It’s all about getting the biggest bang for your buck

How’re is your February going?  Are you coping with the bad weather, the never-ending Lockdown and the inevitable tightening of belts?  I’ve always found February to be a tougher month, financially, than January.  In January, you run out of cash early because you were paid before Christmas and end up in debt/overdue on payments; February is when those debts have to be paid back.   (You may remember me mentioning that tough February 30 years ago, when Dumbo left me with little more £20 to get through the month. It was the inspiration for several years of the “£50 February Challenge”.)

We  went to the Butchers’ yesterday, spending £55.70 from the Meat Fund.  Since our meat shopping is all about getting the biggest bang for our buck, I thought I’d share what we bought, what the plans are for it and how many portions we’ll get.  The butcher doesn’t do an itemised bill, so I’m only recording prices where I saw them and can remember them.  Remember, there’s only two of us in this household.

• 1 large roasting chicken - £7.99 - dinner tonight (we’ll eat the legs), chicken fajitas on Tuesday and chicken risotto on Wednesday.  That’s at least 10 portions, plus stock.  
• 1kg minced beef - at least 16 portions when padded out with veg, lentils/beans, etc
• 1 rolled, stuffed, boned breast of lamb 1.2kg - £13.60 - minimum of 4 portions of roast lamb.  The butcher cut it in half for us, so we have two roasts.
• 8 chicken breasts, average weight 200g each - between 16 to 32 portions, depending on whether I double up in a recipe.   I usually only use one in a stir fry or chicken pasta dish that serves 4.
• 8 large chicken thighs - 8 portions of chicken tray bake.  
• 4 pork chops - two will definitely be served as chops, while the other two may get chopped up to make pork-and-beans and a stir-fry.  Either 4 or 10 portions, depending on the outcome.

That’s between 54 and 80 portions of meat-based meals.  As I said, it’s all about getting the biggest bang for our meat-buck.

With the exception of tonight’s roasting chicken, I have just finished shoehorning it all into the freezer.  Everything has been “bagged and tagged”.  I had to do it in stages to maximise space/freeze things in shapes that will stack and fit together, especially since the freezer was pretty full already with lunchboxes, tubs of soup/cooked pulses/homemade ready meals and sauces, not to mention the haggis that threatens to leap out at you... The mince was divided into 4 and carefully stuffed into freezer box to form 4 rectangles.  The chicken breasts and chops were bagged separately and frozen to be as flat as possible.  The chicken thighs were bagged in fours, while the lamb was stood on its end, to freeze upright.  

As you can see, once again, I win at freezer Tetris.

- Pam

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SitRep2015: How did I do?

At the end of 2014, in this post, I set myself 15 goals for 2015.  Here is a quick summary of how I did.  (Challenge first then result):-

