February 2010 Grocery Challenge

MAXOL

Pink-winged would you please put me down for £80 this month as well. Cheers

echelon101

Spent £8 in co-op

Long_tall_sally

Sorry for the late thanks to all those who suggested meals for the vast amount of food in my freezer, especially Chocclare. I am doing an NVQ (I am a Teaching assistant) and it has to be in a week tomorrow so have been busy with that.)
Chocclare - what actually is mollasses? I've vaguely heard of it - is it a type of sugar?
Sunnyday - g;ad someone else has a freezer full like me, although yours sound far more organised & you have lots of shelves!
Moniker - I would never have thought to put half a bag pf salad in a soup. That's what I love about this forum - you can get so many ideas to reduce waste & cut costs!

Ragz - well done. My kids are 10 & 8 and I certainly don't intend to have any more but there is nothing like the sight and smell of a new born baby to make you think "oh maybe"!

Long_tall_sally

Sorry, forgot to say, I spent another £41.81 today! £10 odd in Mr S's, £7 odd Aldi, £14 odd Farm Foods and £9 in Iceland. Some of these purchases were necessary, i.e toilet rolls (we get through loads in this house!)Veg, freezer bags, refuse sacks, bread but others were not, such as PRAWNS, BURGERS, MORE MINCE, SAUSAGES and MORE FISHFINGERS (on offer in Mr s's) but nether the less, I can sleep easy now knowing that I have everything i would normally have in the freezer, with the exception of scampi (cos didn't see that on offer anywhere!).

Despite the large spend so early in the month, I am actually quite confident now that I will easily achieve target or better this month!

zarazara

I want to join in. I've only spent on 1 item so far, a loaf of bread £1.35.

ChocClare

Long_tall_sally wrote: »

Chocclare - what actually is mollasses? I've vaguely heard of it - is it a type of sugar?

I couldn't swear they're TECHNICALLY the same (in fact probably someone will tell me very definitely that they're NOT) but I suppose the nearest thing would be black treacle. We always have a packet of Billington's molasses sugar in the house so the question doesn't really arise...

Though, come to think of it, I have TWO unopened jars of black treacle I could be using

cuffey

Great news Ragz! Many congratulations.

katenut

Hi everyone, hope all your challenges are going well. I just wanted to pick your brains about the grocery challenge, i have a small dilemma!
My boss gave me £150 of vouchers for our local farm shop for Christmas (possibly the best present I got!) and we are going at the weekend to do a big stock up, then to Lidl for the usual bits and bobs. Would any of you include this in your grocery challenge spends, or look upon it as an added bonus?
We will be buying some of the stuff at the farm shop that we normally get cheaper elsewhere (such as meat, cheese etc - its not the cheapest farm shop but lovely food) and some extra treats - so I'm thinking this will totally blow my budget if I include it in my challenge?! But if I dont include it in my challenge I'll feel like I'm cheating! We dont have to spend the whole lot at once so I might try and spread it out over a few months.
Its lovely to have a nice dilemma for once, rather than working out which credit cards I need to pay first!

self_sufficent_wannabe

Just back from shopping, enjoying 2 of my tesco bargains reduced mulligatawny soup and ham/cheese sandwich, supper for two=62p yum

Only joined the challenge today and left the house at 7.45pm managed to get to farmfoods,tesco,asda and co-op by 10pm.So lucky as all 4 are on a route just 1 or 2 miles apart.

spent more than i planned as was only going to get a few things but when i got there decided to stock up on storecupboard basics. pasta, rice, bread, milk(4x 4pints only 3.00 in farmfoods!) loads of reduced stuff from tesco, toiletries, snacks etc. Came home with 17 bags full!

Looking forward to trying some of the recipes.

spends:
co-op £3.55
farmfoods £10.17
tesco £25.26
asda £18.84
total £57.82

Dont think this was too bad as probably 50% of this should last us for a few weeks.

ikkleosu

*sigh*

Well that.s this week's planned budget ruined. Had a crappy day, just been in a general bad mood, which was not helped when I discovered for the past couple of weeks hubby has not been taking his bottle of diluting juice to work, but instead has been taking my much more expensive fizzy juice.

As I mentioned earlier in the thread, I can't have anything with sweetners in it, so I have to have the more expensive drinks, unfortunately (wish i didn't). Hubby can drink whatever, and he'd happily gone with diluting becuase it was much much cheaper.

Anyway, his reasoning is that the sports bottle he used has started leaking. But he didn't mention ANY of this to me, so I'm wondering why my stocks of drink have been going down drastically (especially when he made a big deal about the amount I bought last time which SHOULD have done me about 5-6 weeks!).

Grrr how can I fix a problem if he doesn't even mentoin it?

So tonight went to Mr T's to get a new sports bottle, more juice and also remembered had to get 2 birthday cards and 1 sympathy card.

Of course gave in and bought myself pickn mix and some kettle chips (half price, at least). Oh and some bubble envelopes to post some make-up I sold online this week.

So £11.80 spent, not sure how much of it to class as budget? Should I count birthday cards and the new sports bottle? Hmmmm

signed, one gumpy ikkle.