Having said that - this one time only: all proceeds from now on will be disposed of lunch-wise as I see fit - I have accepted a challenge laid down by this lunch's sponsor Lee Raven. Lee Raven's photo is there on the right, and please do check out the site he's submitted as his link in return for today's lunch. This is what Lee had to say for himself:

"I thought you could do with this $0.99 I had lying around... BUT, here's the condition... I challenge you to buy a proper lunch for 99c... If you succeed I might send you enough for a drink to wash it down... ;-)"

Cullens was clearly far too expensive for this challenge, so I want to a more mainstream supermarket: the still rather expensive (but in an appropriately kensingtonite way) Waitrose on Gloucester Road. After a lot of thought, some slightly useless research on the BBC Food site and some careful shopping, I decided to create a Pasta Salad of gastronomic merit for the mere 62p available.

	80g "Waitrose" Penne Pasta	90p per kg	7p
	30g Courgette	£2.29 per kg	10p
	30g Red Pepper	£3.49 per kg	10p
	40g Broccoli	£1.29 per kg	5p
	30g Mushrooms	£1.40 per kg	4p
	25g "Waitrose" Crème Fraîche	£0.43 per 100g	10p
	25g "Hellmann's" Mayonnaise (reduced calorie)	£0.34 per 100g	9p
	10g "Grey Poupon" Dijon mustard	£0.51 per 100g	5p
	A desertspoonful of lemon juice	£0.15 per lemon	2p
		TOTAL:	62p

Okay, so Waitrose doesn't quite sell it's food in this manner. These are the weights I used in the lunch and these are the amounts they'd have cost if I could have purchased them at those weights... but often you can't. For instance I had to buy a whole courgette and just use 30grammes (1/3rd of the courgette), but with mushrooms (pick and choose) and broccoli (bits of, in a bag) you can do it. The rest won't go to waste, it'll be used in a dinner at some point. So I did only use and consume 62p worth of food, but admittedly I had to spend more money to attain it. Anyway, away with the economics which demonstrate that it's contentious as to whether or not I met the challenge (I reckon I did though) - here's how it's made!

As you're going to mix this all together and stick it in the fridge overnight, don't worry about trying to get everything to finish cooking at the same time: it doesn't matter. Now:

• chop up your pepper and courgette into chunks and strips, put them on an oiled baking tray and scoot them around a bit to pick up some oil. Stick it into an oven preheated to 200°C.
• Slice your mushrooms and - 5 minutes later - put them with the veggies in the oven for a further 10 or 15 minutes.
• Chop the Broccoli up into small florets and steam them for 8 minutes over a saucepan of water.
• Cook your pasta in a saucepan of water until al dente.
• Spoon your Crème Fraîche and Mayonnaise into a small bowl and stir together with a teaspoon. Stir in the Dijon Mustard until the colour is uniform.
• Take the veggies out of the oven and stir them in to the sauce you've just made. Drain the pasta and do likewise - but make sure that the all pasta the pasta has a coating of the sauce or it'll dry out and go horrible.
• Squeeze some lemon juice (say, a dessert spoonful) over the final mixture: this'll help tremendously as it could do with a bit of lightness and zing.

Despite the miserly weighing of produce to meet the 62p target, this actually made a fairly decent amount of food, certainly enough for a lunch so long as you haven't skipped breakfast. 80 grammes of dry pasta is a fair amount once it's puffed up with water from cooking, and I was easily full and satisfied by the end of lunch: I couldn't have managed much more. Thankfully there was enough sauce to cover the pasta, but no so much that it was drowning. The sauce was pretty good, although a little unusual - Crème Fraîche is basically just thick soured cream, but it makes for a fairly good sauce base so long as you balance it out, but unfortunately Dijon Mustard is not the balancing taste you want: it gives it warm and rough taste and texture on top of the Crème Fraîche's slightly bitter soured taste. Diluting this with the Mayonnaise helped out a bit, but certainly what saved the day was the lemon juice: it lightened up the sauce considerably and stopped it being so heavy going and tangy. It added zest. So all well and good, but there was still a little too much mustard in there.

There was a good and even distribution of veggies throughout (well, just about). Roasting them has the plea sent effect of sweetening them slightly and makes them much more juicy, as most other cooking methods rob them of their juices. Roasting them also gives them a slightly charred-around-the-edges taste that nicely counters their new sweetness, and mixing these into all that pasta and it's slightly heavy sauce gave the dish the moisture and flavours it most certainly needed. The mushrooms were a little odd: slightly dry but very concentrated in flavour, plus a source of protein in this meat-free dish.

So overall, good stuff indeed. It was a bit of a pain to make (I started at about half midnight and didn't finish 'till 1am) and of course I had to do some careful shopping for the ingredients, so it looses a point for that. It drops another point as I had to eat at my desk rather than get out and about. But those are technicalities: the food itself only drops half a point due to slight over-mustarding, so I think it all went rather well really!