May 2022 Grocery Challenge

Naturelover22

Hi all,
We have spent £69.26 out of £385.00 so far.
Did a medium shop between Mr S £36.34 and Mr Al £32.44 each. Then already popped into Mr A last night for something and Co-op for a small shop for mum today as she is not well. I won't need to go near shops for a good few days now.
Planned our meals for the week and I gave the freezer a good sort out so we have planned meals using some things up.

YS
Sage £0.60 to £0.14 (I need to buy a plant to add to our herb garden)
Milkshakes £1 to £0.69
Monster (4can)  £4.80 to £3
3 packs of flatbreads £0.71 to £0.28
Bread £0.67 to £0.33

Will be making up breakfast and lunch for next 2 days at work tonight. Friends are visiting next weekend and I think I'll bake something, needs to be lactose free so will do some research and trial baking this weekend.

Wicked_Lady

ragz_2 said:

JingsMyBucket said:

@DawnW your pie does sound really good. I have a bunch of frozen spinach in the freezer. Do you mind me asking for a link to the spinach filling recipe? 

@ragz_2 where do you buy your low carb rolls and breads? I'd like to start reincorporating those back into my diet. 

Seriously Low Carb. They had an offer last month of 30% off so I stocked up as it's hard to justify full price when we're tight but they will last a while as I try not to use them every day. Eating low carb on a budget is tricky as all my go to cheap meals are carb heavy! DH cooks 4 nights a week and often doesn't know what to do for me, so at least I have the option of rolls for burgers or toast/bread with whatever he's cooked. Yesterday I had chili on toast, which was lovely, while they had jacket potatoes with their chili (that we all had when I cooked it the day before). 

I'm having my first go at cauliflower rice tonight, to go with a h/m chilli. Messy business so, if I like it, I'll do the next batch in the mini chopper! 
Will take a look at Seriously Low Carb too; thanks for the info.

Bella_Budget

Well bit of an expensive shop after work of odds and ends £25.73
Total 259.19 left from 400

Greying_Pilgrim

Evening May GC'rs!

No spends to report today (huzzah!).  But I kept to the menu-plan (kinda), but made a couple of amendments to accommodate stuff I'd got in the interim, after 'setting' the plan.  We had Lemony Spinach hotpot (out of the freezer), but it needed spinach, coriander and lemon adding.  I have frozen spinach and coriander in the freezer, so prefer to try to add it to a dish 'once' if you see what I mean.  Anyway, I decided to keep hold of my spinach for another dish, another day; and used some of the kale from the MrL box.  It was in a better state than the shredded spring greens (only managed to rescue 1/3rd of them), so I didn't use all of it (should have in hindsight, but still), and served it 'on the side' with the hotpot, rather than incorporating like I normally do with spinach.  Still tasted fine.  I also served the hot-pot with 'instant' packet mash.  LG doesn't like it, and wasn't having the same as us anyway, so I took the opportunity to use up the last sachet in the 4 sachet box I had.  I still have an unopened box of 4 sachets in the cupboard with a B/B date of 7/23, so that is fine to leave for next winter.  Saved 2 portions of rice too - as we normally have lshp with rice.  

I decided to make plum upside-down cake and peach/blueberry crumble with the MrL box fruit and MrA YS'd fruit I had.  The blueberries were in the freezer from a MrL box a few weeks ago.  I wish MSE had 'smelly-cam' facilities.  Although the peaches looked like nowt in their punnet, they actually tasted ok, parting the flesh from the stone didn't prove too traumatic and chopped up & shoved in a dish with a handful of blueberries meant they cooked to oozy, jammy loveliness 🥰  And the perfume..... mmmmm, honestly, I hope it tastes as fragrant as it smells..........  We all had a chunk of upside down cake for pudding with a dollop of greek yoghurt.  LG didn't like the plum as it was (not much taste, and the piece they had was still a little hard), but munched up the cooked plum/upside down cake with nae bother 👍 The rest of the cake will be portioned up and frozen, crumble will be served for pud after tea tomoz.

