Thursday morning – A Very Special John Craving’s Newsround

This morning I decided to try something a little different. Last night was the first night when I was quite aware of how hungry I was as I went to bed, and this gave me an idea. They say that you should never shop when you’re hungry because you’ll buy lots of stuff you don’t need, and I adhere rigidly to this rule whenever I’m not hungry. However, there’s nothing in the rule that says that you can’t go window shopping at a supermarket to see what you can find, and do genuine science out in the field to determine how having not eaten flavoured food for three days affects how I feel about a selection of foods. For an added bonus, I decided to go before breakfast to get the full hunger experience.

Naturally, with it only having been three days, most cravings are still in a relatively early stage (you can live for three weeks without food), but that means in order to investigate this properly I’d need to keep this diet going for weeks, and that’s definitely not going to happen!

The supermarket of choice was Morrisons, due to the very scientific reasoning of it being my closest large supermarket. This is not an official endorsement of Morrisons, though, so if any supermarkets are reading who want to sponsor me, feel free to. I’m not the sort of person who can be bought for any price. However, I am the sort of person who can be bought for a certain range of prices.

And so without any further ado, let us enter the realm of…

A Very Special John Craving’s Newsround – Morrisons Edition!

For this, I will present a selection of foods, plus a rating out of 5 for both usual level of craving and current level of craving. My rankings are as follows:

·         0 – If this was all that was left on Earth, I would seriously consider moving.

·         1 – I don’t really use this very much and do not like the taste at all.

·         2 – Something I like, but don’t buy all that often.

·         3 – This would normally be in my cupboard, and I’d probably make use of it at least weekly.

·         4 – I would probably consume this every day if I could get away with it.

·         5 – If this is in my house I will consume it almost instantly, like matter and antimatter annihilating each other.

Grapes

Grapes, aka pre-wine

Usual: 2/5

Current: 3/5

Grapes are pretty cool. They basically feel like a healthy version of sweets in that they’re filled with sugar but they’re good for you. Some sugar would be nice.

Bananas

Bananas also double as a glacially-changing traffic light at an intersection where you never want traffic to stop.

Usual: 3/5

Current: 3/5

I eat bananas more frequently than grapes, but at this point probably want the same things from them. (Except for it to turn into wine, I don’t think banana wine would be especially appealing).

Mushrooms

According to the internet, approximately 20% of mushrooms are poisonous. If I got a punnet of these I'm not sure which I'd be hoping for.

Usual: 1/5

Current: 1/5

I don’t really get mushrooms. I like most vegetables, but this is just rubbery and a bit strange (not to mention the fact that if you see one in the wild, it will almost certainly kill you.) (Not even just by eating it; in some parts of the countryside there are wild gangs of mushrooms roving around with knives and shotguns picking off lone foragers). No change in my mushroom stance today.

Doughnuts

They sometimes have jam in, so they're healthy.

Usual: 2/5

Current: 5/5

For these, the price was almost as tempting as the food itself – 10p for a doughnut, I’ll take that! This was a 4/5 initially, until I got a bit closer to the bakery section and smelt some doughnuts cooking. At that point holding up the shop in exchange for a doughnut seemed like a relatively reasonable trade.

Bread

Always nice to have a food you could either eat or juggle, depending on your mood.

Usual: 3/5

Current: 5/5

For me usually, I get through a fair amount of bread but usually as a vessel for other food which I like more. Bread by itself is usually not particularly engaging, but the smell of the bakery again did funny things to the taste buds that I didn’t think were there anymore.

Cheese

This picture was taken from a slight distance for the safety of me and those around me.

Usual: 5/5

Current: 5/5

If you’ve known me for any length of time, you will know that I love cheese. If you don’t know me at all, you’ve probably heard of me as “that guy who likes cheese”. If you know me but not cheese, you will know cheese as “that thing that I like”. If you don’t know me or cheese then to be honest you’re missing out on two pretty great things, but you should get to know cheese first. I’ll wait.

Pizza

This picture is making me too hungry so let's just all pretend I wrote something amusing here and move on.

