January 2020 Grocery Challenge

Doom_and_Gloom

Since last shop we have spent £15.55. Some things were reduced such as; 1kg of green lentils for £1.25, 1.5kg of bread flour for 74p, tin of banana blossoms for 99p, 6 pack (but with 5) appletiser cans for £2.25 (OH loves these for a treat so picked them up to save money) etc.

I had chickpea salad with potatoes for dinner.
OH had beef stew and mashed potato for dinner.

£263.78/£240.
£23.78 over.

We'll be taking £23.78 off of the £240 (£216.22) budget for February as that is what we are over by. Will go to February thread after this.

madwife28

Declaring £151.09 from £180 budget - we did it!!

We stuck to mainly fruit, veg and dairy and used up loads out of the freezer, which was my main aim, to try and use up a lot of what we already had in.

We’ve still got more in the freezer so hoping to keep February budget to a minimum too and then I can defrost the freezer once empty.

We really stuck to a meal plan and a very strict shopping list and didn’t go off plan, which is extremely unusual for me!

See you on the February thread!

Madwife28

Saver.The.Taste

One last shop complete at 10.16 to restock the cupboards a bit ahead of Feb but even with that i'm still on £99.14 of the £150 target!

See you in Feb

PipneyJane

I’m declaring for January at £122/£132.20, leaving £10.20 in the pot to roll forward to February. No idea where/when the £6 was spent.

Someone mentioned that they were struggling to understand how we manage to stick to such a low budget for two adults. I was thinking about this when I was soaking kidney beans yesterday, so I thought I’d elaborate a little on how we do it. Our full housekeeping budget is:-

£120 - Grocery Challenge/general groceries/Farm shop & supermarket shopping
£ 40 - Meat Fund (spent irregularly at the butcher’s and Costco
£ 40 - Bulk Fund (used for Costco spends, WingYip and booze)
£ 20 - Christmas (for the goose (£107 last year), tree, chocolates, Easter, etc)
£ 10 - Garden Fund
——-
£230
====

We eat really well: plenty of home-made curries, stir-fries, stews, risotto, pasta, the odd roast, some vegetarian dishes. For a stew, I’ll use about 300g of meat, plus onions, garlic, carrots, maybe peppers, and a (pre-cooked, dried) pulse or broad beans from the freezer. I don’t do a lot of “meat and two veg” because, frankly, I find that boring.

Most meals give 4 portions. For portion control, I dish up the next day’s lunches as the same time as our dinner ( prevents my DH eating a second portion).

A big secret is planning. I don’t mean meal-planning, which I do rather badly. (I tend to stand in front of the fridge/freezer after dinner and think “what have we got in? What needs to be used up? What haven’t we eaten lately?”, when considering what we’ll eat for dinner the next day.). It’s about thinking ahead and cooking for more than one meal at a time - those kidney beans that I mentioned? That was for three meals; two 400g portions are now in the freezer. I’ll do the same with chickpeas, mung beans, black-eyed beans - dried the dried pulses we have in stock. Since most of my recipes start “fry onion with garlic, add mushrooms”, I’ll cook up double quantities and freeze the second portion as “Base”, for those days when I’m time poor.

It’s also about thinking of the meal possibilities when you purchase meat. A roast chicken is dinner one night (the legs), Chinese the next (one breast), then risotto (the other meat) on the third night, plus stock. A 1kg package of cooking bacon from L!dl costs £1.39, will be split into 4 and one portion can make any of the following: Cuban Black Bean Stew, Breakfast Pie, Tuna Lasagne, regular Lasagne, “Bacon & Egg McMuff!ns”, Coq au Vin, etc.

Some of it is about buying in bulk, so I’d suggest you put £5-£10 a month aside for buying good storage containers. (I use Lock-n-Lock; they aren’t cheap but are critter-proof and water-tight.). Once you have those, save the cash for a large pressure cooker, in which to cook your pulses.

I only have one type of flour in stock - the bread flour sold as “chapatti” or “Atta” flour, which comes in 10kg bags and costs between £3 and £4 a bag. It gets used for everything that needs flour: bread cakes (add 1tsp baking powder per cup to make “self-raising”); pastry; pancakes; Toad in the Hole, etc. A 2kg bag of kidney beans costs around £3.50, which equates to about 15p a can (NB each 400g can gives 250g cooked beans). That bag of beans will last us at least 4-6 months.

HTH

- Pip

sausageelza

I'm declaring £265.54/£450. I actually can't believe it!

I will aim lower than £450 next month but only by £50. Don't want to go too mad

sarahj1986

Final - €10.30 over

I needed toothpaste, shampoo/conditioner and other bits that couldn’t wait till today to buy. We have so much stuff in bulk wise (nappies, wipes, kitchen roll, cleaning products, toilet roll etc) so this month we should be ok

On to February

Miss_Behaving

Morning, declaring £298.47 of £300.00 so just under budget! I'm going to try and shave £20 off the budget for next month as it's a short month!

JIL

I wanted to spend £100. But I spent £123. Still happy with that. There are gaps in the freezer and I actually ran out of pasta, which has never happened before.

candygirl

sausageelza wrote: »

I'm declaring £265.54/£450. I actually can't believe it!

I will aim lower than £450 next month but only by £50. Don't want to go too mad

Wow that's amazing :T