Which Came First - the Chicken or the Seed Potatoes?

An odd quandary this. Our pitiful budget having just become more pitiful (see previous post) we are forced to ask the question that no married couple wants to ask: what shall we do about the potatoes?

Chicken or Potatoes?
To summarise: medium and short term plans have run headlong into each other like two angry squirrels and only one can prevail and scamper off with the spoils (I'm envisaging a squirrel harem or a hoard of stolen bird food here.) The week-to-week strategy of chicken divided by 16 has been thrown into turmoil by the seasonal arrival of seed potatoes.

Even though I cannot see your face, I can imagine its furrows.

'What in the name of all that is good is she prattling on about now?' you ask. I shall explain.

Chicken Divided by 16
I can, and frequently do, squeeze 16 meals out of a chicken. The chicken first provides a roast meal for two. The leftover meat and the stock I coax out of what remains of the chicken goes on to provide various other chicken related meals to the tune of around 12-14 portions of what my husband refers to as 'good, honest fare.' Our plan, to see us through the summer after we'd made our way through our UN donation-style sacks of rice, was to bring forth potatoes. We would live off the land for pennies and grow increasingly smug and lardy in the process. That was the plan. Hubby having lost his job, a battle has broken out. My argument is that we can buy seed potatoes and a suitable bag of earth in which to grow said potatoes for not much more than the cost of a chicken.

'Let the chicken live,' say I, 'we will go without stock for a week.'

'Are you mad?' says Hubby, 'the potatoes could go bad. There will be no crop. We will have wasted the chicken money. We will starve,' and so it continues ad nauseam.

Let Them Eat Pastry!
I feel I will lose this battle, so I'm rationing the rice again. Tonight we had homemade bread and marmalade. Hubby wanted to eat pastry. You can't just eat pastry. You need something to put in the pastry. Chicken for example. The idea about the potatoes came first but the chicken looks likely to win the battle.

The Novel - Four Days to Go!
It's true. In four days I hope to blog something triumphant. In four days, I should have created the first draft of my brand new novel. It's not the easiest thing to be creative whilst helping one's husband to keep his chin up and trying to win The Battle of Potato or Poultry but I'm doing my best and I'm fairly confident that I'll hit the scary deadline square on the nose.

If I get an agent before the spring, the first thing I will buy is a packet of seed potatoes. He may have won the battle, but the war is still up for grabs.