January 2018 Grocery Challenge

Small spend of £1.91 in L*dl this morning on toiletries.
£77.08/£300

£15 spent, between morries, lidl and B&M, fresh veg, butter and lard, coffee, salt and some store cupboard soups.

YorksLass, thanks for mentioning ice cream. That reminded me of several no churn ice cream recipes I've been meaning to try for a while. I also have some frozen berries I can mix into it. Ooh, I'm all excited to try it now! :T

Today I returned to the halal store and bought fresh chicken (€3.85) along with eggs, frying oil and almond flour for baking (€12.65). Total comes to €16.50.

Totals So Far:
€110.27 / 250
1 NSD

That's it, I'm declaring a moratorium on spending for myself for the next two days. I'm going to use up veg from the freezer to eat with the fried chicken instead of buying brussels sprouts tomorrow; I'll use up the soup in the fridge, etc. This can be done and rather easily.

As always, I'm feeling more positive after reading what everyone else is up to. I can definitely manage this by using up what I already have in store.

I'm feeling lots better as well which is motivating me to cook properly. I made some fishcakes with some tinned sardines for the boy and a huge and very spicy veggie chili for hubby and me. I also tried out a black bean and peanut stew recipe that Jack Monroe posted recently. I'm hoping the boy might like it too as it's not spicy at all but you never can tell when giving new things to 5 year olds!

I had to stock up on bananas today so 95p spent.

£55.38/£100

Afternoon All

Today we made our annual trip to Wing Yip. I can’t remember the last time I went; I think it was when I was unemployed in September 2016. We spent £43.26 out of our Bulk Fund, so it doesn’t count towards Grocery Challenge spending. Didn’t buy a huge quantity of stuff but I thought you might be interested in some of the details:

10kg Basmati Rice - £9.95
Box of 6 pairs Marigold gloves - £7.10
5L “Cook’s” brand washing up liquid - £3.85
4 x 500g packets of egg noodles at £1.25/packet

The rice is the best price I’ve seen in months AND it’s not broken basmati. It was £2 cheaper than the Tilda rice they stocked. The next cheapest I saw was a Thai jasmine rice at £10.95 for 10kg. (I didn’t check out their price for broken basmati but it’s bound to be cheaper than Mr T’s.)

The Marigolds work out at about half the usual supermarket price and will last me about 18 months. (I go through a pair every 3 months.). However, the washing up liquid was the real reason why we made our visit today. This is our usual brand and we’d run out. It comes in a 5 litre bottle, so I decant it into a recycled, pump-action soap dispenser and - because of our extremely hard water - mix it about 70:30 with distilled white vinegar. (The vinegar stops glasses going milky.). At three squirts per sink-load, the last bottle lasted for 32 months! (I wrote the starting date on it - 18 April 2015.)

JIngs - are you storing your potatoes in a cupboard or out in daylight? Usually, potatoes go green when they’re exposed to the light. They are also more likely to sprout. As long as you cut the green bits off, they should be fine to eat.

For an idea of what to cook, we had cream to use up so used the last of our potatoes on Thursday in a Dauphinoise-style dish. I used/abused the BBC recipe. It says to cook your potatoes in a lot of milk and cream. Instead, I cooked mine in boiling water for the suggested 3 minutes, layered them into a dish, then heated considerably less milk and cream with some crushed garlic and poured that over. Some chopped ham and a bit of grated cheese on top and into a preheated oven for half an hour at 180c. Our “potatoes” also included some sweet potatoes, because we didn’t have enough of the regular variety. Very garlicky and quite yummy.

- Pip