Weezl's phase 1- recipe testing and frugalisation- come one, come all!

weezl74

Lesley_Gaye wrote: »

do we have to have 1 each day, does it not count if we have 7 portions a day but unevenly distributed colours over, say, a week?

have tried to find somewhere talking about the colours but haven't yet, can you point me in the right direction?

this is the linkie that HGL was using

Lesley_Gaye

weezl74 wrote: »

this is the linkie that HGL was using

Ok thanks. Have had a look and it makes interesting reading. I do make sure we get a wide range of fruit and veg, but have not really thought about counting the different colours at all.

They do talk about covering all the bases over time, but not every day, just that it was the simplest way.

The purple seems the hardest to get to me. We have toms and red pepper a lot, yellow, green and white veg all the time, but purple, hmmm

OH is not keen on beetroot, aubergine or red cabbage, he hates blackberries, I've never seen purple peppers. Think I need to use red cabbage more and get beetroot and aubergine in as often as I can. OH won't complain if I use them in mixed things (except beetroot, it musn't touch anything else as it colours it and makes it look 'horrible' his word). Purple grapes I have when they are ok pricewise, but they are often twice the price of white grapes. Have blueberries in the garden, and frozen ones are not too bad pricewise. We have smoothies fairly often, so I could get some in there too.

I need to think about the colour issue I think and make sure we get the right balance

boredofbeingathome

Well i can safely say we eat a lot from most of the five food groups- but the purple one is mostly black currants for us, grapes- when they are on offer, and plums if in seaso ( they just don't taste the same otherwise)

Aubergine- very rarely. Hmm will have to think about this one.

In_Search_Of_Me

morning! Re what to do my vote would be carry on and people hopefully use their common sence...as you said (I think yesterday) people dint DO the 50p challenge but many of us picked up bits and pieces - what is important is the demonstration that it CAN be done, if you put the time and effort in. If, on the other hand, youre a lazy S+++ like me then you can pick and choose but still reduce the amount you spend so a sucess anyway? Part of this for people doing it will be motivation to change and within that there is the cycle of change to consider...Rome taking a while to build and all that!
Anyway, my penneth for what its worth...on whch note must on as have a quilt to finish...

System

weezl74 wrote: »

I'm aware too that I keep tinkering with the shopping list as I realise there id too much of one thing, not enough of another or that one meal isn't working and needs swapping. So it feels like that could be quite frustrating.

What do you think is a good way forward? Could I have access through googledocs to the spreadsheet and play around with amounts and costings myself? Or would you like me just to give you up dates of the shopping list and ask what we've run out of.

For the moment, I think I'd prefer to hang onto it myself, if that is OK with you. Lots of reasons... I'm still refining it and checking that it actually works properly, so it needs ongoing testing before it can be considered reliable. It's a bit convoluted to use because I haven't added any of the prettifying/signposting/instructions that would be needed before someone else could use it without being driven insane by the attempt. You have enough on your plate without having to decode arcane spreadsheet mysteries! It is created in Numbers (part of Apple's iWork suite for the Mac), which is potentially another issue. And I think I may have thought of a way to minimise the impact of changes to the recipes and shopping list, so development is still ongoing...

Don't worry about asking me to fiddle with the numbers -- it's fine, and I'm happy to help.

There are three basic aspects to the spreadsheet (which also costs the individual recipes, by the way, and which I will be expanding to cost combinations of recipes) -- the shopping list, the databank of recipes, the stock control system.

Shopping list: Basically, as long as you let me know your current shopping list:

• Prices and quantities bought of items on the list are easy to update.
• New additions to the shopping list are easy to accommodate.
• I think I have a cunning plan to minimise the disruption of removing things from the shopping list, but I only just thought of it an hour ago, so haven't set it up yet.

Recipes: Changes to recipes are slightly more problematic, but as long as you tell me what the "official" recipe is, the spreadsheet changes I plan to make today mean that:

• Changes to quantities of ingredients will be easy.
• Removal of recipe ingredients will be easy.
• Addition of ingredients to a recipe will continue to be a bit frustrating and open to error because this requires manual transfer between the recipe bank and the stock control system (gosh, that sounds formal!). Can't see a way round this at the moment, but these things sometimes become clearer as a spreadsheet evolves.

