June 2025 Grocery Challenge

Soontobeoap

Welcome @Nanxydrew74 good luck with your challenge.

@PipneyJane I am trying to shop from freezer and store cupboards as much as possible this month so my pie will be thrown together with what I have in.I am hoping to make 2 and freeze one. I have some frozen puff pastry. I will fry up onion and mushrooms  throw  cooked chicken into the mix season and either use a hm white sauce flavoured with a chicken stock cube or the tin of mushroom soup that I have. I have some deep pie dishes and will just top them with the pastry to make it go further. Sorry that there is no amazing recipe.😔 I wish I could say that there was.

NSD here for us so we will start June with a full budget.

Soontobeoap

Ist spend for June. £18.56 gf loaf, and 3 pks of half and half sugar were the main buys with a few veg added. Went to Aldi today to try to find Sacla ff lasagna sauce. Can't find it anywhere it has suddenly disappeared from the shops


Edit: I have just ordered 12 jars online directly from SACLA for £24.80 including postage. They are usually about @£3.50 a jar. Let's hope they have a long shelf life!!! All signs are that they are being discontinued sadly.☹️

mandco

Pet shop - I had a £5 off £50+ spend so total spend £58.19 mostly hay & forage stuff for the rabbits which should last the month but did pick up some chews/toys which weren’t on the list as they had a load of bits reduced to clear.
Tesco - £32.24 mostly essentials/fresh stuff like bread, milk & fruit/veg to get us though the next few days plus some own brand gf bits & salmon portions for dinner - ds request.
homebargains - £20.52 mostly household stuff but did pick up some drinks/snacks for the cinema (way cheaper than buying there) and grated mozzarella cheese as it’s only £1.29 sains is over a £1 more for the same size pack.

That makes my June total so far £145.70 already however £92.94 of that is pet related 

Nancydrew74

Hi everyone 

Happy Sunday!

Todays groceries:

£7.51

JingsMyBucket

Evening folks. We had our first shops of the month today. 

£5.00 at the monthly farmers’ market today for greens from our greens lady. 

£42.23 at Lidl for a free bag of bananas from the fruity spin, another bunch of bananas, tomatoes, a bag of bell peppers, red onions, 2 heads of broccoli, loose carrots, salad, chilies, herbs, strawberries, lemons, 30 eggs, oat cakes, 2 blocks of butter, sliced ham, Italian cold cuts, salmon fillets, 4 mozzarella balls, and vegetable crisps. 

I spent more than anticipated in Lidl but got lots of produce. Later this week I need to buy laundry detergent at Savers and toilet paper at Tesco. 

£47.23 / £325 spent. £277.77 total remaining.  

goldfinches

Evening everyone and hope you all had a pleasant Sunday.

Welcome to @Nancydrew74 this is a lovely supportive and helpful thread, best wishes for your new life.

Welcome back to @LadyWithAPlan and wondered if you and @Soontobeoap had seen this review of gluten free plain flours by Becky Excell in today's Guardian, a useful comparison I thought and very sensible to include prices too.

I have a couple of spends to add today with the first being from M*rks where I bought carrots, tomatoes, 2x aubergines, cucumber, swede, gherkins, red cabbage, radishes and lettuce for £10.05. Then I decided to buy my milk from Mr T's on my way back from my after dinner walk and also picked up 2x ys coffee filter papers and ys gluten free cream crackers at the same shop which all came to £5.79.

That makes my new GC total £12.45/£150 while the Baking Budget now stands at £6.05/£20 and the Bulk Buy Fund is now £83.48.

Quantaqa

Hello All, I am already all over the place with my Food budget.  I do a cash envelope system and divide the budget into weekly amounts plus a stock up for meat at the start of the month.  Well, the meat stock cash up is gone and we have not stocked up on any meat!!!!  A big part of my problem, I am realising, is that DH does the shopping and I can't keep on top of what he's spending.  He has no idea what he's spent the money on either. Despite my best efforts to have one weekly shop he is back and forth to the shops, often multiple time a day.  It's driving me mad.  

Things cannot go on like this.  So from today I am going to try and pin him down to zero trips to the shop until Friday.  I am also going to set myself a challenge for the month to resurect 2 old habits that I have not used for a long time.  

Habit 1:  DH and I do the shopping togther and I write everything in a small notebook as we go around the shop.
Habit 2:  Walk to the shops.  Years ago we were in the habit of walking to the shops once a week and we have one of those shopping trolleys that we used.  We still have the trolley, we just never use it. That is about to change.

SausageDogSandwich

Morning all, thanks @elsiepac for running another thread. Overspent last month so will have to lower budget this month. Definitely need to stay out of the shops this month, I am going to try nd only buy what I need at the start of this month then do a big shop when everything evens out, this usually back fires on me though as I forget stuff then have to go again. But I will try again this month, already have a small spend on milk, cucumber and cereal but need to find the cost of these.

£385 for June please 

C_J

Hello everyone, hope you are all having a good Monday.

First shop of the month for me today, where I spent £14.32 in Aldi on dog food, lemonade, laundry detergent, and a naughty treat of some chocolate raisins.  I do make my own ivy leaf detergent as well, but like to have one bottle of non-bio laundry liquid in the cupboard just in case (or for anything more heavily soiled, which tbh isn’t really much unless the dog throws up).

I also called into my fourth favourite community fridge as I happened to be passing during their opening hour. There wasn’t much available today but I still came away with some new potatoes, two brown onions, a pack of cress, a pack of mixed Thai herbs, a loaf of sourdough, six brioche burger buns, two all-butter croissants, a big handful of Hello Fresh chicken stock paste sachets, and a nice bunch of flowers.

This fridge does not ask for any donations so my total for June so far stands at £14.32/£150.

PipneyJane

Hi Everyone and welcome @Nancydrew74

I have a spend to declare from yesterday:  £17.31 in Sainsbugs  which went on 450ml Yeo Valley yoghurts 3x£1.50,  450ml Yeo Valley Greek Yoghurt 2x£1.75,, 452g loose carrots 31p, 1.272kg baking potatoes £1, and -  the BIG highlight -  4x300g packets of Gressingham Duck Livers at £2 a packet!  We went looking for chicken livers and were over the moon to find Duck Liver for such a cheap price.  HM Duck Liver Pate, here we come!

(Seriously, 3 packets are now in the freezer and DH already has eyes on the 4th for a chicken liver curry that I do.  However, I will definitely use at least one pack to make pate.)

We also go a £2 coin and various coppers in our change which will go to the money boxes.  This shrapnel added up to £2.09.

The above brings our June GC total to £19.40/£165 leaving £145.60 for the rest of the month.

 @Soontobeoap thanks for the outline of your Chicken & Mushroom Pies.  Saturday night’s planned chicken was a slight disaster because, after putting the roasties on to parboil (with the plan to put them in the oven at the same time as the roast), I took the chicken out of the fridge to discover that, despite 24 hours defrosting, it was still mainly frozen!  Fortunately, we had a Salmon Wellington in the freezer and the remains of Friday’s huge salad, so that salvaged Saturday night’s dinner.

I eventually roasted the chicken yesterday with half of the (parboiled) potatoes, but that wasn’t until DH’s best friend had already headed home.  (We’d had a large lunch out with him.)  Dinner tonight is Chicken risotto.  Tomorrow, I’ll have a go at making individual chicken pies, topped with the remaining potatoes mashed.  

Wish me luck.

- Pip