June 2020 Grocery Challenge

candygirl

Have just spent £57 on a Morries delivery. Can't recall if I need to add to this, so will go back over the thread to see 😉😊
Need to add £29, so it makes £86/150 so far x

pamsdish

61p for a y.s. seeded loaf from co-op, all I need this weekend.

Bluegreen143

No spends to report here since I did all the shopping on Wednesday. 

Meals today:

B - peanut butter & banana toast with blueberries

L - tuna pasta with salad veg and satsumas

S - nectarine & apricot muffins with probably fruit and Greek yoghurt 

D - roast chicken, roast new potatoes, mashed carrot & swede, cabbage, kids can have Greek yog & honey to finish if they like 

Just made a batch of the above mentioned muffins with my 4yo and also have some sourdough proving in the fridge. Don’t want to bake it too early in case it gets munched as I want it for sandwiches tomorrow lunchtime 😅

Veg mountain is decreasing but I did have a fail yesterday - tried making kale chips but none of us liked them at all. So a waste of a bag of kale 🙁

XSpender

DS and I have just returned from doing the weekly shop at Lidl and I now have £3.31 left in my budget to last until my new grocery month starts on the 26th June.  Today's total included £4.49 on a steak and bacon for butties both for DH Father's day treats and a few sweetie treats for me and DS.  We also picked up some of the American themed products for a movie night on Saturday and some YS bread and rolls.  They still had no brown sugar and hardly any of their usual GF products in.

Groceries £356.69/£360
Bulk buys £47/£40

SJAllicat

Sorry haven’t had time to catch up yet with posts. 

Spends this week are £66.66 on our main shops. 

I’ve done a meal plan for the 12 days left of the month and hopefully will just need a few bits like milk etc when we run out. 

So total spends so far are £217.75/250.00 spent so far. ( just over £30 left to spend till 30th so should make it under budget this month 👍)

Doom_and_Gloom

£43.38 spent since last post.

OH dinner : chicken and bacon tortelloni with cheese sauce. 
My dinner : vegan okonomiyaki. 

£262.51/£300. 
£37.49 left.

Hoping not to go to the shops until Wednesday now, but certainly won't need to shop before Monday.
We will be getting an A&C delivery on Monday. No fruit and vegetable box this week coming as want to get through the fridge contents as much as possible and eat through freezer products too (freezer is now full!) . Out of the grocery budget will be £9.56 from the delivery on Monday (one item is not counted as grocery which means we got to tbe minimum spend for delivery).

So Monday the totals will be:

£272.07/£300.
£27.93 left. 

Suffolk_lass

elsiepac said:

Thanks @PipneyJane for posting the link!  It's such a fluster putting the new thread up now as I don't have a lot of the thread management tools we used to, so I have to copy it all manually and the challenge is making sure no eagle eyes notice it's there and post before I have all the initial post up! Haha, first world problems!
Have caught up on June, been absent I know, totally mucked up my budget for June - I honestly do not know how I am spending SO MUCH! Yes I'm going through more coffee as I'm at home working, but nothing else should really be much more than as if I was at the office!  I think next week I'll start trying to make lunches in advance as if I am going into the office and that may stop the extras sneaking in at lunchtime.  One can dream!
Lots of returners this month - hi guys! 

@elsiepac It must be a pain in the butt now - I was thinking about the recipes - how do you copy the new recipes into the list? - I can see that you can use a simple cut and paste now the text defaults to HTML but not sure how you select one post within a page now. I have always thought we should put all the recipes into a closed thread called Grocery Challenge Recipes and just include a link to that, rather than copying 7 or 8 pages across each month. Nightmare when you are under pressure.

As regards reducing your spend, you could try flipping your meal planning (we have a reverse meal planning thread that meanders around and shares the odd recipe). Rather than planning your week, then compiling your list and shopping - you could plan from what you have in and only buy the fresh seasonal bits you need, trying substitutions of things you have in, instead of buying them. I always think your menu sounds quite complex and a gourmet version of any vegans I know, but obviously that comes at a cost. Perhaps you could look to simplify for 4-5 meals a week. Simple salad for lunch might be a good place to start. I used to have avocado salad every day in the office, while still working, and occasionally swapped to chilled vegetable "soup" like Gazpacho in the summer. HM guacamole with simple wheat crackers is a favourite here too, using YS avocados when I see them. I appreciate you are working v hard so my suggestions are really simple, easy to consume on the go options

Suffolk_lass

Got my new chest freezer in the cartlodge after the upright one in the workshop (wooden shed, no insulation) has begun to struggle to keep stuff at a consistent temperature. I hope the meat is OK. I filled one of those collapsible crates with the meat out there (and just plonked the whole thing in the bottom of the freezer as my equivalent of the drawers!) - Anyway, it made me look at what I have in and I hope that we will use much of this over the next month - though some of the meat is too big for two of us - one joint was bought in anticipation of a booked holiday to a big house with 12 of us - so making sure it stays cold is essential! I can certainly work our way through the bread products and some of the mysterious boxes of either soup or curry. I might put a pen out there too so I can remember to write on things what they are!!!

Charliebear

Last few spends of the month to add - £3.09 on a Morrisons TGTG Box - Box was absolutely rammed with veg, fruit and salad items - Plus they stacked another half a box full of crumpets, croissants and wholemeal loafs for me to take away. I made use of the cashback app offers this week and secured Mighty Pea Milk, Alpro soya and Oat Milk, Yogurts and Vegan Mayo - after Cashback and staff discount ( my daughter works for Sainsburys ) I managed to spend 90p. I also nipped into Lidl and stocked up on some of their super weekend offers and spent a further £4.38. I am declaring a June Spend of £91.53 - £8.47 under budget. This was for 2 of us and included food, household cleaning, laundry, and personal grooming items. We ate mostly Vegan Meals and I have to say, we quite enjoyed being inventive with our choices to keep under budget.  

PipneyJane

Good afternoon All

I have an A$da spend to declare from Thursday.  It was one of the least enjoyable shopping experiences I have had recently.  Social Distancing?  None of the customers knew the meaning of the phrase.  We only went there because DH had secured a refund voucher for the last batch of eggs we bought from them.  (In a tray of 15 SmartPrice eggs, 3 were cracked.  They were packed in such a way that you couldn’t see the cracks without opening the packaging and picking up the eggs.  I’d say they were deliberately positioned to hide their cracks.)

Anyway, throw in a pizza meal deal, icecream, cookies,  fresh milk, a courgette plant (75p) and some fresh veg, and we managed to spend £19.35.  That brings our total spend for June to £113.87/£120 leaving £6.13 for the remainder of the month.  

It’s do-able.  I just have to focus on using what we already have in the house.  For instance, we have a lot of cooking bacon in the freezer and plenty of potatoes so, on Friday night, I made “Breakfast Pie”.  (HM shortcrust pastry case, cooked cubed potato, bacon fried with sliced onion, all combined with a couple of eggs and some grated cheddar then baked.). Tonight, I’m having another go at Chicken a la King.  Monday night will be Sausage & Lentil Casserole, and Tuesday may be a stir fry.  DH is threaten to walk to L!dl on Wednesday to buy meatballs, or I may have a go at making them with the mince we have in the freezer.  (Time to investigate a recipe.)

On the snack/treat front, I think I’ll have another go making carrot cake today.  Some of the carrots we have a looking a little ropey.

- Pip