Nearly November; Friendly Frugaleers Navigating (K)nitting, Nattering and Nuturing our Pennies

[WereWolfcub]

New thread. Happy end of October/Early November frugaleering. All welcome we are a friendly bunch

Lol at chick peas and bin bag hoard! I think on Tesco you can make lists and then add the whole list to the basket, but you’d get a chance to edit it before checkout. Hopefully?!

Cag I think they got rid of the list feature? Personally I think the big for are so much more expensive than Aldi and Lidl. Combined with the offer incentives and amount of choice I could easily spend double at Tesco than Aldi. If I'm trying really hard I could probably get it down to £70 instead of the £50-£60 I spend in Aldi each week but for me I can't afford it. If I could I would definitely get a delivery as it's so much easier 😊

Sunny day today which is nice. Really quiet in the shop though so have been doing some cleaning.

Warm I would keep online shopping but use my supermarket to choose the cheapest one. Last time I compared a basket Tesco was the cheapest.

Those delivery passes trap you into using them exclusively.

I don’t shop how my mum did. I buy all my meat except beef mince at Waitrose. They send me regular vouchers or it wouldn’t be affordable, plus the pizza dh likes and any good offers. Everything else is bought in bulk in Aldi/Lidl/homebargains etc. You could do a bulk shop online in Tesco for grocery stuff if it’s cheaper because they stock their smartprice range online which I’ve noticed Morrison’s don’t which is a bit naughty of them. Sainsbury’s basic range is online too, delivery is free over £60 and you can link your nectar card to pay in points. Their first shop offer is usually £18 off but there will be a minimum spend. Sometimes you can get cash back too.

I had a reorganisation in my kitchen and I can get more food in now, rather than keep hold of things I’ll never use like Buffett servers.

I buy the £1.50 veg box in Lidl when I’m passing and freeze everything, and I mean everything. I freeze salad tomatoes for sauces.

£18 two prescription charges for my skin, the gp was really nice and says she'll ref to dermatology if I don’t improve.

£4.80 4 tins tuna, I think Tesco smart price is cheaper but I was nowhere near Tesco and contact lens all in one fluid. Boots charge £8 for there’s 🤔
£8.75 sains. Two lambs livers, organic tomato puree (chosen for allergies not out of wanky pretensions it would be smartprice normally) big bag of chips, instant oat cereal, bacon medallions for dh.
£13 Aldi, cat food, dw tabs, bleach, fabric softener, a beer for me, smart price frozen peas.

Em Perfect time to be off sick. I swerved a housemove once by working. You can’t just cancel a clinic with 18 patients booked in —actually you can—

I forgot to say, my Brabantia bin takes Wilko smartprice bin liners.

Look. This is MY garden. Eeeeee!

Good morning all.
Have been up playing board games and jenga this morning, which has been really lovely.

em good to hear DSs nursery does it too. A lot of our parents tell us that their previous nursery didn't.

warm 10 years! Wow!

We will be going out soon to get the ingredients for the quinoa curry, I'm making it for my mum.
Have a great Wednesday everyone

Amazing em!! My sister has just got her first garden. You'll be able to get ds a lovely water table in the summer we had a little tikes ones which the dc loved.

Warm I usually go through my DS's menu and try and get as many meals he can eat with us.

So he loves fish pie, spaghetti bolognese, omelettes, soup, pasta bakes, curry and any roast. Quite a good selection really

At the beginning of he month I had these set evening meals:

Spaghetti Bolognese (lasts 2-3 days)

Omelettes

Chicken & veg

Gluten free fajitas (it's about £5 for an Old El Paso kit but really tasty. Just whack in some frozen peppers, frozen onion and frozen chicken)

Fish Pie (lasts 2-3 days)

Salmon & veg (all from frozen)

Burgers & fries (all homemade - mince , egg, garlic and GF flour for burgers (lasts 2 days as you can get about 9 burgers out of 750g)

Soup & rolls - all frozen. Onion, butternut squash and sweet potato + stock (lasts for about 3-4 days)

Pasta bake, chicken & veg (lasts for about 2 days)

Roast chicken (cook in a bag was £4 from Tesco and it fed all of us - GPs, OH, DS and me) with all the veg of course

Curry - frozen chicken, cauliflower rice (highly recommend this if you're trying to be healthy plus Tesco pit then in frozen individual portion bags. Perfect) and any cheapy sauce. They're all the same really.

I also plan breakfast for us all, snacks for OH and me, and lunches. Toast, porridge (love overnight oats) or scrambled eggs and a couple slices of bacon.

I have a salad every lunch when I can. The salad veg is proper cheap and it's very healthy. I usually make egg mayo or have half of one of those sandwich filler pots.

This was the first month I did the online shop. I hate going into the shop. It's stressful. People are slow or rude 😂😂 then DS wants to grab everything in sight. And we always ALWAYS put in stuff we don't need but quite like the look of. Costs a bomb!

We have had to top up a bit this month. It's a trial and error thing. But that shop I did has lasted us the month pretty much and included toiletries, some cleaning stuff and baby food jars (lots of them - we usually have one a day but DS is starting to go off them so will have to rethink that soon 😂).

