Hello!

Just a quick post because I know there are some brave souls about to start the Live Below the Line Challenge for Farm Africa this next week- Good luck guys!

As I undertook the challenge myself for Farm Africa last year, I thought it might be useful to share some Live Below the Line tips. I struggled by (as evinced by my previous Live a Below the Lineblog posts – read em here!) but I thought I’d put together a quick video. It’s the first video I’ve made and we were in a bit of a rush, so sorry for the quality!

Last year’s experience gave me some ideas I thought you might be able to make use of:

Other tips you could consider:

A great way to use your stock cubes and make something cheap but filling, healthy and tasty is to make a soup. Buy a bag of carrots, hopefully on offer (but even if not, shouldn’t be more than £1), or opt for some on offer veg at your local market. Ideally you’d fry an onion until soft and then add your chopped carrots and stock, cook until soft and then blend – but you’d still have something palleteable if you couldn’t afford the onion.

As I mention in the video, it’s great to head to your local market near closing time. We actually ended up with a real treat – I managed to get a fresh whiting for 50p from the fish market,and made a simple fish pie. It took the majority of our budget for that day (about 61p) but I made 4 fish pies with a simple roux sauce and a mashed potato top. What a treat. The moral of the story is…keep your eyes peeled for great deals!!

I’ll be undertaking the Live Below the Line challenge later this Spring, so keep your eyes on the blog for more of my tips and experiences! For now, though – good luck to anyone starting the Live Below the Line challenge this week, especially those of you supporting Farm Africa, which is such a brilliant and worthy cause. Good luck!! X