November 2022 Grocery Challenge

gill5blue

hi all,
over the month I have spent £222.04 out of £240 budget. not too bad as apart from buying what I use I have also been buying pasta and other items to have a bigger stock in my larder.
I also used a local community food bank and got some croissants, red lentils and roses.
good luck all in the last week of November.
gill5blue
hope elsiepac is ok?

joedenise

@elsiepac has put up the December grocery challenge so hopefully she's OK.

Crazycatlady2

I have not added up the spends and darent. I do have a fair but that’s actually for next month though 🤷‍♀️ 

Crazycatlady2

Cupboards and freezer so full I’ve had to defrost a chocolate log I bought for Christmas….oh what a shame we will have to eat it now 😂

Gettingmyshiztogether

hazeldreams said:

Gettingmyshiztogether said:

hazeldreams said:

We're at £447.81/£580. Super pleased with this and just one more week to go for November.

Thats incredible Hazeldreams 👏🏽

Well done! Any top tips please do share! I think, if my memory serves me right, you've reduced your budget by hundreds of pounds.... 👏🏽👏🏽

Hi! I think the discipline of having this forum, and tracking every penny, has been the biggest change for us. Yes, we were up to over £1000pm at one stage. It's shocking when I write that figure out! Having OH on board is also a big difference. We used to be a 2 income family, now its just mine, so he does the food shopping and has seen first hand how much prices have/are rising in relation to groceries and its turns out, he's actually very good at being frugal! Much better than me! 

Practically, on the day to day front, we do all the basics that you've probably already read on here; meal plan for the whole week, starting by planning meals from what we already have in the cupboards/freezer; searching and trying out cheap recipes; I don't eat meat and so the other 3 members of the house tend to only have meat in a curry once a week - the rest of the time we eat a lot of chickpeas, lentils, potatoes - all of which are super cheap; we batch cook a lot and freeze the leftovers. So for e.g. if we cook a soya mince bolognese, we always make one batch for this week and one for the week after. And finally my favourite, any leftovers from plates on the night go into a tub for me to have for my lunch the next day. I love leftovers! I know some will bulk at the thought of this, but I figure if I'm microwaving it anyway, any nasty germs will be zapped!

Oh, nearly forgot! I use YNAB to track all expenses and now I put an entry for each weeks' shopping budget (previously I just had one entry for the entire month and that just didn't work for us!) That's also made a huge difference - instead of seeing one big lump and just shopping to that amount, now we see just what we have for that week.

Hope this helps!

Hazel x

Thank you Hazel, that is super helpful and well done! I agree this forum has definitely helped me also.

Last month we were happily meal planning and buying to that, thinking we were being frugal but there were so many other things that I wasn't doing too. Although I ve always eaten the left overs, that doesn't bother me at all 🤣

Gettingmyshiztogether

Another spend today; £6.55 in N!s@ on golden syrup, chocolate (required for baking) a pack of three reduced peppers; and two packets of h@lls sooothers.

I was quite chuffed with the peppers, 55p for 3 rather than £1.75 it was originally. I ve chopped these and put them into the freezer ready for using another day. 

So total spend so far for November is...

£295.79/ £460

With 10 days left of the month! My freezers (x2) are full, my fridge is full, my cupboards are full and my stock cupboard is starting to fill too.

I am quite pleased with that, considering we were at roughly £550 last month! 

We have a 10% off voucher to use up this month in L!dls and so will do another shop before the end of the month. DH wants to grab some Christmas food bits and some alcohol whilst we are there. 

Today has been a busy day! I have made leek and potato soup, carrot and coriander soup (both for the freezer), a courgette and lentil bake, a veggie sausage casserole, a veggie chilli, lemon cupcakes, millionaire shortbread, an apple crumble, Marshmallow cakes, flapjacks!

I ve chopped up chillis for the freezer, a half of a swede and three peppers also. I ve taken the seeds from the chillis and plan to attempt to grow some chilli plants also. I also have some growing garlic bulbs to plant out this week between the rain! I would never have thought to do this before joining this challenge. I would meal plan but never from what we already had in and would often throw food out that had gone past its best. This month I have changed my approach; writing out an inventory for what we have already in, making a plan from that and buying bits that help to make these meals. We bought a 2nd freezer, I ve used TGTG (I need to grab another one of these this week!) I ve batch cooked and baked! I ve even started the 2nd purse challenge 😊 the funny thing is, although we have (so far) spent much less, we have eaten much better and more! 

