Need help newbie os...

Penny-Pincher!!

Hiya and welcome!!

What kind of foods do you like? We eat very well (3 of us) for about £35pw including all food/groceries and cleaning stuff etc.

Breakfasts are things like: toast/jam, cereal, fruit, juice, egg/toast, bacon butties, full english once a fortnight, porridge and fruit.
Lunch:(OH & I at home 24/7) baked potatoes, sandwich/roll, soup and bread, left over from night before, beans on toast etc. DD has a packed lunch daily at school of sarnie, apple, raisins, banana, yogurt, HM biscuit, water, crisps (every other day). If she is at home, she has what we have.
Dinner: Roast full dinners, toad in hole/mash/veg, shepards pie and veg, HM curries and rice, HM Fishpie and veg, Chilli con carne, Spagbol, Sausage and mash, HM Pizzas, HM lasagnas, Lamb Chops/Spuds/Veg. Loads more but just off the top of my head..LOL.

We cook extra and eat the next day as a lunch or freeze the portions. We buy reduced food where we can and freeze.

I used to be an exclusive M&S and Waitrose food snob spending £100+ a week plus another £50+ eating our or take aways:eek: I really enjoy living like this and we eat and live very well. If i can do it..anyone can.

Good Luck
PP
xx

carlih1

Wow Penny pincher you only spend £35 pw. Well that is an inspiration, although i think i can get my cleaning goods down a lot, ( i think i have a disorder which says i have to test every new cleaning product on the market, slightly, ocd if you like...lol)

Anyway i am down to using just one tablet of washing powder instead of two, works just as well, diluting my fabric softner also. I use vinegar with water and a essential oil in a spray bottle for the kitceh nadn bathroom, also use stardrops, which are great, and have my trusty microfibre clothes, for everything!!!!!

We usually eat

Breakfast
I have weetabix or toast, or my greek yoghurt with nuts and dried fruit.
dd has cherios or equivelant, ds has weetabix and a banana.

lunch

Either sandwiches with sliced meats, coleslaw, cucumber, the kids have grapes and strawberries etc cut up on their plate also. I will have sandwich or crackerbreads with philidelphia. Or if it is cold i would have soup or jacket spud, with cheese and beans.


dinner

I do, roast, or coucous with tomato sauce and mozzeralla, sausages mash and onion gravy, shepherds pie, chicken korma, spag bol, and homemade soups i think thats it. Make all my diner apart from korma from scratch and get organic veggies delivered every week (my mum pays for this). Am absolutely up for trying some new ideas though.

I do make a huge lot of the tomato sauce when i make it, put loads of med veg in with tinned tomatoes and whizz it up so the kids are getting lots of nutrients. Thats gets frozen but i think i need to get more into this as .... i threw away the remains of my roast dinner yesterday feel v ashamed about that.

Anyway thank for your post.

Carli x

henhog

I got this advice from Alvin Hall - sorry Martin! :money: :rotfl:

Decide how much you can spend each m,onth on your grocery shopping - work this out using receipts or Martin's spreadsheet or just guess - you will soon find out if it is too much or too little.

Withdraw this from the bank and put it in a tin and that is your grocery shopping for the month - no more. It does take a little bit of trial and error to get it right, but to ease yourself into it you could put £250 into the tin if you usually spend £300 and then ease yourself down by £20 a month.

If you are worried about having so much cash lying about you can do it in the old fashinoned 'wages packet' way - with draw say £60 a week instead of the whole month in one go.

HTH

mummysaver

Hi there! I found that making a list of the meals that we wanted to eat, and including things like using up the leftovers of roasts in pies or curries, made my shopping much cheaper, as all I had to do was get the extras to make the meals that weren't already in the cupboard or freezer.

Another tip that I found on here - thanks to whoever posted it originally! - was rather than putting leftovers into the fridge where they get forgotten if you don't eat them the next day, is put them straight into the freezer, then you have a ready meal for when you don't have time or can't be bothered to cook.

I also cook double quantities of things like lasagne and curry, as this takes about the same amount of time and means that I have another meal ready for the next week!

To stop myself browsing around the supermarket too much, I tend to do the shopping when I only have a short amount of time, this means that I whizz around grabbing the stuff on my list, and not deviating, as I know that I have to go and pick up the children from school, or whatever!

Good luck with the meal planning, and I can definitely recommend Black Saturn and Penny-Pincher's meal planners, even if you wouldn't eat the same things as them they are a great inspiration!

phizzimum

angchris wrote:

washing powder is ever so easy to make it takes about 10 minutes :j

angchris, your recipe sounds much more simple than ones I've read before, I'll definitely give it a try! thanks

elona

angcris

Thanks for the washing powder powder recipe as I had previously tried the laundry gloop and it was a bit of a fiddle to boil it all up etc.
:T

lynzpower

My tips are:

Swap chicken for turkey in stirfries/enchiladas/pies/curries, cheaper, less shrinkage, healthier.
Use your left over chicken if you are roasting a bird. Chances are the meat on the legs, wings etc, will be left. Eg, I knocked up a chicken pie the other day with
*all the bits of chicken left on the carcass even the *hard* bits
*basic white sauce ( butter, flour milk)
*pinch dried herbs/ cracked black pepper
*splash of age old white wine kept on the side in case I wanted to cook with it - not essential
*mushrooms, onions, handful frozen sweetcorn, half a red pepper
*pack frozen farmfoods puff pastry

Cook pastry on baking sheet, while filling is slowly simmering in pan, score rectangle in the pastry with knife ( not all way through) When its risen, gently lift the *lid* out, put filling in, then back in the oven for 10 mins. Served with mini roasties.

Cost- less than a quid, served 3 with leftovers. OH loved it

Dont be a mug for different cleaning products like Ive been ( do I really need tiled floor cleaner, wood floor cleaner and floor cleaner?, not really) Ive got a cupbard full Im using up. Ive watered down some ecover multipurpose for the tops in the kitchen, and used WUL in the bathroom. Ive also become rather adverse to the strong smell of some products (cif bathroom foam -foul!) adn cant wait to get started with my stardrops!

Use Oldschool dishcloths instead of those pointless blue j cloths ( saves a fortune)

And a budgeting thing weve done is, from my sig I had a :eek: week, at this I looked at what we have left in theres angel delight, heinz sponge pud, bag of flaked pudding rice etc. So that means, you dont need to buy any puds for the next week AT ALL Only buy what you'll need for the week, aim to have very little "left over".

Ive started buying shops own shower gel (50p ) instead of the 1.50 I used to spend, I certainly havent notice the difference, and there are loads of little cutbacks you can make like this, that will really help count the pennies.

All the best with it!!