April 2024 Grocery Challenge

thriftwizard

£11.53 added, from a quick dive into Grape Tree for raw cashews (£9.99, a staple of DD2's diet) and the greengrocers, for mushrooms, plus a 50p bruised aubergine & a 30p bag of carrots that clearly hadn't been enjoying life in a plastic bag. It'll all peel off, and it's all going to be used up today. 

Worked out how to approach the weekend in a budgetary sense; there will be 11 of us at one point, 8 for most of it. I will account for the weekend's catering from the Entertainments budget as it's DS1's birthday/wedding anniversary, but any food that'll be going forward into the week will count as groceries. Leftovers (if any!) will just be a bonus. Any cleaning stuff & toiletries needed would also be groceries, but we shouldn't actually need any as we're pretty well stocked. Now to clean rooms, make beds, etc.!

Blackcats

@PipneyJane - very good news about your scan results.  Your increased grocery budget is still inspirational!

We went to Lidls and stocked up for just over a week's worth of groceries.  It was a trolley with plenty of fruit, veg and fresh produce so yet again I hoped Dr Michael Muesli would jump out of his hiding place to congratulate us 😁.  

we bought olive oil which was £6.75 - really taken aback by that.  I tried to make use of the Lidl + app offers and made some little savings that way.  Apparently we now qualify for a free bag of pasta which is better than paying for a bag of pasta so I just need to remember to pick up a bag next time we are there.

£91.00 remaining 

K9sandFelines

Sallyp2 said:

K9sandFelines said:

£150 please @elsiepac

This is for all food items, cleaning products and toiletries

My month starts on the 13th and runs til the 12th.
I still need to to tot up my receipts for March, but I'm not officially done with that month yet.

Wow am in awe if you only spend £150 in 4 weeks!
Ive smashed that and plus in a week

I only just seen this sorry. I barely manage it as it is solely me apart from visits from my daughters occasionally and granddaughter. I'm vegan also so don't need to include meat or anything like that. I use lots of peas, beans, lentils. Try and make everything. rarely buy meat replacements. Heavily rely on Too Good to go, Olio and Cashback sites. Never have takeaways or meals out 😔. I stick to the cheapest soya milk etc, don't throw anything out. I bulk bought alot of things a while back when I had a bigger budget, so have only just finished a 5 litre multi purpose cleaner, and only just started a 5 litre fabric conditioner. The rest of the shopping prices I have to do an intake of breath at. I've been on here years now, but my budget with two girls and a granddaughter ( when they lived here) never exceeded £350. It's taken me years to get it down this low, and now it's out of necessity. I probably spend equal amount a month on my four cats, than on my own groceries !!

PipneyJane

Blackcats said:

@PipneyJane - very good news about your scan results.  Your increased grocery budget is still inspirational!

Thank you, on both counts, @Blackcats. 

I covered most of the secrets of my success in this post from November 23.  Really, a lot of it is down to applying The Pantry Principle, as Amy Dacycyn called it in The Complete Tightwad Gazette, where you shop first to restock your pantry, fridge and freezer, and then to add the missing extras needed to make certain dishes from your meal plan. That book is the second thing I purchased from Amazon, in January 2001.  I bought it as soon as I knew it existed and read it from cover-to-cover multiple times. 

This month is 24 years since I bought my flat and DH moved in with me.  First thing we did was to add shelves to a tall kitchen broom cupboard, to turn it into a pantry, spacing out those shelves to fit my containers, tins, etc.  Back then, our monthly budget was £100 General Housekeeping and £30 Meat Fund.  Later, we added a £10 Bulk Fund and a £10 Christmas Fund, and after we moved into this house, a £10 Garden Fund. April 22, we added the £20 Booze Fund.   My blog tells me that by February 2009, we’d increased the Meat Fund to its current £40/month - sadly I don’t know when - and everything else has crept up since, to the levels mentioned in my November post.   I know we increased the General Housekeeping to £120 in 2012 and then to £140 in July 2020.

Until Lockdown in 2020, I usually only did one big supermarket shop a month, with a fortnightly trip to the farm shop at Osterley Park, where I bought my fresh veg and eggs.  (Sadly, the Pandemic killed the farm shop.).  The demise of the farm shop is one of the contributing factors as to why we now shop more frequently; the other is that we can walk the 1.5 miles to L!dl and time what we buy in order to take advantage of their L!dlPlus offers.