Usual: 4/5

Current: 5/5

Pizza is essentially bread and cheese stuck together, with more delicious stuff put on top. I’d eat it raw at the moment if that was socially acceptable.

Olives

Tomatoes with cream cheese not included in the below analysis, mostly because I love both of those things and thinking too much about the beautiful combination might be unhealthy for me.

Usual: 0/5

Current: 2/5

Olives are salty and packed with calories and taste. It’s a disgusting taste, but the sheer quantity of it at this point almost makes up for the fact that I’d immediately regret it if I actually tried to eat them.

Olive oil

Crisp AND dry? Those are my two favourite types of spring day!

Usual: 2/5

Current: 2/5

I suspect a nice tall glass of olive oil would replace all of the calories I’ve lost this week.

Salmon

Unfortunately, I'm not quite ready to cook yet. But it's good to know that the salmon is.

Usual: 3/5

Current: 3/5

I’m a pescetarian (a word which Word does not recognise as real and suggested “desecration” as an alternative), which is essentially vegetarian plus fish. I do find salmon delicious, and today is no exception, but perhaps it’s because through the oats and the beans I’m probably getting way more protein than usual anyway, but the salmon didn’t look any more appealing than usual.

Steak

True story - despite being a vegetarian, I once managed to accidentally enter and win a meat raffle.

Usual: 0/5

Current: -1/5

Being a vegetarian means I just don’t understand steak. There are loads of delicious vegetables in the world – steak seems to be for people who say “Why don’t you take all those delicious vegetables, put them in one animal and then I’ll just eat that animal and cut out the middle man. How do I want it cut? Just lop a chunk of it off and pop it in some packaging, I’m not too fussy”.

Milk

On the right, we have a bottle of milk. On the left we have a bottle of water in a milk costume.

Usual: 3/5

Current: 3/5

This is what you get if you take the previous point, and say “You know what, I don’t really want to eat my food second hand. Why don’t you take that animal you’ve just put all those vegetables in, squeeze it really hard and feed me whatever comes out?”. But milk is delicious so it gets a pass from me.

Selection of desserts

This title explains why I got fired from that menu-writing business.

Usual: 2/5

Current: 3/5

This is basically what you get if you take all the things you’re probably not supposed to eat, and mix them together in a bowl. And they taste so good for it.

Juice

If only there was some idiom for comparing the differences between these two types of juice.

Usual: 3/5

Current: 4/5

I drink a fair amount of fruit juice usually, and I genuinely think this is what I am most likely to trip up on in the last couple of days. A couple of times, I’ve got myself a glass and got halfway to the fridge before remembering that juice is out – it’s my go to non-water drink. (And if you’re a juice manufacturer, feel free to use that as your slogan).

Crisps

Apparently the average house price in Leamington is £318,230. I'm not sure if I'd rather have a house or 318,230 multipacks of crisps. I think the only reason I'd choose the house is in case I needed somewhere to store all of my crisps.

Usual: 5/5

Current: 6/5

People often put sliced bread, penicillin or Stephen Fry’s voice as mankind’s greatest inventions. I pity such people for they have forgotten the wonder of the potato crisp. One of my greatest regrets in starting this challenge was not forcibly removing all of the crisps from my house before starting it.

Toilet paper

Because nothing says "notoriously clean" like a puppy.

Usual: 3/5

Current: 3/5

I’ve had pretty much the same desire to use this during this week as I have during any other. If I were going for another week or two this would increasingly start to look like a viable dinner option.

Canned soup

"The nation's favourite", eh? Heinz, are you really suggestion that people prefer your soup to the Queen, Wimbledon or complaining about the weather?

Usual: 2/5

Current: 4/5

Canned soup is often pretty dull, especially when compared to homemade soup (I like any recipe which consists of “Take all of the ingredients in the title of the recipe, plus stock, boil them until you can squish them, and then blend it”). But I suspect that the flavours in canned soup would make a fine addition to any of the meals I’m eating today.

Herbs and spices

Each pot is its own little flavour experience.

