October 2021 Grocery Challenge

jozbo

@Bluegreen143 we are a family of 3 with a similar pattern of eating, cooking from scratch etc. I used to easily spend £450 a month without paying much attention and eating too much meat. I’ve got that down to 1-2 a week now and we did the Grocery challenge last month quite easily last month with £280, so at the bottom of your weekly budget if that helps. That includes everything though - milk, household, alcohol. 

enkeltliv

goldfinches said:

enkeltliv said:

Did you say pickled blackberries @goldfinches? I've never heard of the like 

Another grocery spend via Aldi this morning. I'm down £11.21 so a total of £23.80 spent

Here's where I got the recipe from. (crimped as I can't yet post links) I had the juniper berries already and used ground allspice which again I already had and then used the whole zest of an easy peeler that I already had rather than buying an orange. It was very easy to do and did fit a 1 litre jar perfectly. I left it in a corner for six or seven days and then tried them. They've come out a lovely dark pinky red colour and are soft and tangy but the seeds are still hard inside them so I think if I repeat it I'll look for seedless ones to use.
Anyway here's a photo I took the first day I tried them.



See what I mean about the colour, it's really pretty.

It looks so delicious! Thank you for sharing @goldfinches

I'm back from an Aldi spend so I'm at £36.27/£350

JingsMyBucket

Happy Friday evening all. I'm up to 4 NSDs because I skipped Wednesday for visiting Tesco yesterday afternoon. I went in with £8.22 to spend but I left spending £16.18 even though I tried my damnedest not to go over limit. OH had requested some ciabatta bread and I also had to get drinks for the cousins which I completely forgot about earlier in the week. So yeah, the money was spent on a leek, thyme, 2 ciabatta loaves, cream, scallions, celery, brown sugar, vanilla ice cream and various tonic waters for our guests. The good thing is most of this stuff will last or carry over. 

Week 1 October -- £77.96 / £70.00 spent. That means I went into Week 2 today with £62.04 to spend. 

I just paid £20 for the vegetable box that was delivered this morning which leaves us with £42.04/£70 remaining until next Thursday evening. I'll have to buy olive oil this weekend as we're down to the last inch in the bottle. That'll chop another £8 off our budget but so it goes. 

Here's what we got in our veg box this time. We'll definitely have to meal plan for this:

Eggs
Watermelon
Bananas
Apples
Oranges/tangerines
Pears
Golden Beet (huge!)
Red Beet (huge!)
Leek
Skinny red peppers
Zucchini
Red bell pepper
Orange bell pepper
Eggplant
Cauliflower
Garlic bulb
Red and yellow onions
Carrots
Cabbage (huge!)
Potatoes

Smoosh

£4.78 spent today on cat biscuits (don't usually feed him dry food, but leaving him overnight this weekend so thought it might be handy), 2 packs of gyozas (YS) and 2 cookies (YS).

£130.34/200.

thriftwizard

I've added £40 spent at the market this morning, on fish, cheese, fruit, veg & coffee (£4 for a jar of OH's favourite Douwe Egbert, in my favourite kind of jar. Still well in date) but am thinking I shall be well over this month; we have two three-day-weekend "invasions" coming up, as family members come from far & wide (ok, Devon & Wales) to see the baby. It will be lovely to see everyone, but the budget's going to take a hammering! Both weekends also involve dogs... the cats will not be pleased!

nannygladys

Nothing spent today, mind you after yesterday I haven't a lot left, so I'm becoming shop adverse for the time being. I do have enough food etc to last until I get paid again.
Nannyg

goldfinches

I managed another NSD today even though I popped into the library and had to pass both Sainsbo's and M*rks so hooray for being so loaded down with books that I wanted to get home rather than shop!

Tomorrow I'm going to try to use up some of the onions in the fridge by making a Delia sour cream pie from her Frugal Food Cook Book unless some other kind of inspiration strikes in the wee small hours.

Couldsavemore

Another week another shop.
I did well on not buying crisps n chocolate. Need to work on my diet cola habit!
Got £40 worth of cat food for 13 as I had a 15% off voucher and the company had sent me some money off coupons. So that's the killers fed for the month!
Did the food shopping
Total spen came to 41.
Now spent
£92/100

Hettyhound

Spent £33.19 in As4a last night.  I never normally go there but maybe I should, I’d forgotten just how good their YS stuff is.  Raspberries 40p, easy peelers 10p, 4 large brown bread rolls 13p, 2x bean burgers 56p, rye and spelt boule 53p, cherry loaf 41p, 4 x muffins 39p and 5 x cookies 60p.  As you can see I spent far too much on cake items!  Freezer, fridge and cupboards are jam packed 😁

PipneyJane

Good morning All and welcome to all the Newbies

@Bluegreen143 Have a look at one of the early posts - it covers the average grocery spend of households in the UK.  That will give you a baseline.  

Our GC budget is £140 a month, plus whatever savings we roll forward from a previous month.  Admittedly, there is only two of us, but my GC budget isn’t just for food.  It includes all toiletries, cleaning products, etc. (Sometimes these are the easiest things to save money on.)  The only exclusions are alcohol and meat if bought at the butcher’s.  We rarely buy meat at the supermarket but, when we do, that comes out of our GC budget too.  (The Meat Fund is a separate £40 a month.)

I have a small spend to declare from yesterday.  I’m full of cold - not COVID, I’ve been tested - so asked DH to pop to L!dl yesterday on his way home from work to “pick up whatever you fancy for dinner”.  He spent £12.55 on a YS quiche (£1.53), a frozen salmon en croute (my choice for dinner), breaded chicken goujons (his choice for dinner), potato salad, fresh milk and 2 chocolate puddings.   Not so bad, really, since I can make 4 meals out of all of that.  (We had the goujons and some of the potato salad.) 

The above spend brings our spend for October to £51.19/£160.80, leaving £109.61 in the purse for the rest of the month.

- Pip