Frugal Friday

Last Saturday was our local farmers market’s 200th market - congratulations to Don who has been organising these markets for so long now and has made the monthly trip out there such a delight. We wanted to go - but had a proper chat about it, and agreed that as there was nothing we needed, and we were already up against it on time due to another commitment, we’d skip this one. It would have been lovely to grab a sourdough loaf from our favourite local baker, but instead we opted to use the things we have (ingredients and equipment!) and instead bake a loaf at home instead on Friday evening ready for toast the following morning. Had we gone, undoubtedly we would not just have bought the loaf, and while I love supporting our fab local producers, I really do want to focus on "using up" rather than buying more, at the moment. 

I bumped our usual “main shop” day from Friday to Sunday due to other commitments, but that gave me a bit of time to make sure my meal plan and shopping list were both done before heading to the shop. I know I mention this a lot, but I really do find that shopping with a list is the best way by miles of keeping grocery spending properly under control, and the meal plan means I’m not trying to manage shopping AND working out what we might want to eat through the week too, always a recipe for spending more. It also cuts down on time decision making on weekday evenings when, by the time we arrive home, we usually just want to be eating as soon as possible!

This week was a pretty standard week aside from the fact that we needed some frozen veg - peas and sweetcorn. Both things we always have in the freezer as they will work as a main veg component of a meal or a handful thrown in to a dish to bump up the veg element. Frozen veg is brilliant too - frequently fresher than the so-called “fresh” options due to often being frozen immediately after  picking, meaning far more of the nutrients are retained. Bonus of course is that it also tends to be cheaper than fresh, too! As can be seen from the receipt, that "main shop" was a £14.74 spend. 

MrEH has a banana for his breakfast most days, but the quality in Aldi on Sunday was terrible - he stuggled to find the single good condition one he eventually opted for. Generally he will opt to pop in on a Tuesday morning to get those for the remainder of the week, but on this occasion I needed to  make use of the supermarket car park near to work on Monday as thanks to the traffic we opted to park closer to my office than normal - this means needing to be "a customer" and so that was the obvious time to purchase the remaining 'nanas! 3 of them cost me a further 48p. 

Further use of the supermarket car park on Tuesday meant "being a customer" again - this time the purchase was a bag of onions - at 99p not the absolute cheapest option I could have gone for but the cheaper-per-kg bags were full of teeny tiny onions, of the sort that one might lose the will to live peeling, so I felt the 19p extra was a small price to pay for sanity! I would have needed to buy onions next week anyway, so this seemed a sensible choice.

Total spend for the week then £16.21 - so the highest week so far, but that figure also includes the frozen veg and onions which will carry forwards to future weeks, of course. The fridge is starting to look quite bare now - there are still some parsnips and the last couple of carrots, plus a red cabbage from the Christmas 5p veg. Plenty of potatoes and shallots out in the shed too. Bargains like that are brilliant for stretching the budget - just be sure to keep the items in the right conditions and get them used before they pass their best. Food over Christmas costs most households a pretty penny so we absolutely have to make  sure we get the best use out of it.

Time to move forwards into the final week of the challenge, then! 

Robyn