April 2026 Grocery Challenge

ancientmum

Morning, I've not posted for a while and still need to catch up with the posts, but just popped in to update my signature with spends so far this year. I've been taking advantage of money off vouchers and special offers to buy two of each of bread flour, sr flour, pasta, oil, tinned tuna and a few other staples, including cleaning stuff.

I'm catering for a family weekend this month, part of which will include meals out where we share the costs, and then going away for a week where we will again be eating out. So some of the grocery money will be spent, also some holiday money. I've budgeted for both, so looking forward to having a lovely break.

I

Greying_Pilgrim

I spent £6 in MrW. We're on holiday, and this will be our tea - burger baps and wedges (I brought the potatoes with us). MrW isn't the cheapest, but it was where we were, and we wouldn't be able to get burgers and fries for £2 a head, so…….. I've everything to make our pack-up for the return journey tomorrow, so this should be the last spending for this week….. famous last words……

Greying X

otb666

550 spent of 600 3rd of 4 shops done. Went to Asda and was not impressed they had people eating food in shop from the shop and we nearly picked up a half empty packet of cornettos. ice creams. The shop was dark and not much room with empty shelves. We wont be going back. The self service was very busy but only one assistant on checkouts so queued like it was xmas. Really gone downhill.

whitecatcreamsofaDOH

£99.42 / £420

Feels like I’m in a good place so far this month. I think calorie tracking has also helped as I have definitely been overeating snacks.

Suffolk_lass

Including the milk bill today we are now at £135.37 for April, with a possible extra couple of pints of milk needed. I shall wait though, and not buy pre-emptively for that well known visitor, Justin Case. We do have visitors tomorrow so I shall make a cake of some sort, or maybe biscuits as that means I don't need to buy eggs yet!

Soontobeoap

£18.00 spent at Aldi last night on way home from crib. 2 boxes washing powder, cereal, bread and 2 microwave Currys. Naughty but cheaper than a night out and DH picked up some crisps.

I am buzzing. We had one of our half price half lamb legs on Monday as a roast. It has provided us with so much meat. DH has had it for his lunch sandwich over the last 3 days and I can still get 2 hotpots for 2 out of it. I can't get DH to even think about one meat free day a week but I have been able to cut our meat portions. Anyway the joint only cost £10.00 so that's brilliant

Also paid £12.69 for 12 chicken breasts in Aldi this week. They are quite big too. So I will only need one for my stir frys for 2. These include sweet and sour chicken, honey chicken with rice and chicken noodles. So each meal will come in at under £2.00 for the 2 of us.

I am ridiculously excited that I can still create cheap, tasty, nutritious meals at low prices. Thank you all for the inspiration and encouragement.

PipneyJane

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81957969#Comment_81957969

I love that you can make the meat stretch so far @Soontobeoap and not feel like there’s not enough. We’re the same, although when I first started doing this, money-saving wasn’t the objective - it was all about stretching calories (I was on a diet). That’s the main reason why virtually all my recipes start “fry onion with garlic, add mushrooms”; mushrooms are good, low calorie, meaty padding.

Talking of meat, I have a spend to declare from Thursday. On the Nect@r app, we had a 38p-off SmartShop price on dried yeast, which was nagging me. (Normally £1.55, a tin of yeast was reduced to £1.17.). I’d only bought a replacement tin of yeast two weeks ago, so when we were shopping on Monday, I said “No, we don’t need it” to DH, but I couldn’t get the saving out of my brain…

(Don’t you just hate it, when you buy something that you purchase infrequently, and then the next week, surprisingly, you get an offer for it? It’s as if the shop’s algorithm thinks “You bought this last week, so you obviously want it every week”.)

Anyway, Thursday morning when I headed to the office, I was determined that I wasn’t going shopping, so I didn’t take the GC purse with me. Pulling out of the carpark at work, I decided to stop and buy the yeast. (I’d already opened the tin, I bought 2 weeks ago and it has a BBE date of February 2028.). There’s a Sainsbug’s on one of my potential routes home, so I drove there. Not only did I buy another tin of yeast (BBE Mar28), I scored 4kg of marked down meat!

