A three-​​course meal for two, for $10

Update: this post won the most frugal award in the competition!

Nuffn­ang, a blog advert­ising com­munity of which I am a mem­ber, ran an inter­est­ing con­test: given a $10 Coles Group/​Myer gift card a) spend it most cre­at­ively, or b) spend it most frugally. I got my $10 in the wel­come pack recently.

Actu­ally, the second chal­lenge — the frugal one — states, “How far can you stretch $10 and what can you make it do?” (emphasis mine). Being the lit­er­al­ist that I can be at times, I was con­sid­er­ing buy­ing paper­clips and string­ing them together. This bears some thought: a packet of 100 paper­clips, at Coles World Square, costs $0.64 – so with $10, I’ll be able to walk away with 1500 paper­clips. With each paper­clip span­ning 2.8 cm, a little bit of arith­metic tells me that I should be able to string together some­thing over 40 m long — beat that! But a little bit of arith­metic also tells me that I’d be string­ing together paper­clips for way too many hours, so we moved on from that idea pretty quickly.

I sup­pose, in this world of heightened aware­ness of fin­an­cial prudence, it would be rather passé to exhibit any form of con­spicu­ous con­sump­tion: out with the caviar, in with the roe. With that in mind, and Curtis Stone’s omni­present smile at Coles, we designed the per­fect night out: a three-​​course meal, for two, for ten dol­lars, no cook­ing required. And where else would you eat such a frugal meal, apart from on a pic­nic rug in Hyde Park, right in the middle of Sydney?

(Note: apart from the fol­low­ing pho­tos, I had pho­tos of us shop­ping, but… shit hap­pens. I took them on my cam­era phone. I lost said phone on the way home, on the train. Sigh.)

First course: Fresh man­dar­ins in nat­ural peel. Per­fect for cleans­ing the pal­ate, these man­dar­ins, once peeled, trans­formed into suc­cu­lent wedges of juicy fruitiness.

Two for only $0.54! (exclud­ing laptop, and laptop bag)

Second course: Crus­ted bread, with roast chicken, gour­met lettuce and avo­cado dip. Simple, under­stated, irres­ist­ible. I sup­pose the name of this del­ic­acy speaks for itself.

It’s an easy dish to pre­pare — here’s an easy-​​to-​​follow visual guide as to the assembly of this dish in case you think this is all way too complicated:

The dip made all the dif­fer­ence I think, adding con­trast­ing tex­tures and fla­vours (a hint of onion — oh my!) to the crusty bread.

Third course: Cin­na­mon dough­nuts. If there was a 1 in front of the dough­nuts, that would accur­ately describe our three-​​course meal: 100… percent!

So, we man­aged to fit in all the main food groups, I think — all for $10. Eat like a king, without the price tag. Just look at our beam­ing smiles!

The food: $10. The experience:

And here’s the receipt, to show that everything is above board. (Audit­ing is fun, I’m told.)

21 cents spare.

(more pho­tos)