Last month I decided to get enough groceries to last a month without needing to purchase any extras. We did well, and even took pantry and freezer food with us when we went away for the few days. Friday is shopping day but I will do the shopping tomorrow night (Thursday). The past 3 days I've had to get a little more creative with putting together a well balanced dinner, but we made it without dipping into emergency supplies or running the pantry down too low.
It certainly helps that we get our weekly box of fruit and veges delivered (although did run out of potatoes in the last 3 days and the pumpkin we had wasn't a very good alternative as they were a bit watery so made things a little more challenging). We also ran out of "greens" from the vege box so I was rapt to get the opportunity to use some wild weeds from the garden (we'd depleted our silverbeet and spinach from the garden as well) so grabbed a large handful of chickweed and fresh herbs to throw in tonight's meal. We are still "grain free" so there was no rice, pasta or bread items to fall back on.
Monday's dinner was a lentil and tomato sauce served over roast veges (carrots, yams, parsnips)
Tuesday night's dinner was Borscht soup which used up some left over vegetables - beetroot, cabbage, onion, garlic, carrots followed with a pear and apple pudding.
Tonight's dinner was a mince sauce meal with left over lentil sauce stirred through and veges (chickweed, tomatoes from the freezer, onion, garlic) served over roasted parsnips, carrots and yams.
(The parsnips make me laugh as I recall an online friend buying *masses* of parsnips on clearance and took it as a challenge as a means of going frugal and making as many things as possible and something significantly parsnipy for dinner the whole week. Her kids had great fun coming up with "other" uses of the parsnips.)
The pantry still has a bit of surplus in some items that I bought, so I can see that the grocery bill will be less this month and will start to see some savings overall.
6 comments:
LOL - I remember the parsnip challenge! Well done, you. Soon you'll be running resilience-type classes a la Sharon Astyk;-) (Seriously.)
LOL!
Well done that is so awesome. I am managing fortnightly atm - I do want to go monthly just not quite organise enough at the moment - you will be a great inspiration! By the way, I've finally started blogging again!
That's amazing Nikki - wow. trying to think if we could possibly do that ... Also, how much money do you reckon it saved - in terms of petrol, food, and extras ...?
Johanna, petrol savings would be minimal since it's only a 5min drive away and I would often time it with doing other errands etc. The first month I spent the same as the budgeted amount over 4wks (but I did buy extra things as I wasn't sure if we'd need them or not), however, this month I spent $160 less. I did make sure I still bought items that I had plenty of from the month before and bought extras of a few things on special so next month I wouldn't need to buy them. I guess it will be the next month's shop that will tell whether there are overall savings to see that I accounted for things correctly (ie not going through all supplies this month and therefore taking the hit next month and having to stock up again). I think it is one of those things that I will need to reflect back on after 6mths to see the overall savings.
I am inspired! I've never been able to pull this off. We do have a small garden and local farms.
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