Food shopping and meal planning...

Today we braved the cold weather and did our fortnightly shop. Our main shop comes from the supermarket and I supplement it with purchases from approved food. We don't pop into our local mini-supermarket like a lot of people do daily, because you just end up buying things you don't need, there's too much temptation.

We have cut our grocery bill by quite a lot recently, but there's still loads of room for improvement! Meal planning is really important to save money and reduce waste, but I didn't have time :(  We have been looking after Daisy-May all weekend and she came with us, so I just tried to plan meals as I shopped - I wouldn't recommend it!!!

We bought:

 2 big packs of stewing steak which will go in the slow cooker with dumplings.

2 big packs of chicken drumsticks which will be roasted and eaten as bbq chicken with rice and probably cooked in the slow cooker as chicken casserole.

Sausages will be - bangers, mash, peas and onion gravy and sausage casserole.

Sausage meat that will be giant sausage rolls with beans.

Belly pork strips which I will turn into a mini-roast.

Bacon bits which I will use to make a quiche and other frugal bacon recipes (undecided yet).

A gammon joint which I will bake with mustard and honey.

I bought loads of veg etc, so I could make cauliflower cheese, vegetable lasagne etc. I can be quite flexible over the next 2 weeks because I already have a full freezer. The only thing we buy ready made is breaded pollock. This is handy when I need to do a quick tea. I am in the process of trying to fill the freezer with homemade ready meals when I batch cook, but my freezer is already full! I am making changes that I can stick to and sometimes it's a slow process. I'm learning which foods freeze well and still taste nice reheated. My family think that fruit cake freezes really well.

With all this cold weather, I think that stew and dumplings and treacle sponge with custard is necessary this week.

Sorry that my blog is lacking in photos, but I cannot upload from my laptop and I don't know what else to do.

Thanks for reading,

Mandy x