£67,031.92 is a frightening number indeed....

KxMx

Have you thought about asking DC2&3 their favourite foods for dinner?

Then you can see if that fits within your budget, and find a happy medium between what they want to eat and what you want to ideally serve.

Treadingonplaymobil

Unsurprisingly, I didn't get as much achieved today as I'd hoped, but it wasn't a total washout.

Did do the food shopping, and bought a bottle of Lidl vodka to make vanilla extract with - liking the idea of giving it for Christmas too! If it turns out well I've got time to start another batch in the summer to give for Christmas. After a bit of googling I've gone for madagascan vanilla beans, from ebay. I always trust Smitten Kitchen recipes, so have gone for their proportions, so I'll use 12 pods for the 750ml of vodka I've got. This is a lower concentration of vanilla than some recipes called for, so it will be interesting to see whether it comes out well. It also means it will be cheaper - £4.40 per 100ml if my maths are right, which compares favourably to Sainsbury's £8.33 for upmarket vanilla extract, but not so well to their cheapest (and fairly rubbish, IME) standard vanilla extract at £3.95 per 100ml. So as long as it's better than the Sainsbury's rubbish version, I'll be happy.

KxMx if I ask them their favourite foods they say something entirely unhelpful like 'fish and chips from the fish shop' or 'I like everything'. Tonight's hm pollock goujons and hm potato wedges went down really well and I know they'd love things like that more often, but it was £8 worth of fish and it's all gone now!

Forgot about the last sourdough loaf I had in the oven and pretty much cremated it. Annoying.

Three things to do today
1. Pop into town - the fishmonger comes on a Friday and I'm going to get something, although not sure what yet. I might get some cheap white fish and make goujons - two chicken breasts did for five of us last time I did that! I have a couple of potatoes leftover so could do wedges to go with.
2. Redo menu plan - both my parents are coming down next week now, instead of just my mum, so I need to make sure I have proper food in! So much for my cheap week, with two extra adults to feed.
3. Bake the sourdough that's been proving overnight.

Debt repayment:
- £21.45/31 March rounding down pot.
- £1,608.78/£5,000 2018 debt repayment goal.

DawnW

My children used to like things made with good quality mince, and lots of added vegetables - things like Bolognese type pasta sauce, (mild) chilli, shepherds pie, mince and onion pie topped with pastry, etc. Might they like this kind of thing? You can make a big panful with 500g mince (and lots of veg), as well

Burgers, also HM using good mince were also popular. Toad in the hole, made with good quality sausages - and fish pie, where the fish is cooked in white sauce, with added veg such as peas, sweetcorn, carrots etc, and topped with mashed potato was another favourite. Or HM fish cakes, which you can of course make with any fish, fresh, frozen or tinned.

Pizza night, where they could choose their own toppings from what I had available was always a hit, and something often specifically chosen by them for birthdays etc. These were usually vegetarian, unless there was some leftover sausage or ham. They liked pasta in HM tomato sauce too, and of course you can make big batches of the sauce and freeze it.

Any of these ideas likely to be popular options to add to your usual repertoire? You can choose quality ingredients to avoid compromising your standards too much, and this kind of cooking makes the expensive ingredient (fish or meat) go so much further.

PositiveBalance

Check this recipe out: it is on a website from an ex-MSEer:
https://mortgagefreeinthree.com/2012/02/vanilla-extract/

dawnybabes

I’ve been using my bottle for about 4 years and it’s still fine !!!128077;!!!128077;

It’s just neat alcohol so do t think it would go off ?

warby68

Mine liked meals where they could exercise a bit of choice when they were little. I don't mean entirely different meals for everyone but things like baked spuds where favourite fillings are chosen, make your own pizzas, omelettes.

Pasta meals were also a hit from toddlerhood right through to now - a small amount of good quality meat goes a long way with pasta. Choosing which shape to have was great fun when they were tiny and for some reason me throwing a bit of several shapes in at once was hilarious and tempting.

I considered my two to be very fussy eaters so I wasn't overly ambitious and tried to keep the stress out of it.

Also things with garlic always very popular too for some reason - garlic mash, garlic chicken, garlic breadcrumbs

It can be extremely disheartening when mealtimes are fraught - the main meal often comes when your are most tired and least patient and it doesn't take much to make you either lose your temper or feel like a total failure.

I'd consider giving everyone a say in the meals as long as they eat up on all the nights when it isn't their choice.

wishingthemortgaheaway

I found a single vanilla pod in the cupboard, a mini jam jar and dug the vodka out of the freezer. I didn't measure, just Chopped up the pod, theee it in the jam jar, covered it in vodka and screwed on the lid. Let the experimentation commence....
The smell of chopping up the pod was amazing though.

