January 2023 Grocery Challenge

MissRikkiC

Has anyone tasted the fancy chocolate truffles from Aldi? My husband got them in a secret Santa which he brought home yesterday and oh my life they are delicious 🤤 

might get milk whilst I’m out today. Then I won’t need to shop till into next week for it again! 

sarahj1986

sarahj1986 said:

Hello all

kicking off my first spend of the year so far!

went into town today and popped into Lidl. I got some skinny crunch, energy drinks and finally managed to get a £1.50 fruit n veg box. It had a mango, 7/8 apples, a pear, 5/6 oranges, 2 bunches of spring onions”, orange pepper, lettuce, loads of baby potatoes, 3 red potatoes, aubergine, a lemon, a lime and a grape fruit. 4 bananas although I think only 1 of those can be saved. Apart from 3 of the bananas the rest of it is absolutely fine, 1 apple has a bruise but I can cut that off. I won’t need much fruit n veg this week now. Tesco is delivering on Thursday. I’m trying to keep that under £70

£246.67 left 

£84.33 spent today 

my shopping is due this afternoon and I’ve just got my receipt from Tesco. It would have been a bit higher but there’s 3 subs I don’t want. 

It is slightly bigger than I was planning on but I’ve done a mini stock up on things we use like crisps, cereal bars, biscuits and I’ve also got my husband a selection of tinned soup for his lunch when he wants it. I’ve only got chicken and a big pack of mince on it for dinners. I’ve taken out leftover lamb for dinner tonight, I’ll do a tikka curry, got naans coming for that. The mince I’m batch making a chilli adding in lentils and kidney beans, that will easily do 3 dinners. I’ll freeze 2 lots. Chicken, which I’m going tomorrow will do is 2 meals so freeze the rest for a curry or sweet and sour. I’ve still got 2 joints of pork, 2 joints of beef plus bacon and other bits in my freezer. Next week won’t need to be as high as I continue to use what I’ve got. 

£162.34 left 

BookWormNotEvenSorry

Got my big Tesco delivery today (£114.74) which should see me through the month. I bought freezer stuff for my son's dinners, packed lunch snacks, long-life milk (I drink Oat, Tesco have an offer on £4 off a £12 spend on vegan food, I bought 10 cartons of Tesco own oat milk and paid £9) tinned goods along with toilet roll (24 rolls for £6.99) and also bought a few meat cuts which I'll portion up and freeze for later. I bought Tesco Imperfect carrots and parsnip to make a big pot of soup for my lunches, mushrooms and onions to add to the meat cuts to make stews or casseroles and baking potatoes (4 for 35p) and I also get whatever fruit they have on offer, which this week was kiwi and apples. I had £5.50 in clubcard vouchers to use.

I also forked out and bulk bought dog food (£68.28) which should hopefully last a few months.

All that will be needed now is top up shops for fresh food and if I run out of anything, so I'm really hoping to come in under my budget this month.

£252.63/£330.00

cherry_22

First food shop of January done and dusted. Got a fully stocked fridge now which always feels good. 

My total was £70.63 this included £10 worth of nectar points which I'd forgotten I had 

Aiming for roughly £70 a week but I've just started slimming world again so buying a lot of the necessities such as herbs, spices etc which bumped my total up a bit. 

£70.63 / £300 (will add this to my signature when they let me have one ) 

Saver-upper

Popped into Iceland, bought 2x 6pints of milk (£4.70)  and came right out again!   No snacks ,no chocolate, no "just looking" ('cause that is darn expensive! )
Still got enough ingredients in the house to last a few more meals ( since my shop on Monday), so should be able to close my purse again for a bit longer.

£69.39/£300.00

CRANKY40

£13.50 spent on stuff that the little supermarket didn't have at the beginning of the week. This included milk....we did have a milkman and I carried on using him when the prices went up. Then a stealth charge of £1 delivery per week was also added and we weren't getting through as much milk so back to the supermarket it is. 

The HT suggested going into town to sort his finances out after college yesterday. He had the results of his child trust fund thing from the government to sort out. He opened a proper account even though he still has a bank account elsewhere and he also opened a savings account. He hadn't had lunch so I bought him a toastie and a coffee in town out of my money. If he's hungry he gets grumpy and wants to go home and we had other things to do. 

Late lunch meant that he wasn't hungry at dinner time so we had cheese and crackers for supper instead. Tonight we've had steak and chips with baked beans and mushrooms. The steak was one of our christmas treat meals that we didn't get round to so I added it to the freezer. 

Total spend so far £56.48

FoxFace

Little shop of £7.62p today, as we needed dog food, eggs, bananas, grapes, yogurts and apples… goodness knows how we managed to run out!

£36.49p left in the kitty.

oh also, I picked up yesterday’s Olio order… Ended up with bread, croissants, pain au chocolat, pretzels, pitta, buns… I looked it all up online and it was £17.50p worth of food! Definitely a convert, my freezer is heaving now!

Have a good evening everyone.

Sayschezza

First proper shop of the month came today £47.18. Two small top ups in the week came to another £4.54 so £51.72 in total spent. Pleased with that. 

Ainsty

I was hoping to get through the week (albeit a short one from Monday to Saturday) without spending but I ran out of milk. A walk to Aldi was indicated so that's £1.65 spent on 4pts of milk

This week, Monday to Friday I will have eaten out of the fridge and freezer plus homegrown veg in storage or still in the ground.

Breakfast

5 x Porridge plus 80g frozen HG soft fruit

Lunch

• 4 x soup with HG veg plus onion and stock cube
• 1 x HM beetroot hummus, HG Beetroot, chickpeas and yoghurt plus 0.5 red pepper for crudities and toast fingers

Dinner 

• 2 x Chicken casserole, chicken breast, carrots, onion, HG potatoes, sprouts & parsnips HM Yorkshire pudding
• 2 x Potato, leek and bacon bake, with cabbage all veg HG (1 portion for the week commencing Saturday 7th)
• 2 x Veggie chilli - peppers, onions lentils & kidney beans. 1 portion with rice and the other in the remaining half pepper laid on its side like a boat with the chilli inside and around it.

Desserts/snacks - sweets and biscuits left from Christmas, toast with HM jam

I draw out £10 each week and use the envelop system. Any unspent carries forward to next week. If it isn't in the envelope, it doesn't get spent. When I go shopping on Saturday, I will take £18.35 made up of £8.35 carried over from the week before and £10.00 for the week coming

£1.65/£10

joedenise

@Ainsty - your chicken casserole would be cheaper if you used chicken thighs and also tastier - thighs definitely have more flavour than breast.