November 2018 Grocery Challenge

medsdemon

Hi, update here.
First spend of this week of £24.20 at MrM by OH ( included our weekend gin and tonics! ). He got 4 YS soups for his lunches next week, YS bacon for tomorrow’s brunch treat and a YS chicken breast pack for dinner next week.

Will have to do a basics and Fresh fruit and veg shop ( maybe tomorrow, but try and string it out till Monday).

Have a Beef curry, a roasted spicy cauliflower cooking in the oven atm and it smells amazing. Will be having it with basmati steamed rice, poppadums and mango chutney. Much better than a takeaway and all my own made pastes !

The G&T is going down a treat. Have a lovely weekend everyone.

candygirl

Have spent £6 so far this month on cheese, bread n crisps .I have loads of stuff in the cupboards n freezer, so will hopefully succeed this month

[Deleted User]

Lol - spent another £8.68. Nearly half the budget gone in 2 days. Needed to do a bit of stocking. I have lots in, so will 'try' to meal plan. Not planning on going shopping 'till next Thursday. Have a lovely w/e everyone. Have updated sig.

trulymadlyhannah

Our first spend of the month was £154 of our £300 budget. £18 of that was on McDonald's yesterday when DH was ill, and he couldn't cook while I was at puppy socialization class. I couldn't face cooking from scratch at 7pm, for four exhausted children - so opted for McDs. I'm still cross at myself and will definitley not let us run so low on freezer food next month, I think a quick chicken nuggets and chips meal from the freezer might have saved me!

I topped up on cleaning products which should last the month, and spent £6 on herbs/ spices including nigella seeds which I have been wanting for ages for our homemade Naan bread.

We are also trying to build up our store cupboard before brexit hits. It might not be awful, but I would rather have a month's supply of stuff in my cupboard just incase. Bought an extra 5kg of pasta and some tea and coffee to squirrel away. Is anyone else doing this??

I am trying a 10 day shop & meal plan too, will see how that goes - I absolutley love the thought of only 3 shops a month!

Meal Plan
Spag bol
Toad in the hole
Cheese pizza and chips
Roast chicken dinner with all trimmings x 2
Chicken nuggets & chips (children) / Date night chicken raisukaree (adults)
Mushroom alfredo
Chicken fajitas (or ham & cheese wraps for the littles that don't want spicy food)
Cashew curry with homemade naan bread
Sausage and mash with onion gravy
Homemade lamb kebab with homemade pitta bread and salad.

It's looking like we will go over our £300 budget already, this was always going to be a bit of an experimental month because it's the first month we have started with a empty freezer and store cupboard, It's hard to tell just yet!

Nellbell21

Spend so far £190, this includes the meat delivery at £84 and the Asda shop. Have made a meal pan so hopefully will only need fruit, veg , bread and milk rest of month. Famous last words though as kids don’t always eat what we do!

XSpender

Weekly shop done at Asda last night. Fruit, salad bits, fish and cooked meat for DH diet plan, a couple of bits for the freezer and some final beers for DH before his plan starts on Monday. Apart from a small pack of Pork crackling and 3 YS donuts for DS I bought absolutely no crisps, cakes, sweets etc. I want to cut down on eating rubbish and DS and DH need to lose weight.

Some items bought that should last a few weeks including a big pack of DW tabs, frozen salmon and a big tub of mer1d1an peanut butter.

I also picked up a couple of the Nutella in Christmas glasses for stocking fillers but have taken them from the Christmas budget.

DH also had a tenner yesterday to buy lunch for him and his boss as his boss bought it earlier in the week. This shouldn't happen again this month as DH is on his diet/fitness plan.

Total spent £84.37/£320

MrsD18

First shop of the month today, a mixture of food for the weekly meal plan and restocking some things we had run out of (cooking oil, squash, baked beans). My husband was with me though and he was hungry so we also got lots we didn't need! Went to the village near us which has a few supermarkets and some didn't have what we needed so did a lot of walking about! Not much else needed this week, want to go to the fish market on Wednesday for some salmon and the veg market for some soup ingredients but there shouldn't be much else apart from that and milk/bread top ups.

Greengrocers - £4.68
Butchers - £18.72
Mr A - £9.00
Mr M - £12.72
Mr T - £3.60

Total for the month - £48.72/£300
NSD - 2/10

YorksLass

trulymadlyhannah wrote: »

We are also trying to build up our store cupboard before brexit hits. It might not be awful, but I would rather have a month's supply of stuff in my cupboard just incase. Bought an extra 5kg of pasta and some tea and coffee to squirrel away. Is anyone else doing this??

I'm doing this but not necessarily thinking of Brexit - I don't think anyone can really tell just yet how things might be. It's just something I do every year before winter hits so if the weather is truly awful we don't have to go out shopping. Store cupboard items tend to be long-dated anyway so everything gets used up at some stage or other. Many is the time I've been thankful for full cupboards.

No shopping at all this week :j ...... until yesterday. Purchases in the market, Co-op and Sainsbugs came to a total of £27. Not bad considering that included a half leg of lamb and 500g of butter, both expensive items. Meal plan done for next week and the only thing that will be needed is milk, probably around Tuesday. I'll be spending a lot of time in the kitchen as my "to cook/bake/make" list is pretty long, but it's definitely time well-spent.

Right, off the give the old pooter a blast with the hairdryer as I think the inner gubbins might be full of dust. It's pretty ancient and just about on its last legs (how I feel sometimes ) but I'm trying to keep it going until after Xmas if I can.

Have a good weekend Challengers.

medsdemon

Had to top up on some things today and spent £12.20. Treated ourselves to some diet cola that we’ve mostly cut out, but wanted a treat alternative to alcohol!! Got teabags, sausages and chips for our quick easy tea, GF buns and milk.

Will update sig

Herbyme

Nellbell, I sympathise with you, Oct here was about the same as yours, also hoping to make a big reduction. I remembered that when I used to do this (fallen off wagon for a while :eek:) a thing that really helped me was to food plan for 2 weeks, not 1, so have done that today and ordered an A$da online shop as I had a £5 evoucher. They gave me it when i complained that the kettle I'd bough had 4 different wattage descriptions, not very good!

ETA: Medsdemon, sorry about your kitty, sad news