Making use of the recipe and ingredients available to us here, I have sampled how to make different nutritious meals that are rich in nutrients yet can fit into your budget.
While everyone is discouraged and complaining about the rate of inflation and how difficult it gets to feed daily, especially as the minimum wage is still stuck at 30k naira monthly, we as a community have embarked on different missions about prices. How to purchase the most products at a good price.
This translates to how we can engage in a frugal lifestyle and still be able to make progress in this situation.
Can a budget of a dollar make any meal for you? A dollar is equivalent to 1400 naira. Would this be enough to make breakfast, at least?
How many people can a breakfast meal of $1/1400 feed?
Is that even possible at all?
Well, this is where you have to follow me closely and look at the price list of items here to see how much you would need to make a healthy meal.
The funds for this project were 20HBD, which was transacted for approximately 28k naira here. This is just 2,000 below the minimum wage. Let’s see what this can make and what length of days a family can feed on it.Since the funds seem a little large to make just a single meal, I made the decision to explore what a typical breakfast, lunch, and dinner can look like on tiny budgets.
Breakfast
What typical meal can you make for breakfast, and how much would that cost? Will you opt for a loaf of bread sold currently at $1? Would you purchase milk and Bournvita for tea, knowing fully well that 450g of each is sold above $3?
Typically, this is what I would prepare. A combination of either of these will be just fine for me. You can check the budgets and tell me if this is cheaper compared to contemporary bread and tea.
- A breakfast of pancakes and cabbage
Or - A breakfast of Tom Brown Puff (Any flour snacks will do here; your choice.)
Let's start with a breakfast of pancakes and cabbage.
I had invited a friend to join me and share in the breakfast of pancakes and cabbage.
And here is the price list of the ingredients we bought for the meal. Having spent a total of 5100 naira, we were able to achieve that. You can see all the combinations of nutritious ingredients in your cabbage and egg to go with flour.
Having bought 7 cups (the milk tin measure, which is equivalent to 840 g of flour) using a standard that equates 1 cup of flour as 120 g of flour, we are only able to exhaust half a cup of the entire flour that feeds the two of us for breakfast. Meaning that this amount can equally feed a family of five if the entire flour is exhausted. Hence, a budget of $5100k can give you a nutritious breakfast such as this.
But for those who love to have something they can drink alongside some snacks, let's look at how to prepare some nutrient-rich drinks aside from your regular tea.
Tom Brown and Doughnut/Puff-Puff
For this assignment, I invited another set of friends to join me for breakfast.
Tom Brown is a local drink that I am not sure many people are aware of.
But a good number of individuals in the north take either this or pap for breakfast.
You can choose to take it with bread, doughnuts, or puff-puffs, as I preferred.
To prepare Tom Brown, you have to have gone through a series of preparations of some grains into flour. A not-inclusive list of grains can be seen next.
Some would add tigernuts, dates as natural sweeteners, and a few other grains based on choice, but the basic ingredients are what I have listed above. And most people equally preferred to double the amount of corn present compared to other ingredients. But what I have liked most about this drink is that you get to have a mixture of soy beans and wheat in your drink. These are healthy and nutritious proteins alongside other grains; hence, I prefer to have a larger percentage of the soybeans compared to other grains.
Having purchased all the grains, you wash them separately, pick them out first, roast them lightly in a pot over fire, then take them to the mill and grind everything together.
Having done that, you can now prepare the powdered grains in boiling water. If you want it extra rich with evaporated milk or otherwise, you can go ahead; it only adds to your budget.
The young lady that joined me to take this doesn't want her face showing in the pictures. How shameful🤗😀
The amount spent to prepare the Tom Brown was 4100 naira, but this gave us the blended mixter weighing above 1 kg that can last an individual for almost 2 weeks when taken daily.
Next, we prepared some snacks to go with the Tom Brown.
The price list for the basic ingredients is this:
I was quite aware of how much snack these ingredients will make, especially the flour, and because I have invited a good number of people to share with me, I have used the entire 14-cup measure of flour, over a thousand grams.
Here is the making process:
And guess what? We had a pile of snacks in the house that day, as you can see from the picture.
Everyone was happy to take a bite.
And since nothing is meant to go to waste, I was more than happy to package the snack and hit the road to distribute it to hungry street children, just like in the situation where the invited guest for the wedding feast failed to show up.
Some of the people I intended to come and join us for this meal didn't show up, and we were better off since the most needy and hungry people here got something to eat that morning.
The analysis from this also shows that you can reduce the budget list to 6600 naira and about $5 to make breakfast for a smaller number of people by reducing the quantity of flour used. 4-5 cups of flour (840 g) can make enough of this for a family of 5. The flour is the most expensive ingredient there.
Here is how we took the Tom Brown and puff-puff (doughnut, as the guy may desire).
Comparing the two sets of breakfasts here. We spent 5100 naira ($3.6) to make pancakes and cabbage, while 6600 ($5) was used to prepare our flour snack and another 4100 ($3) for the Tom Brown. The cabbage source is cheaper but would last as long as the Tom Brown and snacks for someone looking at breakfast for a few days. You can choose any desired combination or choose to have your Tom Brown with pancakes instead since the other snacks might take a little more time for their preparation.
That was about 16k ($11) naira spent to review a healthy breakfast meal. And all of these meals contain rich and nutritious ingredients with a good amount of protein and vegetables.
A final episode of your lunch and dinner on a healthy budget will complete the mission report for the months of June, and that will come in within the next few hours.I want to say a big thank you to @terganftp for sponsoring this project
Thank you for checking in and reading through the lengthy post.
I do hope that you pick up some ideas on how to make the most nutritious meal for the most people and on some good budgets.