Bit of a fandango, but definitely using up 'what I have available', and it is helping us to have variety, even if we aren't currently able to just pop into the shops and buy what we fancy.........

I leave you with a gratuitous pudding shot......... 🤣



Greying X

MissRikkiC

Well we are well into Mays budget, however I’m trying to be a little less worried than usual and see if otherwise I’d still perform as well. There is a lot in the fridge but nothing that will go off really quickly. 

Spent a little extra by shopping in sparks today but did only buy things which I needed. 

Tried and tested peach and chickpea curry didn’t go down well here last night so meat was back on the menu again today, peanut burgers for tomorrow. 

Finally managed to find an organic fruit and veg provider, that are actually local! I’m really pleased about this, as I’ve been searching for some time, trying and testing non organic/cheaper alternatives provided by other local companies and just haven’t been happy with their quality at all. This will increase our spend/budget but really would love to be able to sustain this. 

Spends are now approx £180/300 

Smoosh

@Greying_Pilgrim that cake looks absolutely delicious! 

tykemum

Another update;

£45.98 on Takeaway pizza, caused by a hungover OH craving and took advantage of BOGOF so it did do dinner, lunch and dinner for the kids the day after with some veggies chopped up. So £45.98/£150 eating out budget. Takeaways are generally a fortnightly treat for us but given we are on holiday for one week I will try and make that our one and only for the month.

Have just done a reverse meal plan for the next week and a half but stupidly sent OH to the shop…. So a few extras were in the bags when he came home. Haven’t seen a receipt yet I usually just check my Emma app when transactions come through. So groceries still at 10.34/390 with a pending transaction.

I’m enjoying to accountability this challenge gives, OH less so as I eye rolled at his extras although to be fair they were two YS so not all bad! 

Blackcats

Greying - that cake looks fabulous.  

Some shopping spends to declare here - £13 at Asd*.  OH was tasked with buying milk, yoghurt and my daily tea break treat of Yorkshire tea toast and jam brew tea bags. I think other items made it into the basket but as yet I don't know what they are 🤷‍♀️

However, to redeem himself OH made a delicious mushroom soup using olio mushrooms and coriander and left over cream from Sunday's pudding.  He also toasted an olio baguette with garlicky butter and cheese.  It was a fancy bistro style lunch for pennies and the soup gave us lunch for 2 days.

olio is really helping us be resourceful with food and I think it's definitely helping our budget.  We got some olio tomatoes and Greek style flat breads tonight so I think we'll pretend we are on holiday tomorrow lunchtime.  Also got some cooking apples which I'll make into a crumble and randomly we got 18 orange club biscuits (remember the advert "if you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit join our club")

£287 balance remaining 

bupster

Slept really poorly and didn't give myself time to make lunch this morning, so a £3 meal deal in Tesco and the price of a couple of pints of milk for the office - £4.05 for a total spend of £56.09 this month. Annoying but not the end of the world - I'll do better tomorrow. Night all! 

JingsMyBucket

@DawnW thanks for that recipe rundown. I was mostly curious if you added an egg or not. I’ve seen that in some spinach pie fillings before. 

@ragz_2 thanks for the tip on Seriously Low Carb. I’ll have a look at their wares tomorrow. 

We haven’t bought anything yet for the week but I’m keeping a mental tally of what we need. Milk, eggs, lemons, berries, toilet paper, etc. We’ll order a £20 fruit and veg box for Friday delivery. So the end of the week may see a £35 total. 

Tonight we made the lasagna stuffed peppers with the leftover ricotta and meat sauce from the eggplant lasagna I made on Sunday. We can just grab a couple peppers and have them for lunch throughout the week. The peppers are officially Mr. Jings approved. He’s just eaten a couple just now for tasting purposes. Research, you know. 

Since we’re sharing food shots, here’s a pic of our peppers 🙂. Have a good evening all!