Since I’ve been ill, we’ve gone to the butcher more frequently than our usual quarterly visits, in order to get liver to combat my anaemia or a steak “treat”, but I still try to keep the same sort of freezer stock as I did before I got ill, buying my 2kg minced beef in 250g bags for example, and their largest tray of chicken breasts (so that I can freeze them individually and use just one for a 4-portion meal).  

ETA:  Having a well stocked freezer is really important.  As well as meat, ours currently contains a dozen lunchboxes, 9x250g pouches of grated courgette from last year’s glut (which I add to mince-based dishes), half a dozen tubs of cooked (previously dried) pulses, 8 HM “freezer meals”, 2 pints of chicken stock, and 4 portions of what I call Base.  (Since almost all my recipes begin fry onion with mushrooms, add garlic, I’ll fry up extra portions of this Base, when I have a glut of mushrooms or when I can see they’re on the turn.  That’s what I did this afternoon.  Sadly, despite my best storage efforts, I did have to compost 3 mushrooms.)     

We went to Lidls and stocked up for just over a week's worth of groceries.  It was a trolley with plenty of fruit, veg and fresh produce so yet again I hoped Dr Michael Muesli would jump out of his hiding place to congratulate us 😁.  

we bought olive oil which was £6.75 - really taken aback by that.  I tried to make use of the Lidl + app offers and made some little savings that way.  Apparently we now qualify for a free bag of pasta which is better than paying for a bag of pasta so I just need to remember to pick up a bag next time we are there.

I love your nickname for him!  I listen to his BBC podcast.

- Pip

diminua

Recipe

I'm on £142.30 spent. Made a not quite macaroni cheese thing with mushroom and courgette and pine nuts yesterday to use up some of the veg that didn't fit in the BBC chilli at the weekend. Three portions of chilli eaten and one in freezer, and macaroni cheese thing scoffed too now. 

Recipe for the macaroni if anyone wants it (the chilli is the one from the BBC website). This makes 2 portions.

Put 200gm dry macaroni on to boil.

Chop an onion and fry in a little oil in a large frying pan or large saucepan. Chop half a punnet of mushrooms and one or two courgettes into smallish pieces and add to the onion after about 5 minutes. Stir occasionally. Add oregano and pine nuts to taste if you have them and want them. 

To make a white sauce melt a heaped tablespoon of butter and add 3 tablespoons of flour in a small pan. Stir over a moderate heat for a few minutes to get it all mixed up and cook the flour. It makes a kind of dryish yellow paste. Add milk bit by bit (because you can always add more milk to white sauce but you can't easily add more flour without it going lumpy and leaving a floury taste) and keep stirring. 
Once runny 'enough' stop adding milk and set aside (I like mine quite stodgy, but if you want a creamier consistency keep adding milk and stirring in until you're happy). 

Once the veg and the pasta are soft and cooked to your taste drain the pasta and put everything together and stir through. Warm it up again over the hob if it needs it but keep stirring so the white sauce doesn't stick to the bottom of the pan. 

Add the cheese on top when serving. I had gruyere, which is mild and slightly sweet. I would probably substitute the oregano with garlic if I'd had a sharper cheese. 

weenancyinAmerica

Instead of fabric conditioner, you can use a tennis ball in the TD. Or a wad of aluminium foil. I stopped using it after my parents died, and haven't used it since. 

LotsOfTea

I had a big shopping delivery today and also got a few extras while I was in town that weren't on the online order. Totting it all up I'm up to £211.90/£250 for the month now. 

I'm fully stocked on pretty much everything now and have everything we need for family staying with us this weekend so I'm reasonably hopeful of keeping under budget for the month.

NeverendingDMP

Hello all. It's my budget reset day tomorrow and I have 5.47 left over. I'll have to properly add up what was food and what was spends but I think I'll call in a success this week. Tomorrow I'm putting 150 for food to one side. School dinners and pet food not required next week so I've moved that to a savings account instead. 

Soontobeoap

Oh dear £9.50 spent at Aldi yesterday and I have just written a list for another shop thats needed. I really did a bad estimate this time! 🙁. 

Mrs_Cheshire

Low spends this week only £8.05 to add. Will do a shop tomorrow at L!dl as I've got a £5 off £25 on the app. Don't need a huge amount - bread, milk, sandwich fillings, some veg. Hoping to keep it as close to £25 as possible 
Currently at £211.83/£500