In the last post I shared about my very clever, beautiful and hansom sponsored children, who live in areas where it's common to live in extreme poverty. I love to explore the foods of different countries, so I thought it would be a good idea to explore the foods my sponsored children eat, and plan my menu based on their cuisines. This way, I'll be getting an insight into the lives of real people who live in extreme poverty.
I think most Live Below The Line participants eat three meals a day for about 80c per meal. I did that three years ago, but this time, I've decided to cut back to two meals per day. At first, I was going to do lunch and dinner, but actually, if I don't eat anything in the morning, I don't feel well. So, I decided on a breakfast, and an afternoon meal at about 4pm. Funny enough, when I was doing research on Burkina Faso, I found out that's pretty much what they do.
Manthasha (6, India) and Nouridine (5, Burkina Faso) have both sent me letters and told me their favourite foods.Nouridine's favourite food is rice. Manthasha's favourite food is rice and dal. Dal is split beans or lentils, usually curried, although there are endless styles of cooking dal and endless flavours of curry) Aldair (12, Peru) and Susantho (13, India) haven't told me their favourite foods yet. (It's okay, you guys are teenagers, we get it.)
Having been to India, I have a grasp on their style of cooking. I often make my favourite Indian dishes at home, but India is a huge country, with very different styles of cooking from one region to another, so there will always be more to try. Knowing that Manthasha lives in a community of ethnic North Indians who migrated to Mumbai, I set out to find some North Indian recipes. And, specifically, I wanted breakfast. In India, we usually cooked our own breakfast, so I didn't try many the foods Indian people had for breakfast. I do remember trying what I think was Idli. Perhaps in a hotel in Delhi, but this is a distant memory.
On the internet, I found several breakfast ideas, but it was easier to find ones that were most common in South India. Eventually, I settled on a porridge made of kibbled wheat that is called Daliya in Northern India (Although Daliya means any porridge in Southern India). This is good for me because it has a resonable amount of fibre, which I hope can keep me full during the day until my four o clock meal. Kibbled wheat is also avaliable and very cheap. So, if my calculations are correct, I can buy enough for five days for under a dollar. I'm going to put some tomatoes and spices with it (Yes, Indian savoury porridge) And if I'm really lucky, I might even have a small amount of chopped carrot or something in it. Since I like having the same breakfast every day, I'm going to have Daliya every morning of Live Below The Line, and then each afternoon I will have food from a different country.
I also decided to hail to Manthasha's favourite meal for my first dinner. Since I'll already have a big tin of tomatos, and dal is cheap enough. I'm not sure which dal recipe I'll use, though. Maybe something from Susantho's home state if I can find a good recipe. My advice for anyone who wants to try Indian food for Live Below The Line, or just to try authentic Indian food, is find an Indian recipe website or blog, there are plenty of them. I'll put some links to my favourites in the bottom. Being mostly vegetarian, authentic Indian food is cheap to make. Note that for Live Below the Line, you can calculate the cost of 'condiments' like spices per gram that you use. That way you don't have to go into the bulk shop and buy two teaspoons of Garam Masala for one portion of curry.
So, that brought me to Peruvian food. I hadn't really known anything about Peruvian food until I googled it. What I found was very interesting. The first website I found, Lima Easy, was great. It's about Lima, which is fine because Aldair lives near Lima. I was really happy when I saw some recipes involving offal. Ahh, Last time I tried to go without meat for Live Below The Line, but I really missed it. I 'sold' other ingredients half way through to 'buy' some meat. Offal, being cheap, is a good solution. It might put people off, but to me, most offals are just meat. For the Maori audience, think boil up. It's a kind of food developed by people who only had access to cheap meats, and it's good.
So, I found two Peruvian boil ups, Cau Cau, which is traditionally made with Tripe and potato. I made a trial batch, and it was ediable. I'm not quite sure if I will actually do this for Live Below The Line, because you have to buy about 300grams of tripe at a time, and I don't want to eat Cau Cau every day. But, when I was looking at a recipe for Cau cau, I found a link to another Peruvian offal dish; Anticuchos. It's marinated meat on a skewer. You can basically use any meat, but it's generally made of Ox heart. I couldn't actually find any ox heart, but I got a portion of sheep's heart for $1.24. I made the recipe up just to see what it was like, and honestly, it was beautiful. I could feed it to my little sisters, well, I wouldn't because I'd eat it all myself, but I know they would eat it.
If you want to try Peruvian food for Live Below the Line, but offal isn't for you, may I reccomend
Tacu Tacu - a bean and rice dish.
Salchipapas - A style of Sausage and chips.
If I opt out of cau cau, for Live Below The Line, which I probably will, I'll be having Tacu Tacu. But it does depend on what happens when I go shopping.
However, I admit Tacu Tacu is kind of similar to a Burkinabe (Burkina Faso) dish that I will also be making; Boussan Touba. It's a rice and bean pancake. I want to serve it with a home made African style Hot sauce costed out gram for gram. (Or otherwise, sweet chilli sauce) The other Burkinabe dish I want to use is Babenda, which is a cooked rice dish with spinach or silverbeat, peanuts, dried fish, and fermented beans. My only problem is getting dried fish and fermented beans. I have to get my ingredients with $2.25 per day in New Zealand, despite the fact that they would be much cheaper in Burkina Faso where they are staple foods. I remember buying dried fish for another African dish when I was about 8, and living in Nelson and had a school project to research Chad. (I made it for some friends, and I was the only one who ate it). But now I live in Gisborne. I've decided the next best thing is tinned fish. I could use anchovies and work out the cost by gram because they are usually a condiment. But I think I'm more likely to buy a tin of sardines with my budget and add some extra salt, because it's more valuable meat in my diet. But for a whole tin of Sardines -Wish me luck. For the fermented beans, I think miso paste would be a good substitute, and it costs about $7 for a 500g tub, so per tablespoon will be about 28 cents. The other option would be to use some dried beans with a splash of soy sauce for that fermented taste.
I haven't costed out this menu yet because I live 30 minutes away from the shops and I don't know the exact cost of everything so it's not set in stone. I've 'guestimated' the breakfasts to be about 50 cents per day, and the dinners about $1.75 on average. On Shopping day I'll post a video of what I got (Possably of me shopping as well) and the actual cost of each meal. I'd really love it if I don't have to give up tea, but I suppose I'll have to. :(
Indian recipe sorces:
www.padhuskitchen.com
http://sinfullyspicy.com/
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