January has bought a new year and new challenges, one of those is getting my food spending properly under control. It doesn't help that I like eating what I fancy rather than what I have so seem to accumulate a lot of food I don't always need. For starters I am setting myself an £80 food budget for January, £20 a week, £2.50 a day.
This means three things- planning, no waste, and portion control!
Now while I managed to finish all the meat products, I did have left over a collection of spices, about half a jar or mayo, a third of a block of cheddar, 1 loaf of flax bread in the freezer, some fat bombs and a half a dozen eggs. As well as other misc baking ingredients and stock cubes which may or may not get used this month depending on the time I have to bake.
First step: planning and buying
I knew wanted to finally make jerky in my dehydrator which meant a portion was needed for sauces for the marinate. The bits I had leftover meant cheese/butter/mayo in weren't urgent purchases. I don't eat breakfast normally which makes it easier but keeping under £20 still a struggle.
Once upon a time when I had more freezer and cupboard space I used to do larger food shops from Sainsburys online, now I just go to the actual supermarket, but for this month only with a list and knowing exactly how much it would cost me.
Totalling everything up on the Sainsburys website for £21.51 I was planning on getting:
- Mince and veggies (6 meals),
- Bacon and veggies (6 meals or maybe more depending)
- Smoked salmon and cream cheese (1 meal),
- Bacon and pancakes (3 meals),
- Chicken Jerky snacks (3 maybe).
- 2 chicken breasts left over for meals probably with bacon! (2 meals)
Which gives me 18 meals minimum depending on how much bacon I use for dinner, which is two more than the 14 I needed.
Second Step: Go shopping
This is a lovely picture of my hoard, I got everything on my list plus bought food containers from local shop as all mine have broken. Total spend £19.95 because I had 2 money off coupons.
I picked up some paneer that was on offer and not on my list originally, but I really want to try and make some sort of saag paneer with the excess spinach, and potentially the stalks of the broccoli and cauliflower.
Third Step: portioning of vegetables
The first thing I did was portion the vegetables, I use the stalks quite a lot in cooking as they are easy to throw into a mixed pot dinner. Into three separate containers I cut the broccoli florets, cauliflower florets and the chopped up the stalks from both. The stalks I keep in water to prevent them from going brown but the florets are fine in an airtight container.
Spinach I weighed and portioned into bags in the freezer just so I don't have to think about weighing them when I use them.
This gave me:
260g Cauliflower florets ( 5 50g portions at 15p each)
220g broccoli (4 50g portions at 15p each)
1000g spinach (10 100g portions at 15p each)
225g ends ( 4 60g portions at 20p each)
Fourth step: the meat!
I've set aside the middle bacon for cream cheese pancakes and the weekend, cooking bacon for dinner and the mince for lunch because I'm better at cooking mince in advance and not eating it than I am bacon.
Stupidly bought mince that went out of date on the same day two days after I had bought it so had to portion and freeze two of the packets.
3 packets of mince gives 6 200g portions at 73p each.
I erred on the side of too much with the cooking bacon, you can't have too much bacon really but I wasn't sure how much I would need for dinner so will keep you posted on that one. I suspect I can do three meals from one packet of cooking bacon since they are 670g each.
3 packets of cooking bacon 9 portions of 220g cooking bacon at 36p each.
So the other things I bought:
Frozen Chicken fillets: 4 breast 50p each
Cream Cheese: 5 portions at 26p each
Middle bacon: 4 portions at 50p each
Paneer Cheese: No clue how much I'll use but probably 5 portions at 33p each.
Looking at that break down it looks like I should be able to keep to the budget easily.
