Saturday 21 October 2017

Food Planning, Budgeting, Shopping & Cooking – Part 5

I’ve fallen a little behind, it’s been busy and my head has been less than good, I suffer from depression and sometimes struggle with just ordinary daily tasks, so as much as I am enjoying putting pen to paper….or fingers to keyboard……I do sometimes struggle, so please forgive absences, I’ll try not to be away to long!

So onto our week…..this is the week of 9th October.

The shopping bill looked like this….

  



We also had to get some extra bits not available from Lidl and we chose to shop in Tesco, so here’s the bill for that…..




On Monday Little Lady had a friend over and we all made homemade pizza.  I don’t have any photos, but the excellent pizza dough recipe is from the ASK Italian cookbook.  We use our breadmaker and put the ingredients in it in the order suggested for bread...yeast, flour then sugar, oil, salt and finally the water.  Our dough setting takes 45 minutes, of course you can do this by hand, but we use the time to chop and grate all the toppings!




Tuesday we had Prawn Stir Fry, I marinated the prawns in some Indonesian soy sauce, Chinese five spice powder, fresh crushed garlic and sweet chilli dipping sauce.  The veg was ribbons of carrot, kale left from the meals we didn’t make last week, mushrooms, broccoli and baby sweetcorn, the sauce from the marinade was enough to flavour the whole thing and we had it with a selection of noodle ‘bits’ gathered from opened packets of half crushed blocks of noodle….sounds a bit yuk, but they were in date and once cooked….how do you know?!  (you can always use these noodle bits instead of pasta in a Minestrone soup)
  
The Curry was a couple of leftovers that we had frozen, so we had a prawn one and a vegetable one, we served it with brown rice, homemade naans also from the freezer and some Indian nibbles bought this week in Tesco.  I’ll try and remember to get hubby to shown me the prawn curry recipe and post that one for you as it is completely delicious.

Friday night we chose to have the Beachside Paella from earlier in the week….its a hairy biker recipe that husband adapts slightly, really delicious…there’s a link and here's a photo….




Along with husbands delve into homemade batter for his fish, we made our own wedges instead of chips and I made chicken nuggets for Little Lady from Jamie Olivers Family Classics Superfoods book where he batch prepares these tasty little gems…..click to follow the link to The Happy Foodie who shares this recipe.  Here's a photo......




Sunday was Beef, Beer & Butterbean Stew and Dumplings….I always look up beef stews on Pinterest...like this one....




......and try different ones each time, if they don’t have butter beans in then I add them, likewise with beer which I swap out of stock quantity….I just like testing different ones, but I always stick to the same dumpling recipe (which I will also post another time) and make little changes, this time it contained fresh parsley, you can use fresh or dried herbs….or how about making sweet dumplings for a dessert with custard…plain with a drizzle of golden syrup and custard is gorgeous….or how about finely grating chocolate and adding it with….mmmmm…..chocolate custard or ice cream….

Ok…getting carried away there!

So that was our weeks food and minus the toiletries, a gift and Halloween lollies for any lucky callers and adding in the trip to the butcher, our total food shop for the week was…£80.95.  A bit more than was hoped for but we did buy meat and seafood for 5 meals…what a difference that made!

But I mustn’t forget that we also froze leftovers and bulk made meals such as the chicken nuggets and beef stew and fed a visitor on Sunday….so not bad.

I must also confess that I spent £1.50 on a charitable donation when I helped myself to a bag of windfalls from a cottage on my way back from work Friday afternoon.  They have an honesty box for our local Hospice, so I feel it’s a good exchange, the charity gets some much needed support and passers by use up the surplus that the homeowners kindly put out.

From these apples I made apple spice cake, an apple crumble and 4 jars of apple puree (lovely on Greek yoghurt).

So that’s the round up for this weeks food adventure….I’ll be going straight into last weeks in a day or 2!

Chat soon...toodle-pip,
Nora xxx

No comments:

Post a Comment

Thanks for dropping by, please don't leave without commenting as it's nice to know you were here x