January 2014 Grocery Challenge

peony40

Hello,

I will be interested in hearing how you find the actifry, I was looking at one the other day. Our cooker is on its last legs and I have been trying to decide which is the better option to buy. So many cooking utensils on the market these days.

Popped out today and spent £18.38 on nuts and nut butter from the health shop. Hopefully, they will last us for a while as they are so expensive.

Not had chance to read the thread today, will pop back later.

Peony x

Mumof2_2

Hi, please can you put me down for £400 for January. Stopped off at Ald1 for a few bits so hope not to spend much more this week.

Billie-jo

peony40 wrote: »

Hello,
I will be interested in hearing how you find the actifry, I was looking at one the other day. Our cooker is on its last legs and I have been trying to decide which is the better option to buy. So many cooking utensils on the market these days
Peony x

Cant say from a personal point of view but my brother has recently brought this http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/partNumber/9055908.htm
and has rung me a few times to say how great it is. He has done chicken, fish, roast potatoes, roast parsnips, carrots and a few other things in it so far. Says it saves in energy as no large oven to heat up and he also said that if his oven ever broke he wouldn't bother replacing it now.


NSD number 2 and for tea we had some hm mushroom soup out of the freezer and used some more of the pork up by doing pork salad rolls.
Lunch we had a pizza and added to it, a couple of sliced past their best mushrooms and a rasher of bacon cut up. Made rocket salad as well to use up and had this with the pizza. Nothing thrown away at all yet.

debtdawg

£9.55 in lidls today on butter spread, 6pts milk, binbags, fruit juice cartons to drink out, cheese topped bread rolls and pastries for us all for lunch and 4 of their 25p chocolate bars for DH/children as a treat - we went out bowling and needed to grab some food/drinks to eat on the way or risk spending silly money whilst out.

Upsy_Staffordshire

peony40 wrote: »

Hello,

I will be interested in hearing how you find the actifry, I was looking at one the other day. Our cooker is on its last legs and I have been trying to decide which is the better option to buy. So many cooking utensils on the market these days.

Popped out today and spent £18.38 on nuts and nut butter from the health shop. Hopefully, they will last us for a while as they are so expensive.

Not had chance to read the thread today, will pop back later.

Peony x

Hi Peony, we have an actifry and we've used it loads since we had it about a year and a half ago. We always have hm chips and wedges now instead of buying them, and we always do them in the actifry. We've also used it to do roast potatoes and sausages. It comes with a little recipe book, and by the looks of it, you can cook pretty much anything in it x

Coxy11

Hi all,

Thanks for the ideas for using up the lo pork. We have previously diced it and added it to macaroni cheese (instead of the usual pancetta) and it was edible - just - but nobody asked for seconds :rotfl: Might try special fried rice???

Despite wanting a NSD I ended up going to A!di with DD and DS2 this afternoon. Spent £70.48 which is a bit :eek: but I did get 2kg of pasta, tins, 100 dw tablets etc. which means I won't need to go again this month. It would have been much much more at Tosco.

Dinner tonight is minced beef and pasta bake. Smells lush.

Have a good evening all
Coxy

Bluegreen143

Well OH can't find the recept from NYE but he says that, apart from the sausages, everything was a snacky treaty thing so he'll pay out of his own money

The sausages were the outdoor reared ones and were £2.99. I'd have bought two packs as they're two for £5 but he probably thought I'd shout at him if he spent so much so can't win really :rotfl:

Made some T***y's chocolate orange cookies earlier using a chocolate orange I got in my stocking (only baked six, popped the other 12 balls of dough in the freezer - there's just the two of us so I kind of think 18 cookies is too much :rotfl:) and they were absolutely gorgeous, went down a hit with OH so would recommend. Just made my usual cookie recipe but used chopped up chocolate orange in place of chips. Think I read the idea on here, so whoever mentioned it - thank you

dingdongsaving

Can you put me down for £400 for the month please? This is my usual monthly budget, but we have so many leftovers nestled away in the freezer I'm hoping we'll be well under.

2 adults, 1 son, 2 dogs, 1 cat and 1 guinea pig.

Nothing spent so far, and not planning a food shop until Saturday or Sunday ready to start the new week.

Yesterday and today still totally leftover/freezer-based meals. YUM!

Happy New Year All!!

Katey1980

Nipped to the supermarket to take a few baking bits back that I ended up not using over Xmas. Not going to add the refund (£15) back into my budget - that will be going towards bringing us back into the black

Also needed to get a few items that we'd run out of, and picked up literally a month's worth of lunchbox items that were on offer for my other half to encourage him to take food to work - no excuse now!

That stash of lunchbox items and the bread, milk, coffee and fruit and veg that's another £18.67 spent, bringing my monthly total to £42.01. This amount includes items I bought at the end of Dec - I'm just uber-keen on reining in the supermarket spend, so started early!

That's more than I would have liked to have spent at this point in the month, but I've got meals already made up and frozen, meat in the freezer, and I'm making a batch of sauce to pour onto macaroni for my lunch for the next few days this eve. All I'll hopefully need to get in the next week is more bread and milk - I'm aiming still be under £50 spend this time next week.

Think this is going to be hard, but I want to get into the habit of being strict with my supermarket budget - argh!

Katey1980

lol Coxy, another idea - you could shred some of it and make a crispy pork stir-fry.

Those cookies look amazing Bluegreen!