion brands like Shein and Temu.  I have never and would never buy from either company, but each to their own.

Sue xx

Random Bits ... I am Themeless

 

My £2.69 Aldi flowers that lasted for over three weeks before suddenly falling apart.  What an absolute bargain, better than any expensive bouquet.

I don't know what I had in mind when I took this photo, it's simply a bread crust, toasted with homemade marmalade and that all important first coffee of the day.

I take photos all the time as I use them for a starting point on most of my blog posts ... I don't know what this post would have been.  😄

Ginger's 'Tasty Licks', only he doesn't lick them from the tube the way cats are supposed to, he has a special little flat dish that he licks them from.  I can never remember the name of them so they are nicknamed 'squidges' ... well I do have to squidge them out of the tubes!

I buy them as it's the best way to get his thyroid medicine into him.  They must taste good together, he's always begging for them at breakfast and teatime.

One of this years teeny, tiny harvests, three little potatoes from a volunteer potato plant that was growing in amongst my spring onions.

My breakfast yesterday.

The quickest breakfast in my repertoire thanks to my silicone egg poachers that go in the microwave and cook two eggs in one minute and ten seconds, while the toast pops up and gets buttered.

There that cleared a lot of photos from my September photo file, and no doubt confused a few of you.

Yep ... today I am themeless.

Sue xx