January 2022 Grocery Challenge

Blackcats

Meal plan worked well this week.  I found it calming to know what's for dinner and that I have all I need to make the meal.  Simple breakfasts of porridge or bran flakes with banana or tinned peaches, various home made soups and bread at lunch time plus a beans on toast lunch day.  Fakeaway of home made pizza tonight with a glass of wine.  Really looking forward to the pizza and the wine.

OH (who loves a bargain, even if we don't even like the bargain food) came home from the coooop with 24 chocolate oranges (dark, milk and white) at 20p each and 15 galaxy dark chocolate bars at 15p each.  A dangerous amount of chocolate to have in the house.  We made a chocolate orange jenga as a centrepiece for the kitchen table with interspersed galaxy bars - like a Tate modern masterpiece 😂

£148.83 remaining of January budget 

nannygladys

Nothing spent, I haven't been out but I got quite a bit of veg at the food hub yesterday so I have plenty to last the next few days, and a freezer still full from before Xmas, mind you the top shelf has a huge chicken that belongs to dd 1, and the rest of the room on that shelf Is taken up by gf bread/products that belongs to dd2, but I'm taking those up to her on Tuesday. Bet it won't stay emptyish for long!!
Nannyg

EskarinaWeatherwax

Hi all

i love the sound of the chocolate orange Jenga - they do say you need to tap to unwrap! 

£13.50 spend on fresh fruit and veg, would have been £17.00 but the free newspaper brought it down. I forgot bananas though so will need to pop back tomorrow - and like pp above it’s the temptation to buy bargains that gets me!

So I’m now at £91.97 of £200

PipneyJane

Blackcats said:

 
OH (who loves a bargain, even if we don't even like the bargain food) came home from the coooop with 24 chocolate oranges (dark, milk and white) at 20p each and 15 galaxy dark chocolate bars at 15p each.  A dangerous amount of chocolate to have in the house.  We made a chocolate orange jenga as a centrepiece for the kitchen table with interspersed galaxy bars - like a Tate modern masterpiece 😂

I would love to see that, @Blackcats!   Please post a photo.  

I do feel your pain, though.  My DH is both a bargain lover and a chocoholic.  He’d have done the same but would be half way through eating them all by now.  

Hello to everyone who is new!  

I can sense a bit of rising panic in a couple of posts.  That feeling of “OMG! Where does it all go?”, “How did I get here?” and “How the hell do I get out of this mess?”.  If that’s you, have a big (virtual) hug from me.  You aren’t alone.  I’ve been there too, as have many others on this Challenge.  The posts and links at the start of this thread are really useful.   January is a particularly bad month for most people, because  being paid before Christmas means the money has to stretch an extra two weeks to the next payday.  

For me, the crunch actually came at the end of my second January in the UK, when I had to pay all the debts run up in the month, after I’d run out of cash, and was left with my train-fare plus £20 to spend on groceries for two for the entire month of February.  (This was back in the 1990’s.). What I did was to go through the kitchen cupboards, to work out what we we actually had in stock.  Ditto the freezer.  There was some frozen veg.  The pantry contained odd packets of cake mix, tins of strange-to-me fish, several types of flour, lentils... (It was my ex’s flat.  I’d only lived with him for a few months at that point.  He never contributed a penny toward the groceries.)

Then I worked out a shopping list containing the absolute basics needed to make meals for the month: 2kg of the cheapest frozen mince, tins of tomatoes and kidney beans, bags of pasta, a 500g lump of cheddar, rice, porridge oats, eggs, coffee, butter - that’s what I can remember buying in MrT’s.  A few days later, I stopped at the greengrocers on my way home from work and lugged several kilos of potatoes and onions home. I cooked quiches; lots of things that started “fry onion with garlic”, doubling up the onion to make it go further.  I curried that weird can of fish.   Work had a microwave, so I had a baked potato with a slice of cheddar melted on top for lunch most days.

These days, I keep my grocery money in a separate purse and track what we spend using the free spreadsheet app on my phone.  (“Numbers” on the iPhone.). We don’t have a huge budget but we do live very comfortably on it.  It can be done.

- Pip

burtha

chocolate orange jenga sounds wonderful lol .  
spent £66 today in te*** and al** , hopefully will last all this week apart from milk . 
my bargains today was 10 x 10p not chocolate santa bars for my smallest grandchild.  
forgotten how expensive it is for none milk treats , but he's now here 3 times a week.  so will have to find money to add to food shop budget . 

diminua

Since my last posting I've bought milk (more than once), bread (more than once), two tins of tuna, chillies, garam masala, wine, rigatoni, eggs, coffee, oxo cubes, veg box with 2 lots of extra potatoes (should last me a couple of weeks), venison steaks, pain au chocolat and croissant (Friday's breakfast after a medical appointment. I should have just bought the pain au choc, I didn't really want the croissant), mini bottle of G&T (expensive way to buy it but if I crack open a full sized bottle of each I will drink more, so this is actually cheaper).  All of that mostly from JS. Dried soya from H&B. 

All of which came to £54.19 and leaves £85.80, which is not ideal halfway through the month, but I do have plenty of veg and store cupboard items. The only thing I actually need right now is margarine. 

PipneyJane

Good evening all

Two trips to L!dl to declare from today.  We walked down to the closest store, but they didn’t have eggs or skimmed milk, so ended up stopping off at another branch to get those while out in the car.  £11.17 spent in our local shop; £2.94 in the other branch.  As well as sweet potatoes and potatoes, we stocked up bran cereal - I mix it with more expensive cereals, eg, muesli to increase the fibre - vitamin c (on offer and 15%-off coupon), a large block of cheddar, and one of their seed mixes to stir into my breakfast.

The above brings our total spend for January to £70.61/£141, leaving £70.39 for the rest of the month.

The Bulk Fund also coughed up £14.99 to take advantage of L!dl’s offer on tinned tuna in brine: a case of 48 cans at half price (approx 31p/can).  We won’t need to buy any now for at least a year.

Dinner is in the oven now, the first meatloaf I have ever made:  chicken mince mixed with the remains of the Christmas chestnut stuffing, hand mixed with two beaten eggs.  Fingers crossed it comes out OK.  It’ll be served with roasted sweet potatoes and peas.

- Pip

QueenJess

Another £40.62 spent stocking up (cheaper) on DD's various food.  She never stops eating!

Total spent £449.06 / £575

Soontobeoap

So excited just had to share. Had a chicken last week and a gammon joint this week. I managed to get 1 extra meal from the chicken and 2 from the gammon by throwing small amounts into a pasta dish. I call them free meals.it makes me feel so good. It is so lovely to get motivation from this board. I am really enjoying recipe hunting too.

MissRikkiC

This weekend I put hub in charge of meal planning and a shopping list on account of having a bit of a breakdown Friday from doing too much. I hated not doing it myself but I can’t keep up with everything, it was horrendous though. The meal plan didn’t really have much to it and the shopping list didn’t contain all of the things we needed for the recipes let alone for the house but I put those issues back to him whilst getting the other things on the list which once again helped with the mental load. 

So despite poor list making, I managed to salvage the receipts and take a small amount from the bulk fund left left over from last month (not to be rolled into next month) to pay for the relavent items and we’re at £279/£300. We should have enough left for milk, yogurt cheese and bread to last until a week Tuesday … gulp.