June 2022 Grocery Challenge

thriftwizard

Thank you, @Greying_Pilgrim, we had a lovely rest-of-anniversary, despite me having to pick DS3 up from the train at 11.16pm! (No buses after 8pm & a taxi home would cost almost as much as he'd paid for the train ticket.) Your day out sounds brilliant - just the sort of low-key thing we used to love doing with our offspring & rarely do now - although DD2 does love a good garden visit.

£41.50 spent at the market today on fresh fruit, veg & meat, which I will add to my total momentarily. Also some stuff for our street party; I'd meant to make stuff but just ran out of time. It was huge fun and everyone brought enough to feed not just themselves but an entire army. We all ended up wishing we could do something similar more often - until it rained!

goldfinches

Waves to all who are enjoying festivities and time with family and those who aren't for whatever reason. I'm taking the chance to sort through my inbox and came across this very useful article with links to £1 meals from the BBC. 
How we developed our new £1 meals - BBC Food

I've copied these two paragraphs from it to give everyone an idea of whether you want to pop over to the page itself as I thought their new approach was extremely useful to know about and would be appreciated by all those coping on a reduced budget. 

It can be difficult to calculate how much a recipe will cost to make. Prices constantly change and where you shop makes a difference. Recipe writers use various methods to cost recipes, the most common is to calculate a price using only the quantity of each ingredient used in the recipe (so a tablespoon of soy sauce, rather than a whole bottle). This works well if you already have the ingredients in your cupboard, or the recipe uses whole packs, but it can be misleading as you might have to buy jars of spices and sauces which can soon add up.

For our new recipes we've taken a different approach. We've put together a store cupboard of basic items that keep well and can be used in a huge array of different recipes. Ingredients from this store cupboard are costed on the amount used – all other ingredients are costed on the minimum pack size available. We believe this is a more realistic approach as many people have some basic items in, but are unlikely to have an extensive choice of spices and sauces. Once you have a few more spices in your store cupboard from these recipes, some of them will cost even less than the stated price.

The store cupboard they've chosen seems pretty good to me and would certainly give you a lot of possibilities, it's too long to list here as they've given notes about why they've listed things like chopped tinned tomatoes and then commented on what you might prefer to buy instead and how to prepare that and so on. There are recipes from some very good writers like Jack Monroe, Chetna Makan, The Hairy Bikers and more so do have a look at that page too. Cheap recipes - BBC Food

I'm certainly going to try some of them as the veggie ones look delicious, I'll let you know how I get on.

Greying_Pilgrim

goldfinches said:

Waves to all who are enjoying festivities and time with family and those who aren't for whatever reason. I'm taking the chance to sort through my inbox and came across this very useful article with links to £1 meals from the BBC. 
How we developed our new £1 meals - BBC Food

......I'm certainly going to try some of them as the veggie ones look delicious, I'll let you know how I get on.

goldfinches - thank you for the link, definitely some inspiration there!  Perhaps if we try various recipes that appeal to our own tastes/circumstances/household size etc etc, we could highlight recipes on the GC thread - as maybe it's worth a permanent link to the BBC page on the first pages of the thread if the combined shopping/cooking might of the GC has found the recipes to be workable/thrifty/easy to make etc etc???

I'm definitely keen to have a more in-depth look and see if I can incorporate anything into my meal-plan for next week.

Greying X

FrugalHedonist

Good Afternoon, I'm already well into my spending budget even though I have been making mindful purchases but we will see how we go. This evening I made my favourite Dhal - sweet potato, spinach and lentil - we had it with a very small amount of rice and A1d1 naan. I think I may look into making my own or trying out flat breads or something in the future though - if anyone has any tried and tested recipes please let me know. There is plenty left over so it will go in the freezer for a meal later on in the month 

June budget £100 - £56.92 remaining 

Vanlady

Perfectly imperfect'....perfect description for 'wonky'  veg GP👍.

GoldFinches, thankyou for BBC the link, some nice recipies on there....I'm still searching in vain for the perfect beanburger recipie and theres one there by Chetna Makan ....maybe the addition of mashed potato to smashed beans is the secret ingredient🤞.
Theres also a recipie for flatbreads on there FrugalHedonist, although we make all our own bread including flatbreads......simple bread dough , patted out by hand into a thin- ish oval, dry fry on a frying pan or teva on high-ish heat for a couple minutes then shove under the grill till brown-ish. If you're lucky it will puff up and split like a pitta bread. Once cool, slather in garlic and parsley butter....optional. But beware....they're totally addictive.
Ps apologies for all the 'ishes'😄

goldfinches

Greying_Pilgrim said:

goldfinches said:

Waves to all who are enjoying festivities and time with family and those who aren't for whatever reason. I'm taking the chance to sort through my inbox and came across this very useful article with links to £1 meals from the BBC. 
How we developed our new £1 meals - BBC Food

......I'm certainly going to try some of them as the veggie ones look delicious, I'll let you know how I get on.

goldfinches - thank you for the link, definitely some inspiration there!  Perhaps if we try various recipes that appeal to our own tastes/circumstances/household size etc etc, we could highlight recipes on the GC thread - as maybe it's worth a permanent link to the BBC page on the first pages of the thread if the combined shopping/cooking might of the GC has found the recipes to be workable/thrifty/easy to make etc etc???