Stock control: I'm about to set this up to further reduce the amount of manual entry, but in essence:

• Omitting recipes from the plan is easy.
• Adding recipes to the plan is straightforward, but each individual ingredient is added to the stock control sheet in a manual process so requires a little more effort than would be ideal.
• Re-adding previously omitted recipes is easy.
• Changing the number of batches of a recipe in the plan is easy.
• Updating the stock control sheet to reflect addition of ingredients to individual recipes is a bit of a pain. Short of redoing this whole thing in a database rather than a spreadsheet, I can't see a way round this at the moment (and I haven't got a database at home anyway).

Which is a long and complicated way of saying that the spreadsheet isn't really fit for release, that I don't mind in the slightest doing this for you, and that I would welcome some more data (nomination of recipes, changes to shopping list, etc) so that I can test it out further and see if better streamlining is possible.

sistercas

Lesley_Gaye wrote: »

Ok thanks. Have had a look and it makes interesting reading. I do make sure we get a wide range of fruit and veg, but have not really thought about counting the different colours at all.

They do talk about covering all the bases over time, but not every day, just that it was the simplest way.

The purple seems the hardest to get to me. We have toms and red pepper a lot, yellow, green and white veg all the time, but purple, hmmm

OH is not keen on beetroot, aubergine or red cabbage, he hates blackberries, I've never seen purple peppers. Think I need to use red cabbage more and get beetroot and aubergine in as often as I can. OH won't complain if I use them in mixed things (except beetroot, it musn't touch anything else as it colours it and makes it look 'horrible' his word). Purple grapes I have when they are ok pricewise, but they are often twice the price of white grapes. Have blueberries in the garden, and frozen ones are not too bad pricewise. We have smoothies fairly often, so I could get some in there too.

I need to think about the colour issue I think and make sure we get the right balance

what about red onion ? I think that may be in the purple catagory

nopot2pin

got-it-spend-it wrote: »

Weezl- poundland has non- stick loaf tins. They look okay quality. I saw them when I was looking for a flan case.

I have 2 of these, and one silicon one.
The poundland ones are absolutely fine :T

weezl74 wrote: »

:rotfl:

sorry this is utterly off topic, but I had to share:

DH and I talking about valentine's day tomorrow:

DH: 'I have to confess I haven't got anything. I wanted to get you flowers but I didn't know if you'd think it was a waste of money. (he pauses...) I knew it had gotten bad when I considered walking home via the graveyard and inspecting the roses there....'


:rotfl: Must point out that DH would never steal fresh flowers off a grave.

:T:T:T

He could buy you a bag of flour, instead of flowers :D:o
Sorry...that was bad
But it is a multi-tasking "present" :whistle:

System

weezl74 wrote: »

blue/purple(Aubergine, purple grapes, plums, raisins, blueberries, blackberries, purple figs, dried plums, black currants)

Isn't it odd how all the blue/purple ones are jolly expensive? (Apart from the blackberries which are free if you pick them yourself, but entirely unavailable at this time of year.)

Lesley_Gaye

sistercas wrote: »

what about red onion ? I think that may be in the purple catagory

I did see that one but wondered about the amount of colour involved. When I use red onions the colour mainly seems to be in the skin and not much in the edible part, although I could certainly use more of them to help get the hard purple portion in

The place I looked didn't mention the pulses that count. Maybe there is a pulse that would count in purple, that would make it easier, we use LOADS of pulses and beans etc. and it would be very easy to use one instead of another

HariboJunkie

Weezl it's your plan and I'm happy to go along with anything you decide . As it is I am looking at this experiment with a view to taking bits of it away for my family but not the whole thing so it isn't aimed at me anyway.
What about offerring the monthly plan with a few alternative meals at the end which could be substituted if certain ingredients were too hard to get hold of or had risen in price?