Usual: 3/5

Current: 5/5

I cannot state this enough – herbs and spices are wonderful. I genuinely think that the rice and beans meals I’ve been eating this week, with the right mixture of herbs and spices, would make a very tasty and filling dish. If I take nothing else away from this week, at least I’ll know how great these guys are.

De-icer

For some reason this photo is way darker than all the rest. It's the Christopher Nolan's Batman of these photos.

Usual: 1/5

Current: 1/5

If having too much ice was one of Jay-Z’s problems, he could buy this and be down to 98. Otherwise I think the description of 1/5 at the top is entirely apt for this.

Wooden train set

I choo-choo-choose this one!

Usual: 5/5

Current: 5/5

Hello? It’s a wooden train set! I’m never not going to want one of these.

Book about cooking

The fact that she has so many show-stopping recipes perhaps means she's less likely to get invited onto cooking programmes.

Usual: 1/5

Current: 4/5

I could be tempted by either the contents of the book, or simply eating the book.

And that was John Craving’s Newsround – extra-long edition! This evening’s update will cover all of today’s meals.

Thanks to a series of very generous donations, I have now hit my stretch goal of £350, which means I’ll be continuing the blog on to Saturday. This means there are still three days of the blog left to go, and so three more days of shamelessly asking for money. If anybody has any suggestions for further stretch goals that they think people might be willing to pay for, do let me know!

 Note: As part of my Mean Bean challenge I will be writing about my experiences each day – the more money raised, the more I write. At the time of writing, people have generously donated £365, which means I’m aiming at 2,025 words per day (excluding the ones in this explanatory paragraph). This will hopefully come in two posts, one in the morning and one in the evening. If you would like these posts to get even longer, and support the excellent work of Tearfund at the same time, please click here.

Wednesday evening – Hit Pea With Your Rhythm Chick

(Yep, it’s already getting to that point in the blog where the titles start to become real stretches)

Perhaps it’s Stockholm Syndrome kicking in, or perhaps all my taste buds have died and I’ve grown a new set which are simply “buds”, but lunch was actually a fairly decent meal. Having realised that the beans I’d bought earlier in the week weren’t going to be enough to last me the whole week (curse 300g tins of beans for being essentially a meal-and-a-half’s worth of food!), I raided the cupboard and discovered some black beans I’d forgotten about. I quite like black beans, so this seemed like a good idea, and actually as a combination it almost worked.

The rice was as usual inoffensive, and the black beans seemed to have enough of a taste to them that I actually almost enjoyed myself for a moment.

When it came to dinner, though, I decided to go all out. Since Wednesday is the middle day, I figured it was worth trying to construct a medley of all three ingredients to see how that went.

Chickpea Bake with Oat Reduction and a Rice Crust

1)      Remember the debacle of yesterday’s falafels and turn the oven on now.

2)      Microwave and mash the chickpeas.

I forgot to take a picture of this, so here's the one from yesterday. I don't mean to sound racist but I think all mashed chickpeas look the same.

3)      Microwave the porridge, briefly attempt to mash this before realising that mashing makes no difference, like cutting the head off a hydra or flossing.

4)      Clarify that actually flossing is pretty great.

5)      Also clarify that hydras aren’t.

6)      Mix the chickpeas and porridge together to make a chickpea-porridge hybrid that one could almost use to make falafel. Add mixture to a glass dish.

Displayed like this, it would make flat-lafel instead.

7)      Cook some rice, drain it, and don’t mash it.

8)      Put the rice on top of the dish..

This may look like just a bowl of rice, but trust me - under the top layer of boredom lies a whole new tier of monotony.

9)     Put the dish into the oven, leave it to go and write this part of the blog post, and hope that when you come back you’ll have produced something vaguely edible.

I ended up cooking the above for about twenty minutes, hoping that the top might start going a golden brown and make it look a bit more like a proper meal. Instead the rice just went crispy, which was perhaps to be expected.

I took two photos of this at various stages, and both are exceptionally blurry. I must have been shaking in anticipation at such an exciting dinner.