I'm definitely keen to have a more in-depth look and see if I can incorporate anything into my meal-plan for next week.

Greying X

I think your suggestion is a good one GP and agree that it's worth waiting until some of us have thoroughly evaluated the shopping/cooking/budgeting aspects before we decide whether the recipes are worthy of GC inclusion. I'm hopeful that they'll be useful as I thought their new way of costing combined with the store cupboard list was very practical and widely applicable. As the current GC budgeting star I do hope you'll give us your opinion because I know many others on this thread read your posts for inspiration.

sprozza

Hi everyone, hope you're all enjoying the bank holiday.

A few small spends through the week at Morri5ons and Co *p, some yellow label fruit, lemonade and some bottled water as we had a burst main on our lane which meant no water for 24hours. Unfortunately our water supplier was really slow in responding and although they did eventually deliver some bottled water it was 10 hours after the supply went off by which time I had already had to go out and spend £. It made me realize how lucky I am to just turn on a tap for water and actually how much we use daily, apparently the average water usage for a person in the UK is 147 litres per day! Anyway after all this it has prompted me to donate a monthly amount to Water Aid for those who do not have the luxury of turning on a tap or popping to Morri5ons to buy spring water.

This morning I decided that in order for me to be any where close to my budget this month I need to make sure I meal plan so did a food inventory before my shop. I am quite astounded at the amount of food that I have squirreled away, things that I had forgotten that I had even bought. I really need to find some recipes for the amount of dried beans and lentils that we have other than the usual curry and chilli that I cook. Ended up doing a much smaller shop than normal at Ald! spending £49.42 and this included wine. Total spend so far is £197.29 however looking at what we have in the store cupboard and 2 freezers we should be able to stick within the £600 budget for the rest of June.

wishus

Hello everyone. £31 spent today. Made my meal plan and took a list into Alldii. OH bought more cat treats and a pomegranate off list and double the naans we need for Naanizzas, but they'll come in. 

As it's jubilee, we had jubilee pancakes, Wimpy style, using one of our stored tins of black cherry pie filling. The rest just went into a luxury hot chocolate!

Greying_Pilgrim

Good Morning!

Vanlady - I did cheat a bit, I think the packaging MrS use has the word 'imperfectly' on it.  But as far as I'm concerned, if the veg is edible, then it's perfect for me and my family.  The tatties certainly baked up nicely anyway.

goldfinches - thank you, but I don't think my budgeting skills are good enough to be honest.  Without stuff in the storecupboards - even down to stuff like a variety of spices - I would have been quickly sunk.  I admire people who work wonders with fixed budgets - and absolutely get Jack Monroe's point about how your carefully crafted list/menu plan can be scuppered because the SEL bears no reflection to the price charged at the till.  Rev Canon Kate Bottley was doing the pause for thought on R2 yesterday morning, and talked about how her mum could make any meal stretch to the number of people it had to feed.  I laughed out loud (in acknowledgement) when she mentioned the ingenuity involved in making a tinned, steamed pudding stretch so that it fed 6. 

Can anyone tell me HOW you extract a 'ready meal' from the foil container and put it on the plate?  I don't expect it to look like the image on the front of the packet, just not in a dribbly, separated line along the counter top would be a start....🙄It was good enough for 70p, but I don't think I would buy mrL's deluxe lasagne as a matter of course.  The portion size was OK, albeit a bit heavy on pasta layers.  i served it with a baked potato, nearly the last of my 10p YS'd carrots steamed and the broccoli head that was in the MrL box.

I made an apple and blackberry crumble to fill the oven last night.  The blackberries were some very ancient, squished, squashed berries that have been taking up space in the freeze.  They were OK, and I must make sure that I use up the rest asap.

HM pizza on the menu tonight.  It will feature half garlic mushrooms (I cooked up the last of the YS'd mushies yesterday) which we like and half black olives which is what LG likes on their pizza.  Potato wedges most likely with.

Greying X

otb666

294/600 veg box.3 weeks to go