Our simple, homely menus will be back with a Menu & Shopping List for Week 4 around 5.00 pm on Wednesday ready for your shopping and cooking creations next week.
This ‘pause’ will give you time to revisit your favourite recipes of the past three weeks. In Recipe 18 I laid out a method on how to make up your own menu and shopping list for this week. Once the shopping is done you are ready to begin.
It would be wise to check your stock cupboard and you may wish to add items into that, eg flour. You have probably used at least the plain one, on pizzas, pancakes etc. I’ve not been putting it on the shopping list as knowing you had a whole bag from the first recipe, but I’ve not been taking into account on regular useage how much you will have used by now. Some consumables will need weekly replacing especially breakfast and lunch items eg bread, and obviously these need adding every week to your shopping list. However the cost has been calculated into the overall budget each week. Hopefully you have been able to store a few things in the freezer , eg bacon pack and at least two meals to be used at a later date. Don’t forget to label those items, for in a month or so when you want them again, you may not remember which container they are in.
If you have comments, suggestions, ideas and even recipes you would like to add to these all would be welcome. Email at foodforthought@emanuel-publishing.com. It would be good to hear if you have discovered typing errors, wrong calculations or even recipe errors (and I hope not, but forgive me if this has spoilt your meal) so I can correct them
From the recipes you will have realised I am not a professional cook or photographer! My heart is to just share my recipe collection from childhood onwards, and when just after the war, life was frugal, and the mentality of families was ‘waste not, want not’ and thus my always finding a way to use anything leftover.
This week I shall not be idle for it seems sensible to collate the parts of recipes that appear regularly, eg ‘Salad Suggestions’ and ‘Potato Proposals’. I will put these under What’s on the menu? so I don’t have to keep repeating the recipes, and are easily accessible when needed.
Now halfway this series, this experiment and belief I was only spending £3.00 a day on meals, I have been surprised to discover in sharing my recipes here, that we in fact eat for around £2.00 a day – far cheaper than expected. Here are my calculations (my basic arithmetic skills are also open to error!)
Stock (SC) = £20.51
Week 1 = £25.68
Week 2 = £21.58
Week 3 = £30.69
TOTAL = £98.46
Average weekly spend: £32.82
Average evening meal: £ 4.69
Cost per person per day: £ 1.17
With breakfast & lunch: £ 2.17
It will be interesting to see how the following three weeks pan out. I hope you are finding the shopping list useful, the menus stretching your meal creativity and the recipes easy. Along with which you can see that looking after the ‘pennys will save you pounds’ (another saying learnt in my childhood) and has certainly worked in my life.
Have fun, stay healthy! You may not become wealthy, but you will become wise!!
Ruth Johnson
March 2021