Again, the food actually tasted relatively decent, all things considered. The oats made the chickpeas go further without sacrificing much in the way of taste or texture (not that either sacrifice would have been especially substantial), and the fact that the rice was slightly baked meant that there was a sufficient range of textures for the food to almost be interesting. Not genuinely interesting, but if somebody came up to you at a party and started talking about something with that level of interesting, and you knew they’d have to go away in a few minutes, you’d be able to sit and nod politely through the conversation and perhaps throw in the odd sensible remark. You would almost certainly spend the rest of the evening casually trying to stay on the opposite side of the room to them so that they don’t actually try and continue telling you about it, but you wouldn’t feel like you had to resort to jumping out the window if you actually made eye contact with them.

Quantity-wise, this recipe actually made quite a bit of food (comparatively speaking), so I opted to only eat half and save the other half for lunch tomorrow.

Which brings me onto a serious note that has increasingly become obvious to me throughout this week – namely that there are so many ways in which I am so much more fortunate than those whose diet I’m emulating. Despite being limited to so few ingredients, I in practice have as much of each of them as I like to eat, so there’s no serious danger of me going hungry. I have access to as much clean water as I want to stay hydrated and to cook with. I have a selection of beans so that I can make each meal different.

And perhaps most significantly of all, I know that this is only for a few days. On Saturday I get to delve back into my cupboards and gorge on whatever I can find in there, and if I want pretty much any food, I can go to one of the many nearby supermarkets and buy it. People who actually have to live like this day to day are not so fortunate, and indeed are only one bad harvest away from having no food to eat at all.

Later in the week I’ll be writing a full serious post about how I’ve found this experience, as my first dalliance with what can often be deemed “poverty tourism”.

In the John Craving’s Newsround corner, bizarrely as I’ve started to enjoy the food a little bit more I’ve not really found myself with too many cravings. Note that I said “enjoy… a little bit more”, in the same way that if I stand on a chair during the day I’m technically a little bit closer to the sun – I still wouldn’t say I’m enjoying the food. But I have managed to stave off craving much in the way of food so far, and certainly the anticipated cheese withdrawal symptoms have yet to hit. Stay tuned tomorrow, though – I have a plan for testing how my food cravings are going.

 Note: As part of my Mean Bean challenge I will be writing about my experiences each day – the more money raised, the more I write. At the time of writing, people have generously donated £320, which means I’m aiming at 1,800 words per day (excluding the ones in this explanatory paragraph). This will hopefully come in two posts, one in the morning and one in the evening. If you would like these posts to get even longer, and support the excellent work of Tearfund at the same time, please click here.

Wednesday morning – Oatlahoma

Porridge du Wednesday

Plenty of fibre!

Ingredients: porridge oats, water, the ability to operate a microwave, use of opposable thumbs,

1.       Unearth the porridge oats from the cupboard.

2.       Notice that the packet is still depressingly full, despite the fact I’m sure I’ve been eating porridge every day for approximately all of my life.

3.       Pour a very small quantity of oats into a bowl.

4.       Decide even that looks like a bit too keen a quantity.

5.       Cover it in a small amount of water so it looks like an unblended lentil soup.

6.       Microwave the entire mixture until it looks ready to stick bricks together.

You know that bit in Groundhog Day where Bill Murray wakes up and lives the same day over and over again? (I believe that bit is known as “the entire film”). Writing about the porridge in the morning is starting to feel a little bit like that. It’s quite tricky trying to write six hundred words about a food that tastes of nothing.

Challenge accepted.

The wonderful thing is knowing the incredible journey that has gone in to every ingredient (all both of them) in the bowl, and how the ultimate trajectory of their voyage is to be united in the bowl for a meal which transcends both.

Firstly, the humble oat plant. Grown on a plant in a warm climate, it has dalliances with water in helping it to grow and reach its full potential. When it hits its prime, it is harvested and begins an adventure that takes it through processing, packaging and multiple forms of transportation to arrive at the shop, where it waits to be purchased by customers eager for its excellent sources of protein and dietary fibre.

Meanwhile, the water cycle, which has taken place for millions of years and sees water fall on the ground, seep into the ocean, evaporate up into the atmosphere and fall again, culminates in this instance in the arrival of water to a reservoir, where it sits, desperately curious about its destination this time. Will it be used for a bath or shower? Will it be used in washing and cleaning? Will it simply fall straight down the drain in favour of superior water coming after it?

