Glorious spreadsheets

We are halfway done.

The finish line is a bit blurry because we need to decide how we are handling the days when we ate other people’s food (potluck, Kulbir’s house, our lovely couchsurfers) and the days when we went over. The first was covered in our rules—we said we would make dinner based on the money we had leftover for the day.

Unfortunately, I forgot about that rule when our couchsurfers cooked for us and I stuffed my face with extra cookies because we lpanned to just redo the whole day. Oops. The other two days aren’t as much of an issue.

We didn’t include a rule about “what if we go over” because we didn’t plan to go over. I think I perhaps was a bit optimistic about how quickly I would be able to work it out, and thought that we’d be figuring it all out BEFORE cooking so we would manage it better.

As a week average, however, we have a daily average under £2 for both weeks (see my lovely print-screened spreadsheet).

Woo-hoo! However, that wasn’t part of the initial rule. That’s the way Mac wanted to do it, and that’s how the £1 a day woman ran her challenge for a YEAR (more about her later!) but in my mind that isn’t strictly “£2 a day”. Of course the way we buy ingredients isn’t anywhere near £2 a day, so some flexibility is needed.

I thought, since I’m showing off boring spreadsheets, that I would include a little bit of the MASSIVE spreadsheet we’ve created (well, I’ve created) to keep track of portion prices of all the ingredients we use.

Sorry it's such a rubbish copy of it. I had to paste it into paint!

I colour-coded all the organic items, so you can see the balance. I haven’t really emphasised this in the daily breakdown, however. Maybe I should include it a bit more—especially since the idea was to highlight the fact that we can eat organic food for under £2 a day.

This spreadsheet has been absolutely invaluable. It means that I'm having a slightly easier time (breakfast is super easy now) adding everything up. I don't have to measure most things, just sit at the computer and do some math. No, it's not an amazingly pleasant experience, BUT it's probably the hardest part of the whole £2 a day diet. Not bad, eh?