1. £50 February.  We nearly made it.  As detailed here, we spent £58.83.  I will definitely try this challenge again.
2. January is for finishing Projects/WIPS.  This is more difficult to measure because I didn't list the unfinished projects in the original post.  I think they included my Deco cardigan - still needs buttons - and the Woolly Nanette Tee - finished but the ends still need weaving in.   Let's just call this goal a fail and be done with it.
3. Lose 15lb in 2015.  As detailed here, I succeeded in losing 7lb almost permanently, but I reckon I lost at least 5 of those pounds on 3 separate occasions.  Partial win.
4. The 2015 Fitness Challenge.  Fail.  I'm still a slug.
5. The Feed Me Gardening Challenge.  Almost total fail.  Gardening got away from me this year.  The only thing I managed to grow were courgettes and they were from two plants donated by DH's boss.  Maybe next year will be better.
6. The 2015 Knit from Stash Challenge.  Almost a complete success.  I say almost because I had to buy two extra balls of 4-ply Blue Faced Leicester in order to complete my latest project, It Cannot Fail to Please from A Stitch In Time.  I was really good until October, when  I slipped at the Knit & Stitch Show and purchased two balls of Toft Alpaca Sock, 8 balls of Drops Alpaca and two balls of Jamieson's Soft Shetland.  Only the last has been knitted to date; I used it to make a hat for Dark for Christmas.
7. The Fashion on the Ration Challenge.  To be honest, while I know I blew this one out in July when I bought a load of lingerie, I stopped tracking before then and don't know how many points I really spent.
8. Learn French.  I have worked my way through 2 lessons of Duolingo every morning this year and, according to to the app, am now 7% fluent in French.  While I am far from being able to sustain a conversation, I know more French now than I did after four years of classes in high school.  I'll continue with Duolingo in the new year.
9. To Throw a Fabulous 50th Birthday Party.  Big win.  I had a great party.
10. To Read and Finish 15 Books in 2015.  Not quite a win.  I read 13 books, not 15.  Virtually every book I've read this year was on the Kindle app on my phone or iPad and a lot of them were free or cheap, thanks to joining the BookBub mailing list.  (I now have hundreds of books thanks to BookBub.)  Please, Amazon, update the app so that we can tag the books we've read and easily find them.   
11. To move into the back bedroom.  Fail.
12. The wardrobe challenge.  Fail.  I'm still waiting to make the big trip to IKEA to buy new wardrobes so that we can outfit the back bedroom and move.
13. To make something of my new job.  Success.  I'm not quite back to the same point as I was with the previous role, but I'm close.  I've made friends with two of the business's senior people and, as of tomorrow, I will have a team of project accountants reporting to me again.
14. To blog 26 times in 2015.  Fail.  Somehow, though, I remembered the target as 15 times not 26.  Once I post this, it'll be 15 times.
15. To write that book.  Fail.  Although I have started.  Twice.

So that's a quick review of my 2015.  How did you do with your 2015 resolutions/challenges?  Do tell!

Wishing you a fantastic 2016.

- Pam

£50 February redux

First things first, I haven't blogged in ages and you deserve an explanation why.  The main reason is that my old laptop is virtually moribund and I couldn't take it any more; purchased over the Christmas break in 2008, with Vista as its operating system, it took forever to open any file, forever to access any website (including Blogger) and it became impossible to sync my iPhone (my main camera).  Believe me, I tried.  For the last six months, I've mainly blogged on my phone or my secondhand iPad2 - that's what I took to Miami - but there are some things that can't be done on the Blogger app, that need access to the full functionality of the Blogger website (limited as that is).

Eventually, I bit the bullet and, last month, raided my Netbook Fund and purchased an 8GB, 11-inch MacBook Air.  It is lighter than the iPad and not much larger!  It has taken me a few weeks to get everything up and running, and to get used to the Mac quirks, but "Hello World!, I'm back!".

Anyway, back to the question at hand:  how did we do on the £50 February Challenge?  Well...  The bad news is that we didn't quite make it.  We spent £58.53, so broke the limit by £8.83.  The details of what we spent are in the photos below.

and the second sheet:

Hope you can read my hand writing.  In a moment of inattention, I binned the receipt from the Tesco shop on 14th February.  (DAMN!!!)  That was mainly to replenish things we'd already eaten, since the fridge wasn't empty on the first day.

I can hear you asking:  "so how did you really do?  Was it difficult or easy to stick to?  What did you eat?"  It took a bit more organisation than usual, since I don't usually menu plan more than a day ahead, but this time I had to figure out what we could eat that fitted into the budget without spending everything in the first fortnight.  Also, we ate out a couple of times, spent a weekend at my MIL's and had a takeaway for Valentine's Day (with associated leftovers for lunch), things which don't get counted in the challenge but affect the result. 

What did we eat?  I regret that I didn't keep a written meal log - next year I will - but I can tell from the list and by memory that we had the following meals:-

• White fish curry.
• Toad in the Hole - made with the chorizo purchased from Lidl.
• Pork stir fry - the biggest food bargain of the lot was scoring two tubs of "stir fry pork" on the condemned shelf for 22p each.  We ate one and froze the other.
• Spicy Lentil & Sausage Casserole.  The recipe is from Louisa's blog, here.
• Spaghetti bolognese - based on the recipe given here.
• Bacon and Cream Cheese Pasta, using half the bacon (recipe here).  
• Cuban Black Bean Stew using the other half of the bacon.  I'm still perfecting this recipe, but it's based on the Black Bean Stews the Lost American cooked for us in Miami.  
• Chole Paneer.  That's chick pea and paneer curry.  (Note to self - write up the recipe.)
• Smoked Mackerel, grilled and served with veggies.

