November 2021 Grocery Challenge

sarahj1986

sarahj1986 said:

Hello all

its been a busy few days here

Ive kept the receipts. I used to do this but stopped and that’s why I feel like our spends have gone a bit chaotic in recent months. My husband working loads probably didn’t help. He’s only working part time now and our daughter is in nursery. This is giving me so much more time to keep control if spending, meal plan, make things in advance etc 

Anyways!

€78.95 spend over several shops. This does include some Christmas treats. We went into Lidl on Thursday as they had special buys on. We got pjs for our daughter and slippers for hubby. I’ve deducted that cost from the above. I’ve got to get more water and milk today from Aldi but that should be it. We are doing a big Carrefour shop for next week which will have all the bulky items in it. I’ve gotta make this last as much as I can in November. It will obviously include many fresh and frozen items. 

Just to update this 

€12.85 spent this morning. I didn’t intend to spend that much BUT they had reduced meat, pork mince, chicken breasts and pork chops. I’ll happily use those next week or following week. All bagged up in the freezer. Discount of 30% off which is great. I also got the big bottle of washing detergent as that was on special offer. 

€188.20 left with our big shopping coming next week too 

thriftwizard

Oh no - another massive spend of £130 over the last couple of days, mostly because of surprise visitors meaning I've had to dash to W8rose several times - I'm really going to have to rein the spending in hard for the rest of the month! But should be able to do that; I think we have everything we should need for the week, with the possible exception of supermarket bread for OH, and maybe yogurt. Plus there's loads of stuff in the freezer; I wouldn't want to run it down too much at this point in the year, especially not when isolation is still a possibility, but we can "coast" for a while in respect of the more expensive items like meat. We're not actually expecting any weekend visits this month, which should help, and I've revived my sourdough starter so should be back making most of our own bread any day now. Also I shall try to ensure that we always have some snacks to hand to offer visitors; I just have to not eat them myself in between visitors!

JingsMyBucket

Happy rainy Saturday everyone, from the SW of Scotland. I was aiming to drop off a bunch of frivolously bought high heeled shoes to the charity shop today and have lunch on the high street but those plans may be off due to the copious rain. If so, I'll push that task to Monday to get a walk into my day. 

Anyway, we're back from our trip and I have a few spends to declare. We returned on Wednesday and I scheduled a Tesco delivery for Thursday morning. That came to £59.09 had loads of yoghurt, fruit, veg, ham, cheese, eggs, and a few other staples. We have enough fruit to last us until kingdom come at this rate. 

Yesterday I went to Iceland to see if they had any frozen butternut squash or frozen cherries but they didn't. However, I did pick up a box of Piccolino meatballs in sauce (no pasta). Apparently that's a restaurant chain / professional instead of regular Iceland or Bird's Eye brand so I wanted to try them to see what they're like or if they're better quality. We ate them last night with roasted eggplant. The meatballs cost £3 and there are 6 of them in a tray of sauce covered with mozzarella. They weren't too shabby but I could definitely make something similar myself and intend to do so. Heck, I even have last month's YS meatballs defrosting in the fridge now and mozzarella as well. 

On to M & S next where I went in search of prepared butternut squash (BNS), hopefully cubed. I found sliced BNS and then whole uncooked smaller squashes like acorn, spotted, etc. So I bought a bag of sliced BNS and a whole acorn squash for £2.25 total. 

I'm really craving making a hearty winter/fall salad with roasted BNS or other squash so hopefully these will scratch that itch. The reason for searching for both the squash and the frozen cherries is due to Tesco booting them out of my order due to unavailability. I'd like to try frozen cherries as a lower sugar add in for Greek yoghurt breakfasts, vs. cherry jam. 

Oh yeah, and Mr. Jings went "man shopping" yesterday, in his own words. He bought bulk purchased a bunch of toiletries like shower gel, toothpaste, etc "so I don't have to bother until somewhere in 2022".  He spent £35 at Boots for all that stuff so it'll unexpectedly come out of the bulk fund I had set aside for Thanksgiving food this month. Oh well!

Total Week 1 Spend: £64.34 / £70.00 with £5.66 remaining
Bulk Spend: £35 / £100 with £65.00 remaining

Tomorrow is the monthly farmers' market and I wanted to buy fish from the fishmonger for the first time along with some beef or pork from my usual guy. It looks like we'll be going over the budget for the first week but our second week starts this coming Monday. I'll try to keep tomorrow's market trip to £15 max so it doesn't dent the next week too much. 

joedenise

I buy the frozen cherries from Tesco and use them with porridge or in overnight oats and they're lovely.  Definitely not too sweet but not to sharp/sour either.  The other frozen fruit I like is their breakfast topper which is small diced strawberries, mango, pineapple and peach.

jozbo

Afaik both l1dl and Aldee do frozen cherries too. I have the same issue with missing items / substitutions then leading me into other shops … where I buy other things…
hence lots of rejigging of this month’s meal plan so far.
spent £8.96 yesterday at a local Turkish supermarket on vinegar for diy cleaning products, halva, olives and coconut milk.
current remaining total is £53.60. I’m thinking I will scrap the idea of using w8rose vouchers and use the Xmas budget in l1dl and A$da instead, which has great GF staples. Would also like to check out M&S YS offers at some point but the closest store is quite out of my way here. 

JingsMyBucket

joedenise said:

I buy the frozen cherries from Tesco and use them with porridge or in overnight oats and they're lovely.  Definitely not too sweet but not to sharp/sour either.  The other frozen fruit I like is their breakfast topper which is small diced strawberries, mango, pineapple and peach.

Thanks @joedenise I believe it was the frozen fruit conversation from last month and you mentioning cherries that got me hankering to try them. I’ll go into the physical store later next week to try looking for them. 

Blackcats

First spend of the month to declare - £64.73 at Asd*.  Fruit, veg, a few frozen bits (at least there's some room in the freezer after eating from there for a few days 😀).  

Meal plan includes
a roast dinner and apple and plum crumble tomorrow (with my elderly dad),
prawn jalfrezi,
8 treasure fried rice (basically special fried rice using up lots of veggies and leftover rice from the curry).  
Freezer night = fish cakes, chips, homemade mushy peas,
pasta - exact meal to be determined 🤣 
tamil black pepper chicken - using kit from simply cook introductory offer 
Home made pizza 

I can't believe how much easier and more efficient and cheaper having a meal plan is.  It's only taken me 😵‍💫 years to work that out! 

joedenise

I've got one of those Simply Cook introductory offer boxes - really must get round to using them.  Bit daft having them stuck in the cupboard and then not using them.

Wonder if I could do something with one of them with LO duck on Monday!  Off to have a look which ones I ordered as can't remember as it was a while ago.

Blackcats

JoeDenise - I'm the same - the intro box has been in the cupboard for a while.  I've used a couple and found them good for pushing me to try a different meal. Actually the prawn jalfrezi on this week's meal plan is being made using one of the kits too.  I don't think they are very MSE unless I work on the basis that it's stopped me getting a takeaway.  (I have dubious budgeting rationale 🤣) 

joedenise

I only bought them because they were an introductory offer of a £1 for 4!  Definitely not MSE if you carried on with the subscription!