And these long-travelling oats and experienced 175ml of water finally unite in a bowl in the middle of England. Married by circumstance, and yet both build the other up in new ways. Oats are small, and yet with the addition of water they swell up to far beyond their purpose. Water is a wet liquid (traditionally), and yet the oats turn it into something with consistency and solidity. Neither has much of a taste to itself, and yet when combined, two nothings collide and make a greater nothing, something that has every potential to be the base of a delicious meal and yet squanders that in the pursuit of something greater.

Yes, the easy path this new-found “porridge” could take would be for the ingredients to enhance each other’s taste – but surely the nobler journey it could take would be to diligently persist in tastelessness, resisting every natural impulse to add flavour and instead cling to that which brought them together in the first place, that wonderful bond of bland which their disparate expeditions share.

(Goodness, I’ve still got 200 words to go).

And yet these star-crossed lovers, this all-too-briefly-united double act, must only spend the shortest of time together. Piece by piece, lump by lump, oats and water journey together into the abyss of the human body, navigating their way through dispensing energy and nutrients as they go, before rejoining the water cycle in the cistern and ultimately joining fertilizer. So this round of oats and water departs, so that future generations may use water again, and that next seasons crops may benefit from the remaining harvests of this one. The beautiful cycle repeats and repeats, so that energy is merely borrowed, not kept.

And as it is dispensed from the body, what used to be porridge turns into the kinetic energy that powers the typing fingers, the (minimal) electrical energy in the brain transmitting words from nerve impulses, the other functions in the body that simply allow it to continue. And thus, this unassuming, insipid sludge generates instead the highest function known to man – the blog post of a hungry twenty-something with way too much time on his hands.

That’s 564 words, but I think that’s still relatively impressive. It probably also gives a bit of an insight into my current mental stability. Next thing you know I’ll be writing a poem about porridge. Or maybe a song…

Porridge, made with Troubled Water

When you’re hungry, not so full,

When you want food to eat, ‘cause you’re miserable.

The food around, is not enough

And flavour can’t be found:

Like porridge, made with troubled water,

I’ll eat with a frown;

Like porridge, made with troubled water,

I will chew it down.

When you have some oats, when you want a meal

But you want food that will, often congeal

I have a thought, that’s up to snuff

Which will your fears confound:

Eat porridge, made with troubled water

Really go to town!

Eat porridge, made with troubled water

That’s my favourite noun.

Eat up all that food, nice and bland,

There’s more where that came from, it tastes like sand.

Looks like it too, it may taste rough,

But it’s a fine compound!

That porridge, made with troubled water

It’s not a let-down

That porridge, made with troubled water,

Hey, nervous breakdown…

Maybe I should pursue a food-based record deal…

Note: As part of my Mean Bean challenge I will be writing about my experiences each day – the more money raised, the more I write. At the time of writing, people have generously donated £300, which means I’m aiming at 1,700 words per day (excluding the ones in this explanatory paragraph). This will hopefully come in two posts, one in the morning and one in the evening. If you would like these posts to get even longer, and support the excellent work of Tearfund at the same time, please click here.

Tuesday evening – What a Fal-awful Idea

For lunch, I thought it was worth trying something a little different. They say that variety is the spice of life, and like all other spices variety is largely banned this week, but there’s still a little room for manoeuvre.

I figured it was worth trying to make falafel, which is largely a chickpea based dish. A quick Google yielded the following ingredients for a decent falafel:

·         Chickpeas

·         Onion

·         Parsley

·         Garlic

·         Flour

·         Cumin

·         Coriander

·         Pepper

·         Cardamom

And now here is that list again, with the ingredients I’m not allowed removed:

·         Chickpeas

So I do at least have the basics, namely the chickpeas. I’ll just have to make a few substitutions along the way for the ingredients I don’t have, such as everything else.

Fakelafels

Ingredients: chickpeas, porridge oats, relentless optimism.

1.       Cook the chickpeas in the microwave until you’re bored of waiting for them to finish. Mash them with a fork until you either run out of chickpeas to mash or run out of forks.

