Penniless Princess – Shopping: Planning Ahead

**Penniless Princess** – Shopping for the weeks ahead

How do you shop? Where is your favourite place to shop? Let me know in the comments!

**Caution: if you’re a veggie, this post has pictures of meat in it. Sorry! Avert your gaze if you would rather not see!**

As you may have guessed, I’m all about that budgeting, not that bass! In previous incarnations, I did like me a little bit of spending: a Mulberry bag here, Kurt Geiger shoes there, and above all, never ever let me loose in Michael Kors! But now I’m trying to save to move out, so it’s all about being money-sensible.

What I usually do is on a Monday or Tuesday, have my little list ready, and either at lunch or at the end of the day, I go to Tesco and get what I want for that week. Sometimes if I have a voucher I’m quids in, so I might treat myself – I got prawns one week: ooooh!

This week, however, I decided to go into forward planning overdrive. I had a voucher for £4 off a £20 shop at Sainsbury’s. This might not sound like much to you, but every penny counts! I actually have four of these vouchers: we’re on week 3 of them. But I try not to spend £20 a week on food if possible – and especially not now I’ve had my mega shop!

How to make your money go further:

1. This is my mega shop:

 

 

 

 

 

I bought some beef for frying, pork loin steaks and turkey breast. Turkey is a wee bit cheaper than chicken and I quite like the taste!

None of this was on”special offer”: the beef was the basics range, and all in all it came to just over £10.

2. Get your baggies ready! I like these resealable ones which you can get from any supermarket. Just to prove it, here I use ones from Tesco and Morrisons.

3. Get some good sharp knives. The beef was quite hard to cut with my “good” knife, so I used our proper chef’s knife. I sliced everything up – without mixing!

4. Bag ’em up! Just like this:

PRO TIP! Don’t forget to label them. Name and date, if you please.

So out of those three cartons I got 9 x portions of beef, 2 x pork steaks, 3 x pork pieces, and 4 x turkey! That’s 18 meals there! All but one of the beef got whacked in the freezer; the beef I had as a stir fry for tea.

This should last me the whole of April! (Bear in mind I haven’t bought anything for Easter.) I am pretty chuffed with myself. I also have a few portions of meatballs I froze from earlier on – plenty to go off!

The idea is to now only buy what I need fresh that isn’t growing in my garden. I mean, a girl can live on kale, but she needs some variation!

I shall let you all know if this kept me going for all of April.

How do you try to make your shopping (or money in general) go further? Please let me know in the comments!

Katy

x

 

March 2015: Day 1 of the Minimalist Month

Good morning fellow bloggers! 

It’s a new month. Welcome to March!

March is of course Minimalist Month! This month I’m decluttering my life, making a really conscious effort to get rid of all the junk and unnecessary stuff I have in my life. That sounds more psychological and self-discovery-quest than it is meant to. I am undertaking a purge of material things, like:

• Clothes that no longer fit, or I no longer like, or haven’t worn for years;
• Shoes that are uncomfortable, or that I haven’t worn, or are too small;
• Books that I’ve read that can go to the second hand bookshop;
• Books that I bought for my PGCE/CELTA and no longer need (that can’t be used at work);
• DVDS, CDs and games I don’t play or watch or listen to;
• Old electronics, like personal CD players and broken iPods;
• Makeup that I’ve held onto because it was expensive or my favourite and I bought in first year of uni;
• Food! Which means clearing out the pantry and the freezer;
• And I might even be able to tackle the two containers full of all our old junk!

Today is Day One! I took it quite easy.

For breakfast I usually am a bit of a fussy eater. I’ll go all in with one thing, eat it for two weeks straight, then get bored of it and move onto something else. This is the case with muesli. I know some people call it rabbit food, but I can’t think of anything worse than munching on soggy papery cornflakes! Muesli is ram-packed full of sugar though, and they always seem to chuck massive whole Brazil nuts in and that’s always a surprise when you take a bite. We have so much muesli at home – in containers, boxes, and from a Graze breakfast subscription. I found a recipe in a Nigella book to make ‘breakfast bars’ – using muesli, raisins, whatever else I could find, and some condensed milk. This was when we discovered we had a very cheeky mouse that had eaten through various packs of mixed dried fruit and cous cous and what-have-you in the magic corner. I found some blueberries, thought mmm these might be nice, blueberries are meant to be good for you! So I whacked them in my mix and ruined a bunch of nice breakfast bars with a horrible acidic almost fermented blueberry taste.

The bars have lived in a box in the kitchen for a while now. I have eaten half of them (with Greek yogurt they’re about edible!) but I just couldn’t bring myself to eat the rest.

Day 1 of the Minimalist March Challenge! Granola/breakfast bars that nobody was eating.

 

So there you go – Day One of Minimalist Month: I threw out a culinary experiment that went awry!

Check back tomorrow to see what else I’ll have expunged from my life! And see how many more words I can think of to replace ‘declutter’, ‘get rid of’, ‘chuck out’…

Katy

x