Frugal Grocery February - Wrap Up

Today is officially the last day of summer in Australia and coincidentally happens to be the last day of the  Frugal Grocery February Challenge . I reckon we have some reckoning to do people.

In case you're new here , this is the deal, I decided not to buy meat for all of February after I was hit in the head by 476 kilos of dead cow, chicken and lamb falling out of my freezer in late January. Buying no meat morphed into not buying anything we didn't need because seriously folks I have so much food it's not funny. There - you're all caught up.  Continue reading.

My goal was to halve my grocery bill for the month - which means I had 300 bucks to spend. Gone are the halcyon days when I had a grocery budget of 1000.00 bucks a month . Of course there were 4 of us then. I have been aiming monthly for around the $600 .00 mark since Mr. P and I reclaimed our house after 20 years of servitude last November.

I mentioned last week  that I was going to have some shopping to do this week, since we are pretty much running out of some of the essentials of life, like gherkins. I made the tactical mistake this week of looking through the local store catalogue (which I have avoided every other week this month ) and spied so many special specials it felt like manna from heaven. I managed to blow my good intentions big time and spent $152.00. Lesson learned - avoid the catalogues. That $152.00 spend was more than I've spent in the previous three weeks combined.

In my own defence I haven't bought a piece of meat for about 4 weeks which for me is nothing short of miraculous. But when  Chicken boobies are on special as well as 2 kilo whole chooks, lamb chops and Porterhouse Steak my will is weak. It was a wonderful feeling to know I could legitimately stroll past the meat cabinet this week because for the last three weeks I've run past averting my eyes like a crack addict trying to avoid her street corner dealer.

In the end my grocery spend for the month was 303.75- a saving for the month of 296.25 , so I almost made my goal. Yes I could have done better - yes I could have held off to buy meat and crackers this week but that's sort of cheating isn't it? To deliberately hold off to make my stats more impressive?

It doesn't matter how much meat I think I'm using my freezer never seems to get any emptier. I think my freezer is like that never ending pack of Tim Tams from the TV ad.

I don't know why I stopped menu planning.  I kind of lost  it in November of last year and just never started again until I did the challenge. It really helped me stay on track. It also made me look in the freezer for inspiration rather than just buying the same old things week after week and ending up with 6 packets of peas in my freezer.

I learned to get creative with leftovers. A quarter chicken can be made into Laksa soup for two if you add a few other ingredients. Mr. P makes a mean chicken fried rice from almost nothing. And if we don't eat it and it's a leftover from  leftovers  it goes into dog food.

I still have two freezers full of meat. I still don't know what's in the freezer in the shed because I never needed to use anything but meat from the inside freezer. I'm sure that confirms I have a serious issue.

Mr. P has stopped laughing at my propensity to stockpile meat , toothpaste, plastic wrap, alfoil  toilet paper , washing powder, soap and canned goods. It kept him fed/clean and unsmelly for the month !

There is the small matter of me sending some fabulously Australian  food  to whoever saved the most percentage wise off their groceries for the month. If  you  played along and you'd like to pop your percentage saved in an email and send it to me , I'll announce the winner in my FTF post for this week.

I'm giving some consideration about whether I'll continue to torture myself for March or come up with another cruel and unusual punishment....