If you squint it at, you can pretend it's cornflakes. Cornflakes that somebody has liberally strewn whole chickpeas into, but I'll take it.

2.       Make a small amount of porridge using the classic Tuesday morning recipe.

No, I haven't just carpeted the bottom of my Pyrex jug, although I can see why you'd think that.

3.       Combine chickpeas and porridge together. Wonder whether you’ve made a terrible mistake.

4.       Realise that the porridge is sticking the chickpeas together like the flour is supposed to and you actually have a food with structure. Briefly rejoice.

5.       Take a small handful of the mixture and then remember that the mixture contains hot porridge and quickly return the small handful of mixture.

6.       Wait for a couple of minutes.

7.       Try again.

8.       Place the balls of odd mixture on a baking tray.

It's a slight toss-up as to whether the baking tray or its contents are more palatable.

9.       Realise that you should have preheated the oven before starting. If you have a time machine, retrospectively add this as point 1. Otherwise, invent a time machine and then follow the previous sentence. Or just turn the oven on at this point and wait for it to heat up, but I reckon the time machine is easier.

10.   Put the tray in the oven at an undetermined temperature for an undetermined length of time. (The undetermined temperature is due to the fact that the temperature knob on my oven isn’t screwed in properly and gives you a temperature with error bars of around 30 degrees either side. The undetermined time is because I had no idea how long they should take so just waited until I got hungry)

11.   Remove tray from oven.

You can tell that this is a different picture to before because the baking tray has moved to somewhere with slightly more lighting.

12.   Realise that everything is sort of stuck to the tray, and also that the tray is hot.

13.   Shovel what you can onto a plate.

Remarkably, this recipe seemed to actually go relatively well, all things considered. The food was definitely still fairly flavourless (this is probably due to the fact that it only consists of chickpeas and oats) but the outside was a little crispy so it didn’t feel quite so much like chomping through soil. And although I wasn’t particularly fala-full after eating it, I didn’t feel quite as fala-foolish as I thought I might have done for trying this. Indeed, I was expecting it to be somewhat of a complete mess, and actually I might even consider making this again later in the week.

Probably not after Friday, though. Not unless I need to bore somebody to death and my conversation isn’t quite cutting it.

My evening meal, which I have just finished, followed the more traditional route of rice and beans. The bean of choice here was the borlotti bean (aka Bertie Lott’s Zero Flavour Beans). As far as beans go, it’s a fairly decent one – it’s a variety of kidney bean so has a similar sort of consistency, and probably would be very nice with any sort of seasoning. It complements the rice well, in that both are wholly unremarkable in their taste – to the point where if the Rice or Borlotti families are reading this, both will be surprised that their taste has managed to get an entire sentence, even if most of that sentence is dedicated to pointing that fact out.

Finally, we come to John Craving’s Newsround. It’s a short one today, as I still haven’t really hit any massive cravings at the moment. Having only just finished dinner I’m still a bit hungry, and I suspect that later in the evening I may land my first craving for something tastier than rice. But for now, things aren’t too bad.

I continue to be amazed and humbled by the generosity shown by those around me, be it through donating, through kind words and prayers or simply by reading through the ramblings that I write each day to keep me sane. So thank you for your support!

As the week continues, I suspect my inspiration for topics to write about will start to run a little thin, and therein the real rambling begins. If there’s anything that you think would be interesting for me to write about, then do let me know – I’m always happy for writing prompts.

 Note: As part of my Mean Bean challenge I will be writing about my experiences each day – the more money raised, the more I write. At the time of writing, people have generously donated £290, which means I’m aiming at 1,650 words per day (excluding the ones in this explanatory paragraph). This will hopefully come in two posts, one in the morning and one in the evening. If you would like these posts to get even longer, and support the excellent work of Tearfund at the same time, please click here.

Tuesday morning – Porridge-ards Almanack

Day 2, and the day so far has actually started relatively positively. Following yesterday’s post and the first day of low calories and dull food, I went to bed feeling slightly hungry. Not the “I need to eat something or I’m going to die” type of hunger, but very much the “You know what? I could really go for a biscuit or a packet of crisps or a 5-course meal right now” type of hunger.