(YS chicken liver 2x90p (was £1.75), YS 24 meatballs £3.25 (was £6.75), YS 800g/8 pork loin chops £3.80 (was £7.50), YS 2kg/12 chicken thighs £4.60 (was £5.75), YS 6-pack hot cross buns 35p (was 71p),  Yeast £1.17, Mazot £1.85.)

That’s 8 portions of chicken liver, 8 portions of meatballs, at least 8 portions of pork (depending on how I cook it), and 3 chicken tray bakes (4 portions each). With the exception of the meatballs, everything has been carefully bagged up and is now in the freezer. £16.82 spent, which once the coppers and 5p’s are removed brings my GC spend to

£78.80/£180 leaving £101.20 for the rest of the month.

Beyond using half of the meatballs for dinner tonight - and freezing the rest - I’m still working out a meal plan for the next week. We’re at the football tomorrow, so won’t get home before 8pm, so whatever we have for dinner will have to be something that’s either quick to cook, just needs reheating, or uses the slow cooker. I still have some goose left from Monday, too, which’ll need to be frozen or cooked/used up before I make stock with the carcase. Hmmm….

• Pip

diminua

Potatoes, veg sausages (frozen), milk, bread, salad veg, eggs, 25p hot x buns - JS in Purley Way had stacks of them reduced, mostly the odd flavours but I picked up a 'traditional' pack of four. Last of the Easter treats I will buy until next year now. Two mocktails in a can - I got quite into them but probably should keep an eye on that as it feels like an easy way to fritter small sums that add up to bigger ones.

Looked at some soda stream syrups too (not in JS) - maybe it's because I only buy them once a year when it starts to warm up but I feel like they've shot up in price, so will wait a bit longer and see if there are any deals. I've also made my own syrups before with sugar and fruit and that works quite well.

£120.26 spent so far this month.

Greying_Pilgrim

More spends to own up to. However, the 'best' spend actually isn't counted in my GC - but we had to take DH for a scan at a hospital in the local metropolitan town, which has a huge MrT. So we dropped DH off, and pootle to MrT. We had a look in the World foods section, and there was nothing doing (after the good offers that were on for Ramadan), so we were walking away, and luckily, we went past the end of an aisle that I wouldn't normally give a second glance to, but it was stuffed with 'world food' type products, and was labelled up with 'Share the joy this Vaisakhi'. But most of the products were labelled as 'Reduced to Clear' (I now realise that the Sikh new year - I had to look it up - was on the 14th). Imagine my delight to spot 1kg bags of black-eyed beans for £1.12 per brick. I did invest in all 4 remaining packs. There was far more choice of pulses, in this section, but I just stuck with the B-E beans. So £4.48 to come out of my bulk buys budget.

But I did also buy some spaghetti, radishes and a tin of pineapple in MrT - £1.66 spent. Then we called in to MrL on the way back, and I spent £14.03 on 2 punnets of YS'd mushrooms, 1 YS'd small pat of truffled British butter, some cheese, some yoghurt and a bottle of red wine. £14.03 total. So damage to the grocery budget was a total of £15.69. We've managed to save money, by bringing home the milk we bought on holiday (thank heavens for good flasks keeping stuff cold), and some ice creams too (we did eat those when we got home), so at least we're not heaping expenditure, on expenditure. But I am now on over half the budget having been spent and only a third of the month having passed ☹️

Greying X

Nelliegrace

April budget £150

DH spent £3.30 on milk on Tuesday.

We shopped at Aldi yesterday. £33 spent. I added a cucumber and another bag of satsumas £1.09 after taking the photograph.

DH made a loaf, and I bought ham 67p and a cucumber 79p for sandwiches, some dates £2.99, banana chips 1.25, fruit and nuts £1.35, and shortbread 2 x 89p, to take to the family camp day out and picnic at a National Trust property today. 20 of us had a lovely day catching up and exploring the gardens and farmyard in the sunshine, and the house, and second hand bookshop (where I found a comfy seat and dozed,) when it rained. The teenagers went exploring and climbing trees. We took a large flask of coffee and there were hot drinks and good food available.

Total £57.40