Thank you to everyone who contributed to these boards 😊

Amara

My target was £350, I'm on £413.50. It's hard. Still ten days to go. 

Soontobeoap

@Amara, i agree it is hard, especially at this time of year. I have been doing this siince January. I am getting the hang of different ways to save on grocerys but my estimates are still way out sometimes and will be this month. However if you save a  little bit here and a little bit there, your bills must come down or at least remain stable. 

happydenial

£98/£500 left with six days to go (feeding 2 adults & 2 teens 3x meals a day) - we are away Fri-Mon which comes out of a different pot, but still have plenty of food in the freezer and pantry so feel it would be ok anyway. 

Pleased with this as we have had two takeaways at just over £100 between them in Nov - whilst this an expense that could be avoided, one fed 7 people for dinner and then 3 for lunch, and the other fed 4 for dinner twice, so not as bad as it sounds.

Putting this money aside in a separate account seems to be really working - I don’t have to keep receipts as I have the bank app on my phone so I can check when and wherever I am as to my budget. It’s also, weirdly, made me more accepting of spending the money - I used to feel guilty about buying a takeaway or anything slightly extravagant, but now it’s budgeted for and it feels like a treat! DH thinks I’m looney to look at it like this but there you go…..

JingsMyBucket

Morning y’all. It's cold and rainy in part of Scotland this morning. We have a real feel of -2.8C so the heat is definitely on for a little bit. I also heard from elsiepac and she said she was unfortunately really busy but is fine health wise. WHEW. There are some weekend spends to report on my end. 

£68.03 from a Tesco delivery on Friday. That was a combination of stocking up and just general fridge refilling. Yoghurt, mozzarella balls, halloumi, bananas, berries, tomatoes, herbs, oranges, various veg, lemons, etc. We also needed to restock on foil, paper towels, Dettol laundry disinfectant, all surface cleaner, and EVOO. The household stuff should hopefully see us through end of January. 

On Saturday we spent £10.00 at the cheese shop for a weekend box which consist of 4 cheeses, oat cakes, and a small jar of onion chutney. It's a good value and we like supporting them when we can. The cheeses were a smoked Godminster, a local Scottish cheddar, a blue cheese, and a brie. 

£4.49 at Savers for a box of Fairy detergent. OH’s liquid Fairy detergent is running low and we’d like to try out using powdered detergents to possibly save money. When my Bold liquid finishes in December I'll get the powder version as well. 

£9.35 at the halal store for harissa, red lentils, coriander seeds, yellow lentils, and ramen. I wanted to get beef and lamb bones from him but he was totally out and told me stop by another day. 

£20.60 at M & S for 2 packs of sausages, strawberries, butter, wafer thin ham, and 2 packs of 20% mince. Heads up to a good value/price: the mince was only £1.80 each as the regular price. I decided to try using it for meatballs later on. Both packs are in freezer for now. 

£20 for a fruit and veg box that’ll arrive on Tuesday morning. 

£329.72 spent so far. £20.28 / £350.00 remaining

Annoyingly but is also a good thing… we decided at the last minute on Saturday to have an American Thanksgiving dinner this Thursday and invite one of Mr. Jings’ sisters over. This particular SIL lives in the same town as us but we haven’t had a chance to her over for a proper dinner yet. The problem is now we have to buy a turkey and various other items for a dinner this week. 

Last night I put in another Tesco order that arrives this afternoon; that’ll cost about £54 so will send us over for the month. It includes a medium sized whole turkey, frozen cranberries, butter, more herbs, lemons and oranges, leeks, cream, garlic, nuts, foil containers to send SIL home with food, nice flavoured Fever Tree tonics (0% tolerance for alcohol in Scotland so we'll have these instead of wine), etc. And that order still doesn’t include a few staples like celery and fresh sage because everything’s low stock around here. I'll likely pick up anything that's missing at M & S or Iceland on the way home from my Covid booster and flu vax shots this afternoon. 

Eh, oh well. At least we’ll have lots of leftovers. Here’s the menu for the holiday this Thursday:

• Herbed and butter roasted turkey
• Cornbread 
• Green beans sautéed w/almonds
• Mashed potatoes w/garlic and rosemary 
• Roasted squash or carrots, depending on what’s in the veg box
• Gravy
• Homemade cranberry sauce 
• Apple and maple pecan crumble for dessert w/double thick cream

Have a beautiful day folks and keep warm.