Unless it included pasta, we ate rice with most meals (nothing new there).   also baked one loaf of bread, drank lots of squash, took leftovers for lunch to work most days (included in the budget) and packed a picnic of bagels, sliced pork (from the condemned food aisle), and salad.

We will definitely be doing this challenge again, next year, and I promise to be much more organised about it.

- Pam

£50 February Grocery Challenge

With February looming, I have been thinking a lot about my "£50 February" grocery challenge.  When I first discussed it with DH in December, he thought it'd be easy.  "We only spent that at Tesco last month," was his response.  While strictly true, however, shopping at Tesco is only one part of our grocery shopping:  we buy most of our veggies at the farm shop in Osterley Park; dried beans, rice and spices from Wing-Yip; coffee, salmon, cheddar, cans of chopped tomatoes and tuna from Costco; meat from the butcher during 4-6 monthly visits; and a few odd bits-n-pieces from Asda (mushrooms/cooking bacon) and Lidl (whatever is on offer).   

Here's the nub of the problem: we shop to restock the larder/freezer/fridge; we don't shop to fulfil a week's menu.  We buy in bulk and have a well stocked larder and freezer.  How do we account for that? Since most British households don't shop that way, how do you level the playing field?

After a lot of thought, I've come up with the following rules:-

1) Whatever is already in the fridge on 1st February is "free".  After all, very few people start a month with a completely empty fridge.

2) Ditto the spices, tea, coffee, sugar and hot chocolate already "in the jar" in the larder.  Top ups, however, do count.

3) I know the price of the meat, fish and cheese in the freezer - they will come off the tally as-and-when they are used.  

4) Leftovers in the freezer are free.  That means I don't have to work out how much a six-month old tub of Base or Sophie Dahl's Dhal costed when I made it months ago.  The same goes for the lunch boxes stored in the freezer.

5) How to account for the dried beans, lentils and chickpeas we use, has occupied some considerable thought.  We don't use everything all the time and I usually cook up dried pulses in batches, storing them in the freezer. I can't imagine going through more than 2kg dried weight of pulses in a month and, chances are, if I hadn't stocked up at Wing-Yip, we would buy a 2kg bag in rotation every month. We are almost out of Chana Dhal (split chickpeas) so a 2kg bag has been added to the shopping list and will represent the cost of all dried pulses used in February.

6) For rice, rather than buy some more (we have 12kg in stock), I will deduct the cost of 2kg of the cheapest rice from the tally.

7) Ditto flour but, in this case, it'll be the cost of either one or two of the standard sized bags of flour, depending on how large they are.  (We use a couple of kilos a month baking our own bread, etc.)

8) In the pre-Costco days, we'd buy 6-8 cans of tomatoes each month.  There are 7 in the cupboard right now, so I'll deduct the cost of 7 cans from the tally and limit us to 7 cans for the month.

9) What about other store cupboard items?  Based on nothing more than the assumption that few people won't have something in stock, I'll tag 3 cans of tuna and two of pilchards/salmon as "free", together with one jar of sauce (either pasta bake or potato bake).  Ditto a box of breakfast cereal and a tin of baked beans.

10) This is a grocery spend challenge, so it includes items such as cleaning products, washing powder, toiletries and tampons - anything that would normally be purchased at the supermarket.

Having set the rules, right now I'm contemplating how to spend the money.  £50 isn't a lot of money - it's £12.50 a week or £1.78 a day which is a scary figure when you consider that's groceries for two people.  The only way to make it work is to break it up into "shops":  £20 for the main supermarket shop; £10 for two trips to the farm shop for vegetables and eggs (£5 a trip); £15 for meat and/or fish from the freezer; £5 for a second, top up supermarket visit.

Will we starve? No.  Will we have a stand-up row in the middle of Tesco at some point?  Probably.  Will we get through February without breaking the £50 budget?  I really don't know.  Wish us luck.

- Pam

(is anyone else up for the challenge?)