KxMx

Iceland do 800g of whitefish (Pollock) for £4.50, or three for £10.

It's de boned & skinned with added water for an ice glaze.

Nothing else added and there is nothing wrong with the taste or quality. I eat it regularly

http://groceries.iceland.co.uk/iceland-whitefish-fillets-800g/p/68579

Treadingonplaymobil

Week 57: Day 6

Yawn. Up early to squeeze in an oil bath (an ashtanga yoga thing. Not literally bathing in oil, although pretty much as messy) before taking DC1 into town to choose a present for DC2 and 3's birthdays.

Thanks for the food ideas. It's actually reassured me in a way as I'm looking at all the suggestions (pizza, pasta, burgers, letting them choose aspects of the meal) and thinking 'yup, I do that.' It reminds me that actually I'm doing all the right things, and DC2/3 are just having a slightly fussy/negative phase about food. I think the key is variety, so it's not too many meals on trot which are variations on the theme of soup/stew. This is trickier during the week as the easiest meals are ones I can prep in advance and are one pot meals, but I'm sure I can come up with something. KxMx, you know what I'm like, I wouldn't buy the Iceland fish - it's packaged in plastic and is shipped from the fishing site to China for processing, then back to the UK, making the food miles appalling.

I think I need to keep the faith with the way we eat, and make sure there's some midweek variety - we never do anything on a Wednesday evening so it's an easy day to add a more interesting meal to. It will get easier as more veg come into season too.

Speaking of food shopping, I think I have found a better balance with local/unpackaged food than I had at the beginning of the month. The past two weeks I have done a menu plan for the week and done a Lidl/Aldi shop first, getting everything loose or in cardboard or glass that I can and leaving anything in plastic, then repeated the process with loose/cardboard/glass packaged things from Sainsbury's, then filled in the final gaps with trips to the zero waste shop and local grocer's. It means I can stick to my plastic/local food/seasonal veg ideals as far as possible and support those local businesses a little without completely busting my budget. I am so much more comfortable about our food spending since reverting to some of my old ideals, if not all of them <sad wave at the organic food aisle>.

Incidentally, if anyone else is uncomfortable with non-organic fruit and veg but similarly budget-limited, studies have shown that soaking fruit and veg in water with bicarb in it for 15 minutes eliminates a huge huge percentage of surface pesticide. It doesn't resolve the issue of any pesticides that the fruit has absorbed, but it does at least eliminate some.

I am officially over budget for this month - am already on track to spend £40 more on birthdays than I have in the pot, and to be around £45 over the food budget (from the beginning of the month while I was figuring out a new way to shop for food). Annoying. Am avoiding raiding other pots to balance the budget as I know that seeing that red number at the top of the page on YNAB is a good reminder than I have overspent, and I can rebalance it with DH's bonus at the end of the month (which better be more than £85, at least!). I could steal from some of my business account savings pots (for new equipment, extra training in the longer term etc, all non-urgent), but I know it will take time to refill those pots too as they just get the odd extra quid chucked into them, so I'm leaving it for now and I'll see how things are shaping up next week.

A flurry of emails yesterday from someone I work for quite regularly about some more reasonably big chunks of work in late April and May. Not sure if they'll all happen, but will be brilliant if they do. Sorting childcare is going to be a nightmare as the work is all some distance away but they are such a good source of money for me that I need to bend over backwards to make it work if I possibly can.

Three things to do today
1. Sort charity/recycling stuff and load into car for DH to take later.
2. Paint nails.
3. Sort provisional childcare and email client re extra work.

Debt repayment:
- £22.77/31 March rounding down pot.
- £1,608.78/£5,000 2018 debt repayment goal.

Suffolk_lass

I was wondering if you have explored rubber chicken meals? - I think the name comes from the bouncing back qualities of a rubber ball. The idea is that you pop a chicken (a large, free-range bird in your case, I suspect) in a slow cook-pot with some root veg and water or veg stock for several hours and slow roast it.

The process makes chicken soup at the same time. Then the meat goes further and is more moist because you cooked it in a wet environment. Ideas for the next two days are chicken pie (with frozen veg in it), sourdough spot-the chicken wraps (means the carcass pickings) with wedges or salad (seasonal variations) or risotto. There are several claimants for the description of rubber chicken but I'm sure there was originally a thread on here way back when I first joined, where people put their recipe ideas.

I was just thinking it might help with meat over several days. Lots of people serve the first meal in a large Yorkshire pudding so it looks plentiful without using more than the breast-meat for that first roast meal, and the YPs are filling and frugal to make.

You could freeze the pie, to spread it out over more than four days, of course. I also make curry, chicken and pasta, chicken salad and picnic-night sandwiches to vary things...