It begins
Midday: I am about to go for my first shop. I’ve made a list of basic ingredients with no particular meal in mind. Once I get all the food back here I’ll mull over all the suggestions I’ve had so far and then to cook something worthy. I’ve had a very cheap day so far by eating the weetabix I had left over in the cupboard. After I’ve been to the shop to check prices I’ll estimate a cost for that meal later. I suspect I’m going to have to spend more than my £18 weekly budget initially to stock up on those essentials that will hopefully last longer than a week.
I’m hungry.
6pm: I’m back, and I have food. My first shop cost a total of £33.66 and on that basis I should have enough food for nearly two weeks. Here is my receipt:
And this is what I got for my money:
To briefly summarise, there’s potatoes, bread, milk, eggs, margarine, cheese, bacon, sausages, chicken, turkey mince, plain flour, self raising flour, frozen peas, frozen peppers, cornflakes, museli, and a few tinned things. A crackingly good variety of stuff for £30.
A lot of the basics stuff is really stupidly cheap. 20p for baked beans, and 19p for a tin of basics rice pudding (Ambrosia alternative was 79p). Basics flour for 36p (branded alternative was £1.08) and I defy it to be three times nicer. You can see a lot of ‘Sainsburys Basics’ stuff here, and I’ll have to report back on whether cheap means nasty or cheap means delicious bargain.
The cheapest bread was 37p, but I couldn’t bring myself to buy it. I put it in the trolly for a while but then swapped it for some bakery bread for £1.09. It has to be worth the extra.
On the whole I’m pretty pleased with my haul and providing I cook everything in advance and freeze some portions, I reckon I’ll have more than enough to last me a couple of weeks. Today has been a bit of a rush so I’ve only had two meals, the weetabix breakfast (4 weetabix + milk, Cost: £0.48 I reckon), and then this for tea:
Some egg noodles (from cupboard) with peas and some chilli sauce, probably about £0.50 worth. Pretty good start to the mission so far.
Still a bit hungry, so I might eat an apple (21p) as a snack. It occurs to me that I haven’t really bought any other snack foods so I’ll have to do something about that or I might spend the whole month being annoyingly hungry. Onwards to tomorrow!
July 1st, 2008 at 12:47 pm
I don’t think you will be starving. As others have noted, rice, pasta, potatoes, etc are cheap and filling. Your challenge is not about avoiding hunger — it’s about avoiding boredom at what you are eating.
Oh, and not to lose all your teeth to scurvy, too.
July 1st, 2008 at 1:41 pm
Don’t forget rule 1:
“I’m allowed to eat anything I’ve currently got in my cupboards as part of my meals without it being included in my monetary total.”
So are you counting up the value of the weetabix just for completeness or to include in your weekly allowance?
Good luck!
July 1st, 2008 at 6:02 pm
DO eat: carbohydrates [potatoes, pasta, rice, basically anything beige], vegetables, pulses [beans and peas], and cook things from scratch. If it comes pre-prepared, you’re paying someone else to do your monkey-work.
DON’T eat: any meat that comes pre-cooked and costs less than £1 [IKEA hotdogs = no], anything that claims to be a ‘healthy alternative’ to anything else [remember, healthy is for the wealthy].
Great soup:
Ingredients - 2 or 3 bacon rashers, 3 decent-sized potatoes, 1 7-oz tin sweetcorn [or 2 handfuls thawed frozen sweetcorn], 1 pint milk, 1 oz. butter, salt, pepper, cheese.
Method - peel + dice potatoes. cut bacon rashers into small strips. melt butter in a saucepan, add bacon and frizzle for 2 minutes. Add potato, stir for 2 minutes. Pour in milk, simmer over low heat until potatoes are tender. Add sweetcorn. Season with salt and pepper, leave to simmer for a few minutes longer. Put cheese in bowl before serving, if budget will stretch for it.
Should serve 3 people, but since you’re starving and will soon be reduced to eating 2 meals a day [a splurging snack-fest mid-morning and a heavy-duty meal at about 6pm], this should do you for a meal.
Good luck!
July 1st, 2008 at 7:55 pm
To save on the milk, why not put some in a sealed bottle and freeze it until you need it? That way you don’t risk only using some of the milk and the rest going off, wasting money (but I suppose you’ve thought of that already).
Sounds like a decent buy
July 1st, 2008 at 8:35 pm
Or the Aspartame in the Robinsons drinks will give you cancer before it runs out.
Also frozen/thawed milk is hideously nasty.
July 2nd, 2008 at 7:25 pm
UHT milk will last a lot longer, but a lot of people don’t like the taste.
Same goes for powdered milk, providing you don’t get weevils in it.