Online shop was £220. For a month. For 2 adults and 1 baby.

It will be more next month as it will include nappies and wipes to last us the month but... Hey ho.

If anyone is looking to meal plan, can I recommend princessdiaries?

She does food diary trackers for SW but also just for calorie counting. But more importantly, she does these pretty menu planners. You can get them in pink or blue. You can also get them in a fridge magnet version so you just whack it on the fridge and everyone knows what's on for tea 😄

It's fantastic. I found it so helpful. Plus new stationery 😍😍😍

I am also working my way towards being super anally retentive organised and making a spreadsheet with all possible menu items and the ingredients needed for each meal so I can print them out and possibly laminate them. It would save me so much time. I don't have to wrack my exhausted brain then 😂

Unfortunately, my DS is hellbent on causing carnage on a half-hourly basis so getting my laptop out for half an hour or so is not an option 😞 but we'll get there!!

My car needs oil. I went onto Euro car parts and it was on offer from £15 to £11. They were advertising a code but didn't say how much off it gave. Anyway I used it and it went down to £7.40! Reserved it so dh can collect it later (and pay for it 🤣).

Plink you’ve done brilliantly there. Have you tried buying gluten free tortilla & making the fajita spices?. I do fajita spice mix and it is literally chilli, sugar, salt, paprika and cayenne. If you buy the big bags of spices in Sainsbury’s/Asda/Morrison’s it costs about 10p for the spice mix.

If you spent £3 on tortilla a week and 10p on spices it would save you £72 a year.

Em Lovely garden. Put some salt on those weeds in the patio, it will kill them off without harming bees.

A pigeon flew into the house and died on my lawn. Offered it to the cat but he wasn’t interested.

Ooh em lovely garden.

That's a brilliant idea Fluffy

I will give that a go definitely. The more homemade the better in this house 😄 just fotntonfind some gluten free tortillas now 😂😂

A pigeon?! What on earth? 😂😂 must have made quite a bang!

Em your garden is lovely 😍😍😍😍 little sanctuary right there 😃

Frugal win. No bread for tea so I have used my lunch break to make soda bread with the buttermilk left over from ds’s cake. This will successfully feed us hut annoyingly I’ve run out of milk so will need to nip to the shop tonight anyway.
Warm I use Ocado, I think it’s cheaper than Tesco and Sainsbury’s and it saves me an hour a week plus petrol and a sore back! Win win

Tesco do them. You can make them if you like cooking. I like to buy ingredients rather than ready made. Curry sauce will be cheap to make as well.

I was out, came home to a dead bird. Surprisingly heavy.

Oooh super! Haha okay... now I've got to have a look and see about curry sauces. I've never made one from scratch so I'm intrigued 😄😄 DS only gets Korma obvs. I dread to think what would happen if I gave him anything spicier 😂

Yeah you'd think they'd be quite light really 🤔

Oh WereWolf I'd love to make my own bread. There's something so comforting about baking your own bread 😂😂 bet it smells lovely in your house!

Meant to say earlier Cag I had a bed rail that I put on my bed when my ds slept in with me as they were both very restless sleepers - maybe something like that would help.

I managed a heroic cooking extravaganza this morning and convinced the satnav to take us to the music course that ds and I are booked into. We arrived 3 minutes early, only to discover that it is tomorrow.

So we had a day in town and we will start again tomorrow from scratch.

Ooo! I just checked the email and it turns out the course was definitely meant to be today, so I'm not an idiot after all. Yay!

We went car shopping for a car bigger than a Ford Focus. So we bought a three year old Ford Focus 🤦‍♀️ The newer ones are bigger than our 19 year old one so not quite as daft as it sounds. It also works out very economical for mainly commuting DPs 20 minute journey and £20 a year tax.

Now we need to do numerous trips to the dump clearing out our garage this week before we get the new car.

Lovely garden em, perfect size too

Plink Lots of sauces are really cheap to make and you can freeze them. It’s having the time to make them.

love 😂 you can’t beat fords. I love them.

Haha exactly Fluffy don't think I'm going to be doing it anytime soon. Need eyes in the back of my head at the moment! 😂😂

Aw thanks guys for the garden love. It’s a bit scrappy at present but it’s mine and I don’t care.

Will follow fluffy’s tip re weeds. Do you just heap salt on them? Just dry salt?

I want to have a wildflower patch and a veggie patch (but might do veggies out the front - we have a front garden too. Next to the garage. I also have a garage.

Have unpacked most of the kitchen. All furniture is in the right room and I’ve done one trip to the tip. Cardboard and bubble wrap mostly.

Am back at dparents now. I’ve left dh there as fil came over with a chainsaw ready to take down a tree in the front. I can’t be doing with the noise or the mess.

Within walking distance (10-15 minutes) we have:

Big coop
M&S food
A small boots store and pharmacy
Two pubs
A bookeys
Shoe shop
Travel agent
School - ds’ name is down I did that today
Church
Parish hall
Community centre and youth club
Indoor market (which was open today - and the first Saturday of the month they have a model train exhibition...)

Oooh and a farm shop and tea room.