Frugal Friday

A frosty morning view!

The time feels right for a bit of a challenge to start the year - December was unsurprisingly a spendy sort of month - in between various Christmas foods, presents to be bought, and a few trips out, and ending with a long weekend in Norfolk just after Christmas. January will also have a few (planned!) trips out, but we can certainly do a lot better on the food spending front!

We have two full freezers, and a well stocked store cupboard thanks to making use of vouchers for money off a set spend in Lidl a couple of times during December. We also made excellent use of the cheap Christmas veg - and we’ll be aiming to use every scrap of that.  Christmas left us with plenty of leftovers as well - the turkey got carved up and divided out into portions  - sliced with gravy to make future roast dinners,  chunks for pies, pasta or curries, and “gribbly bits” perfect for risotto and similar. I also purposely over bought on a few bits, and did my usual thing of buying two large gammon joints while they were on special offer - once cooked they were each cut into two with one feeding us over Christmas and new year, and the remaining three bits stashed in the freezer. 

As we were away between Christmas and new year we didn’t have too much chance to pounce on any Christmas bargains, but we did happen upon a big pack of chicken breasts in Waitrose for a bargain price - those were cooked immediately with three being turned into a big pan of chicken orzo bake with plenty of 5p Christmas sprouts, a jar of sundried tomatoes and half a pot of cream left over from making cheesecake. Very tasty, and fed us both for two main meals with a final single portion being set aside and squeezed into the freezer for a lunch one day when one of is on our own on a Saturday. 

Money wise - the aim is simply “as little as possible”. To assist with this I’ll be meal-planning. Asked around items we have in already - so the shopping list should consist of pretty much entirely fresh stuff. I also started out with a small balance left on an Aldi gift card acquired when we did an insurance renewal last year. 

We are always pretty hot on avoiding food waste round here, and we’ll be keeping the focus there. This morning I’ve taken the final scraps of some pastry and turned that into a couple of little tartlet cases - the pastry scraps were a mix of sweet and savoury so I need to have a little taste of the cooked edges I trim off to decide if a I can get away with a savoury filling or not! MrEH had the oven on anyway as he was making a batch of rolls for lunches next week - so it made sense to pop the pastry in at the same time. Lunch used up the last of a focaccia I made for Christmas Day tea - we ate very little of it on the day as we were all still stuffed from lunch, so it had been in the freezer! Slices of the Christmas ham, and pickle (me) or chutney (him) turned that into a delicious sandwich. 

One of the main things for me to focus on with this challenge will be avoiding the temptation to shop for bargains - remembering that it’s only a bargain if you actually needed it in the first place! If we are in a shop anyway we’ll check for reductions, but there will be a proper thought process employed about the purchases. If my list for a week’s main shop is short enough that I can just walk round to Aldi that is what I will do - as that in itself is money-saving too, of course, saving on fuel for the car to go elsewhere. That is what I did this morning in fact - with a list consisting of just fresh fruit, some tomatoes and yogurts.  Total spend for that first shop was £10.28, with a cash spend of £3.54 once the voucher was employed. Well still need to pop somewhere else over the weekend for milk and bananas. 

So that sums up what the plan is - I know we are far from alone doing this sort of challenge this month too, on all counts a focus on “using what we have” is a solid start to the year, after all. I intend to try to make weekly Frugal Friday posts during the month updating how we are doing - so a proper old school blog challenge! 

Robyn