February 2017 Grocery Challenge

meg72

zafiro1984 wrote: »

What a brilliant idea I'm going to give it a go - thanks

Hopefully, a NSD, maybe another one tomorrow!!

You can do the same with celery, leeks and onion. I use the onion leaves that grow chopped in stirfry or salad.

AlwaysHungry2016

Hey!

On Saturday done my first grocery shop which came to £25.22. Stocked up on supplies for most of this week and still have £12.28 remaining (weekly budget £37.5).

After raiding my cupboards and with all goodies purchase at Lidl and Sainsbury's (mostly Lidl) cooked big portion of delicious bolognese sauce, which I will be having throughout the week (got five portions frozen). Also will be making some red lentil soup for cold evenings and for quick lunch-on-the-go cucumber + pate sandwiches. Still have one or two dishes that would like to make this week but will see how I am getting on with what I have :rotfl:

Happy to be back budgeting for groceries again, I can’t believe I wasn’t doing it for such a long time. This is really helping me to cut back on eating all kinds of bad ready-made comfort food that I been so into this winter. :eek:

fairy3

Hello all,

My month does not start til 1st/28th Feb but want to declare £95 please.... this is for myself, DS2 and DD1 (they do not eat all their meals at home) and the dog.

Still have a fair amount in stores and will continue to tackle the freezer as aiming to having just a fridge/freezer instead of the additional under counter freezer.

Menu plan done for the week and chickpea curry made yesterday so good to go..

Have a lovely day everyone

Islandmaid

Well first shop of the month.

Went to Aldi and spent £53.54 (will add £55, like to round up)

This should last me 10 days - fingers crossed

Coxy11

Hi everyone


Budgets all updated to here


Coxy

Fruittea

First shop for me £17.24 just essentials like bread, milk and cheese as this weeks meals will mainly come from the freezer and store cupboard.


If anyone is near a Tesco they have the biggest cauliflowers I've seen for just a £1. So cauliflower, coconut and squash curry for tonight and probably 2 portions for the freezer.

meg72

Discovered a new fruit and veg shop local to me. Its run by Taste not Waste, great bargains and even better can buy one off if that's all I need and NO packaging to go to the landfill.

Check out if theres one in your area.
http://tastenotwaste.org.uk/

elsiepac

Hi all

Thanks as always to Coxy, zippy and lynnejk for running the thread.

After going over budget consistently I am raising it slightly to make it more manageable and will stop reducing in big chunks as I keep not sticking to it!

Therefore, I would like to set £160 for February please.

I have done a big grocery shop so far, plus an extra one (why oh why am I so out of control!), plus a fake meat shop (let's face it, most of it was entirely not needed), plus an extra little top up shop today because of some stuff they didn't have last Thursday. Therefore I'm already over half way through my budget, BUT I have got most of the staples in as a result of those spends, so we'll see.


Date.......Shop......Amount.....Remaining form £160 Budget
26 Jan.....T35c0.....£33.49.....£126.51 (Main Grocery Shop - some stuff wasn't there)
28 Jan.....T35c0.....£22.75.....£103.76 (Extra Shop - off plan. REGAIN CONTROL!)
28 Jan.....H&B.......£23.53.....£80.23 (Fake Meat things - frozen - not really necessary!)
30 Jan.....T35c0.....£10.20.....£70.03 (Things that weren't there on grocery shop)

keggsy

Hi there,
I've been a lurker for too long. Can you put me down please for £300.
I thought we were doing quite well on the food shopping front (around £250) I have just worked out January is £366!!!!

JingsMyBucket

pamsdish wrote: »

I don`t count those sort of things, I try to keep a seperate budget for household items and clothing

meg72 wrote: »

I wouldn't count these things in my grocery budget.

Thanks meg72 and pamsdish. I figured as much but I didn't want to mentally cheat myself.

Some good news though! I had a Frugal Buyer's Remorse™ on one of the products because it turned out to have really high shipping that was shown and itemized only after I purchased everything. I requested to cancel that order and stated that I found the shipping costs extreme. Shipping was £15 for about 200g of biltong/beef jerky. The vendor replied that it was excessive and he wasn't sure why I was charged that much so he refunded me £11.05!! This brings my total food and toiletries order total to £200.30 ≈ €234.88.

Excellent! That leaves me with €165.12. I'll revise the numbers like so:

€30.00 - M & S stock up of cheddar, tea and other goods
€30.00 - Feb 1 – 7
€30.00 - Feb 8 – 14 (OH leaves to Scotland on 12th)
€25.00 - Feb 15 – 21 (OH returns on 21st)
€30.00 - Feb 22 – 28
€20.12 - Spare/leftover

£30.00 - Boots UK vitamin top ups when OH is in Scotland (Remembered I have a leftover £30 I forgot to exchange from my last trip to London. Yay found money!)

I'll throw the leftover money toward the €38.00 service call to have someone come look at our clothes washer before OH leaves for Scotland. His French is much better than mine.

On a related note: notice the M & S line item there. M & S is closing a lot of their stores outside the UK and we're really devastated about it. I'm actually going to put some money away to bulk buy cheddar cheese, haggis and tea before they shut in March. The cheddar in the country we live is horrible plasticky stuff. It's really hard to find a good one unless you go to a really huge supermarket or one of the farmer's markets that's out of my way. So, that's another reason for clearing the freezer out. To stuff in the cheddar and haggis! :rotfl: