Only an hour to go before the restricted diet ends – and what have we learnt?

In no particular order

• It’s much to write blog entries using a real client (Xjournal) rather than the basic web interface.
• The Clash’s London Calling is brilliant accompaniment for kneading chapatti dough and then rolling out chapattis – in fact, to me, it’s brilliant full stop. The Fall’s Dragnet isn’t.
• We’ve had plenty to eat, most of which has been ok. I can’t say I’m fond of porridge made with water – and my hostess doesn’t like porridge anyway – but the various lentil concoctions (caramelised onions and garlic, red lentils and stock) with rice and chapattis have been very enjoyable and filling.
• My hostess has most missed tea and coffee. I’ve missed tea and the 20 or so tins of Irn Bru or Dr Pepper I’d drink in a normal week. (We both thought that hot water was better than black tea. I usually loathe coffee – the mere thought of it can make me feel sick.)
• Our final food bill was
  

  Item	Amount	Cost	proportion used
  Tesco Scottish porridge oats	1 kg	£0·99	about half
  Tesco Value long grain rice	1 kg	£0·49	all
  Tesco Value penne	1 * 500 g	£0·09	only 1 of the 2 bags we bought
  Tesco value veg stock cubes	2 packs of 10 cubes	£0·20	only 2 of the 5 packs we bought
  Tesco market value brown onions	2 kg	£1·18	19 of the 22 onions in the bag
  Indus red split lentils	2 kg	£2·69	around 1·75 kg
  Tesco plain white flour	1·5 kg	£0·52	around 0·9 kg
  Tesco swede	600 g	£0·70	all
  Tesco market value carrots	600 g	£0·76	500 g
  Tesco pure vegetable oil	225 ml (remnant of a 1 litre bottle)	£0·32 (22·5% of £1·44)	about 50 ml
  apples, oranges, garlic	varying amounts	£1·39	all
  salt	a few pinches	£0·10	all but a few grains thrown over our left shoulders
  Total		£9·43

• It takes ages to knead chapatti and aeons to roll them all out. Fortunately, the kneading can be done while onions are caramelising – they only need stirring occasionally. (In general cooking from scratch takes longer than I’d normally have in an evening. How did our parents do it while working full-time too? I begin to understand why convenient foods cost so much, even though they’re churned out by mostly production lines.)
• There’s lot’s more washing up too!
• I don’t have the knack of rolling chapattis out round. How is it done?
• I wish I’d lived like this as a student – my overdrafts would have been much smaller (or maybe I’d have spend the same amount on other enjoyments!)
• We’ve not suffered physically apart from me having some headaches which could easily be due to early mornings and commuting – and not wearing the right glasses on Tuesday. In fact today we’ve done an amount of heavy lifting – humping a new-ish dishwasher AARRGGHH!! and freezer into the flat.
• My hostess likes driving white vans!

13 minutes to go – I can hear the Irn Bru in the larder calling.