I probably wasn’t quite as hungry as I thought, though, because I woke up this morning and didn’t feel particularly hungry at all. Perhaps my body ate some of itself in the night – I checked and I still have all my limbs so it wasn’t a massively oversized meal, but it might have taken some of the unused stuff hanging out in the part of the brain where I make sense and don’t use overlong sentences which go on for a while but don’t end in a particularly sensible.

Or perhaps my brain (or at least what was left of it) had extrapolated from yesterday’s breakfast what today’s breakfast was going to be and had decided it would prefer to stay out of the whole proceedings.

Tuesday Porridge

Ingredients: porridge oats, water, a keen sense of dread.

One of the hardest parts of this recipe is getting the calligraphy right.

1)      Decide that you’re not going to put yourself through eating an entire dull bowl of porridge and so opt for pouring fewer oats into the bowl.

2)      Accidentally tip the packet too far and discover you’ve poured exactly the same amount of oats as last time. (Down to the oat, I counted).

3)      Consider putting some oats back before deciding that’s too much effort.

4)      Redress the balance by adding even less water than yesterday.

5)      Cook the porridge in the microwave for 2 minutes.

6)      Consider cooking it for another hour in the hope that it will disintegrate and you can get all the calories just by breathing in the fumes of the burnt wreckage of what used to be a kitchen.

7)      Realise that burnt plastic is not one of the foods allowed on the list and so step 6 would probably invalidate the challenge.

8)      Reluctantly source a spoon.

The whole question of oats-to-water ratio is an interesting one (if you use a rather creative definition of the word "interesting"). At one end of the spectrum, adding no water means just eating raw porridge oats, which are not particularly interesting. At the other end, adding (for instance) the entire Atlantic Ocean to 40g of porridge oats means that I wouldn’t really taste the oats at all, but would also have to drink a fair bit more water than I usually drink. I’d also need to filter out all the sharks and boats and plastic bags, and would probably exceed my recommended daily allowance of salt.

So both ends of the spectrum are pretty bad, and part of the science of this week is trying to work out if there’s a sweet spot where two wrongs make a right (as the proverb famously suggests often happens) and it suddenly starts being an acceptable meal.

I think the best conclusion here is simply that porridge is not really my sort of meal. Although perhaps it would be better if I added literally anything else to it – which has actually led me to think of a good way of ending this challenge.

Currently, the challenge to eat plain rice, plain beans and plain porridge finishes on Friday. I am considering making Saturday into a transition today between the challenge and ordinary life, by still eating porridge for breakfast and rice and beans for lunch and dinner; but then I am free to add as many other ingredients as I like. So I can make the porridge with milk, honey, sugar, asbestos – any of the classic additions. Similarly, lunch and dinner can be any dish that involves rice and beans in some way. In that way, Saturday would make this into an actual food blog where I genuinely cook something. (And since I’m not a particularly good cook, this could be quite a disastrous process in and of itself).

So this seems like a good time to introduce a “stretch goal”. I am incredibly thankful for everybody who has donated towards the challenge so far – your generosity really will make a huge impact. Thanks to another donation overnight, you’ve now raised £270 in total, which is beyond what I was aiming for. But if I can be cheeky and prey on your generosity further, I’ve set a new target of £350. If we reach that by Friday evening, I’ll continue this blog for an extra day and write about my Saturday porridge/rice/beans experience as well. (Plus I’ll still be writing an extra 5 words a day for each pound donated). The link for donations is below if you’re able to help.

In the meantime, thank you again for reading and for your support. This afternoon I’ll be trying (and most likely failing) to make falafel from two ingredients. Watch this space.

 Note: As part of my Mean Bean challenge I will be writing about my experiences each day – the more money raised, the more I write. At the time of writing, people have generously donated £270, which means I’m aiming at 1,550 words per day (excluding the ones in this explanatory paragraph). This will hopefully come in two posts, one in the morning and one in the evening. If you would like these posts to get even longer, and support the excellent work of Tearfund at the same time, please click here.

