How Cheap Can I Eat?

I’ve just spent £12.39 on food in Sainsburys, in what I anticipate to be my last shop, pretty much. I’ve bought all the small things I need to make enough meals to last me for the rest of the month.

I bought 3 cheap chocolate bars (23p each from sainsburys) as I think another brownie cake is in order. I also bought more sugar, more chopped tomatos, pasta sauce, and more ingredients for a stir fry.

Oh I almost forgot, I bought a frozen ‘Basics’ cheesecake for 70p. 70p!!

I’m now at £70.78. £4.22 left.

Very little to report over the weekend. Yesterday was a busy day, so it was a cornflakes breakfast, peanut butter and jam sandwich for lunch (a forgotten favourite), and reheated sausage casserole for tea.

Sunday wasn’t much better, with another cornflake/PB&J  combo, but on the plus side these meals are entirely filling and cheap.

To my credit I did go shopping again for a couple of bits:

Big bag of oven chips for 41p! I was going to resist buying anything like this, as I do have potatoes in the cupboard so I could make my own, but for this price I could’t resist. The pizza there was £1.64, which I’ll eat in two halves, making it a cheap 82p per ‘meal’ that I’ll get out of that. Everything else is ingredients for a stir fry that I’ll make this week. I’ll get at least two portions out of that on consecutive days, so it’s all good.

Total spent today was £6.13 making the total spend so far £44.14. That gives me less than £31 left for the rest of the month and it’s only the 6th today. I’m not worried yet though, I have loads of ingredients in the cupboard and I envisage that I’ll just be buying the odd ingredient or two to complete recipes from now on.

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!