Holiday Meal Planning

This holiday photo is from a few years ago and we are looking forward to taking some new ones soon ! However, we are going to Scandinavia and having looked up food prices I've decided to once again take most of our food with us. This has meant making a detailed meal plan and shopping list, meal planning and shopping carefully has been a bit of a theme this week !

MasterShoestring, who is now the tallest in the family, is coming with us so I've had to make sure that we have plenty of snacks along as well ! Over the past few years I've often made things like bread on holiday, but I decided that that is too much work this year as we won't be staying in one place for more than a few days. Deciding to use ready to bake rolls and bread did put the cost of the meal plan up a bit but including a few treats it works out at just over £25 a week for 3 of us, so I think that is pretty good !

Here's the plan:-

Breakfast - pancakes, eggs or weetabix with decaffeinated tea of coffee. I'm taking dried skimmed milk along so we don't have to try and cool liquid milk as we travel.

Lunch- cheese, crackers, tomatoes, buns, ham, salad, fresh fruit, crisps

Supper - pizza, quiche, hot dogs, rice, meatballs, gnocchi. pasta with tomato sauce

Snacks - individual apple pies, chocolate, biscuits and crisps

Now to pack it all in some sort of order so nothing gets squashed or broken (I've never travelled with eggs before) !

Frugal Friday

This has been quite an expensive week, what with a service for the car before we go on holiday and the purchasing of some specialist English teaching books the spending has gone into the hundreds ! However, all the spending has come from the savings account which is funded by all the frugal living, so it is alright to spend what you have saved for !

This week I found £10 in a country hedge, no-one else about and nowhere to take it to to see if someone had dropped it so I used it to buy 24 cans of sugar free, caffeine free Coca Cola so MrShoestring could have a little treat on his healthy eating plan.

I bought quite a few packets of yellow-stickered bread and MrShoestring and I ate mostly potato based dishes whilst MasterShoestring was in the USA, so grocery spending was very low.

We picked red currants, blackcurrants, garlic, potatoes, cucumber, garlic and blueberries from the garden and I made some more redcurrant jelly for later in the year.

O ordered travel money online and got a good exchange rate and did not have to pay commission, I haven't done this before but it was very straightforward and saved quite a bit in commission.

I hope you had a great frugal week too !

Careful Menu Planning

We have a very young student from Africa coming to visit for English tuition for 3 weeks in August. he has lots of allergy problems and so together with our allergy restrictions I have had to make a plan about what we're going to eat. I thought that it might give some of you a few ideas so I've included it below. Since he is very young, very far from home and going to be trying to communicate in a foreign language I have tried to include as many of his favourite foods as I can, the plan isn't as healthy as we might eat. However, it's not that expensive and has a decent amount of fruits and vegetables in it and will be all made from scratch !

Breakfasts - cereal, bacon, pancakes, waffles, muffins, fresh fruit, yoghurt, mushrooms, boat, apple and orange juice, hot chocolate

Lunches- Roast chicken, sandwiches, carrot sticks and houmous, pita bread and felafel, soup and bread

Dinners- Baked beans on toast, chicken curry and rice, pizza and salad, vegetable curry and chapattis, lentil bolognaise and pasta, burgers,bun and chips, hotdogs and all the fixings.

I've got all this written down in detail and have made a shopping plan so I'll always have what he can eat in the house.

Busy in the Garden still !

We are very proud of the first cucumber of the year ! Along with the first courgette, 48 bulbs of garlic, another pound of red currants and 2 more pounds of blackcurrants that means that the fridge is stuffed with fruit and vegetables.

I'm still trying to decide what to do with the currants. I think I'll make some more redcurrant jelly with the red ones but there aren't enough of the black ones to make cordial. I've still got more than half of a blackcurrant cheesecake in the freezer and we still have bags of frozen ones from last year. Not to mention several jars of blackcurrant jam. I'm thinking about maybe freezing them just now and waiting for some more to make cordial. Or even better idea might be to deforest those old ones and use both lots to make cordial !

Ah, inspiration strikes, I'm off to make cordial !

July Challenges

July is a holiday month and also report writing month so I've decided not to have any real challenges apart from making up a menu plan and taking enough food away with us to make sure we stick to the grocery budget and helping MrShoestring lose the rest of the weight he has put on. So far the guidelines from the "4 Pillars" book are working and he is losing weight, which is great. He also does not feel deprived and is eating plenty, so fingers crossed this is a permanent change ! It's not expensive either as the health eating plan is based around vegetables and we have plenty of those !

So far this month I have only spent £55 on groceries and that includes all sorts of pre-packed stuff for our holiday which I would not normally buy. This should give us some wriggle room when we travel to Scandanavia at the end of the month, just as well as the price of a lettuce is around £2.50 !

How about you, are you doing any challenges for July ? The Frugalwoods are hosting an Ultra-frugal month challenge if you want to pop over and see what that is all about !

Drying Garlic etc.

With the dry weather continuing and our well water beginning to get low we decided over the weekend to pull up crops which looked ready, so that we got something out of them before the sun just dried everything out.

As you can see, I think we have enough garlic to keep us going most of the year. We also dug up some volunteer potatoes, enough for two meals, picked a courgette, picked a whole bowl of summer berries and pulled out the lettuce which had bolted. We have other lettuce but it is small and won't survive without watering.

The cucumbers are on the verge of producing in the polytunnel and the apples and plums still have fruit which is growing, so fingers crossed that either we get rain or the well water does not give out. I think that if the sunny weather continues the peas will be ready to pick by next weekend !

Yellow Stickered Bargains

Last night we went off down to the local supermarket to see if there were any reduced items and sure enough there were !

I got 14 packets of bakery rolls for 17p each, cheaper than I can make them for and 2 packets of Hovis wholemeal bread for 26p, also cheaper than I can make it. I usually make my own bread but this has been placed safely into the freezer for taking away on holiday with us, to save work and save money !

Well worth the trip, I think they must have made more than they needed, thinking that lots of people would want buns for barbecues !