Frugal Grocery February - Week 3

I don't mind confessing I slipped ever so slightly last week. By Friday night, after a 10 hour day at work I'd pretty much had an ever loving gutful of everything and we got takeaway for tea. Even as I was doing it -I was cringing because  I could have made that meal for free from the contents of my own freezer/pantry  and saved myself $27.00, but I was just soooooo tired. And I haven't bought takeaway in forever. And it tasted fabulous.

Another confession: Thursday I made Mr. P go to the shops before he went to boys night and buy me a bag of salt and vinegar chips because I hadn't had a chip in over a week.  I thought about making my own but it was all too hard. I think making your own potato chips is something you do when you're feeling resilient and have about two hours to waste. Or when you don't have a car and the nearest shop is 50 kilometres away. And for when you may have undergone a total lobotomy and think making your own chips is the coolest idea ever. For $1.90 Samboy did it for me. It was worth the money.

Saturday when I finally hit the shops in desperation (we'd almost run out of plain flour and I'd planned to make my own bread this week and had run out of white sugar because Mr. P has a really bad habit of using stuff and not putting it on my shopping list and I had already used caster sugar for something else because I was being frugal and not running to the shops-and I think I just won the award for the longest run on sentence EVER   ) I almost bought a pack of lamb chops but sanity prevailed I put them back. That would be because I'd already checked the outside freezer BST (before shopping trip ) and found three packs lurking in the bottom. I did have to stock up on fruit because we had pretty much nothing and I have at least three of the symptoms of scurvy. The price of fruit and vegies was horrendous so I gave serious thought to growing my own vegetables and then thought about all the time that would take me away from blogging and quilting and discarded the idea. I spent $35.80 on fruit and vegies.

Since we needed dog food and I only buy it every 6-8 weeks I dumped that in the trolley first because 100 pounds of dried dog and  cat food take up a shitload of trolley room and it didn't leave much room for anything else. Smart huh? Next time I might borrow some unruly children because that will motivate me to get in and out in less than 5 minutes. I'm giving you these two tips for free.

I ended up spending 89.55 this week (dog /cat food not included ) I want to show you where $9.00 of that went. See the almost invisible tube of toothpaste at the bottom ? That's mine. I got two tubes. You will notice it is less than half the size of a regular toothpaste tube and yet costs twice as much. That is because Colgate is colluding with my dental hygienist to keep me poverty stricken. I know denistry has come a long way in recent years but is this really necessary? Apparently it is.

In the spirit of using what I've got, I made Monte Carlo Biscuits on the weekend and whacked some Mocha icing in there that I found in the depths of the freezer. We all know I don't have a natural affinity with baking which has yet again been proven by the fact that these are the size of tennis balls.  Mr. P has since started publicly callling them monster biscuits.  It is worth noting however that he has managed to eat several of them on the sly despite his rudeness.  I hope they go straight to his arse.

And I baked bread and a couple of rolls for lunch. This is not the best bread I've ever made but it's edible. My loaves did  not rise as much as I would like them to so we'll call this damper shall we?

I tried to get creative this week with the menu plan to use up all the little packets of chicken, lamb  and beef that were formerly roasts in a previous eating  that I have stashed all over my freezer. Tonight we lashed out and had barbecue steak with peppercorn sauce , tomorrow is chicken fried rice, Wednesday is Rendang , Thursday is Thai Chicken  soup with noodles, and Friday is a suspect spaghetti sauce that I may have made as far back as early 2010. If we survive until Saturday I'll make beef pies and Sunday I'll do a roast of some sort.

So with this weeks spend my grocery total stands at $118.50 which is a saving so far of $181.50 for the month. I'm going to try not to shop at all this week. If we need milk I'll try to find a  cow somewhere which is harder than you may imagine since we live in the city and there aren't many people that keep cows tethered in the backyard....

So how are the rest of you doing?



P.S.  Just off to see if YouTube has a cow milking tutorial.  My parents had beef cows on the farm.