Monday evening – Haricotta Army

And so Day 1 of my exciting food experience draws to a close. The recipe I used for this afternoon was so good I decided to try it twice.

Rice avec Beans

Ingredients: rice, beans

1.       Cook the rice

2.       Cook the beans

It’s remarkable how such a simple recipe can result in so many exciting combinations. You can do rice and beans, or beans and rice, or alternate rice-bean-rice-bean (which typically results in running out of beans before running out of rice unless you’ve got the quantities horrifically wrong).

In reality, the meals are already spectacularly boring. It turns out that plain rice and plain beans mixed together make something that tastes rather… well, plain.  That makes eating it rather an interesting process. As somebody who has never experienced a shortage of nice food, food is something that I’m used to being able to eat for the purposes of enjoyment, and so if something tastes uninteresting I don’t feel like I have to eat it because there are usually other, tastier options around the corner. It’s why in the past month or so I have eaten a whole pizza several times, and a whole stick of celery zero times.

But as the week goes on, I expect I’ll progress from “food is something I like eating” to “food is something that I need to eat to survive”, and I think that’ll be an interesting transition.

At least there is still some variety in my meals (albeit not much) – namely choice of beans, and quantity. For lunch, I opted for chickpeas, and managed to get the quantities very heavily in favour of rice.

From a distance this may look a little bit like somebody dropped cat litter in the snow. That would certainly explain the taste.

This meant that most bites consisted largely of rice, and I ended up missing some of the blandness of unflavoured chickpeas, as they were drowned out by the blandness of plain rice. I do actually really like chickpeas, so I figured this would be a strong start.

However, I did feel like I let Team Bean down a bit in the war against Team Rice, so when it came to dinner I decided to reinforce the beans with a few extra soldiers and ensure in turn that the rice had a little bit less in reserve. I also chose to make a tactical bean substitution, using haricot beans instead. For those keeping track at home, haricot beans are the beans used in baked beans. In fact the only difference between tinned haricot beans and tinned baked beans is that when they make baked beans they put things in to make it taste nice.

The fork here essentially serves as a spiny metallic referee. Except when the war begins, it tends to leave impartiality in favour of stirring up trouble.

This ended up being a much more even fight, and beans and rice fought valiantly for every mouthful right until the very end, although I think we can all agree that the real winner was blandness.

At the end of Day 1, I can already see that this will be quite an interesting week. My calorie intake for the day is around 1,000, substantially less than I usually eat, and I already feel like I have a bit less energy than usual. It’ll be interesting to see how I feel in the next couple of days.

At this point, I should introduce Cravings Watch (aka John Craving’s Newsround), where I’ll keep track across the week of any strange cravings I happen to pick up. A day in and naturally there aren’t really any serious ones yet. If you think of cravings as horses, though (and many people do), there are some obvious frontrunners as far as I’m concerned as to which will win the Grand National of my mind, the prestigious “First craving” award. And when I say frontrunners, I mean frontrunner. And when I say frontrunner, I mean cheese. My body has already noticed that none of the three meals I’ve eaten today have included cheese, which is a pretty rare state of affairs in my life, and there’s a real possibility it will enter a state of shock when it realises that the next four days will also be cheese free. Writing that sentence is already a bit of a shock and I can’t dwell on it too much. Indeed, I camembert it.

Yeah, that seems like a good place to stop for the day. Except that I still have a few words left to write. Hopefully you’ll forgive me for borrowing these last few from Tearfund, who have stated in much better words than I have the reason this challenge exists; namely:

“…to help you really have an insight into what it is like to live on a bland and repetitive diet without much choice. For many even having rice and a variety of beans would be a feast. Living simply this week enables others to simply live.”

 Note: As part of my Mean Bean challenge I will be writing about my experiences each day – the more money raised, the more I write. At the time of writing, people have generously donated £255, which means I’m aiming at 1,475 words per day (excluding the ones in this explanatory paragraph). This will hopefully come in two posts, one in the morning and one in the evening. If you would like these posts to get even longer, and support the excellent work of Tearfund at the same time, please click here.