Happy 2019 to you! Pictured above is the ancient fire festival of The Burning of the Clavie that takes place on the old new year, 11th January, at Burghead in Scotland. May this year bring all that you want it to bring.
And if that’s saving a bit of money? One of the fastest ways to cut back on spending is taking control of your food budget.
Daily deals site Wowcher has been added to The Sales page; it has some particularly good offers on holidays and hotels just now.
For foody bargains check out Approved Food. We’ve been using them for years and have saved hundreds.
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One of the cheapest ways to pare your food budget right back is to find out what time your local supermarket marks down its perishable products and do your shopping then. This makes possible what we call the 25p meal: feeding a family of four for £1, or under, all ingredients.
For example:
Cauliflower (25p) in a white sauce (milk/marg/flour/water totalling 20p), and 30p worth of leftover rice made into herby tomato rice by adding: 1 onion (7p, not marked down but really cheap in Lidl) a squirt of tomato puree (5p), dried herbs (5p) salt (2p).
Above was a nice meal based around getting an organic unsliced wholemeal loaf for 10p, and adding marg and garlic to make it into garlic bread. Cheap spaghetti (often around 20p for 500g in value ranges) mixed with a tin of kidney beans at 25p and marked down pepper and courgette, both 10p each. Salad was a 10p lettuce with a squirt of lemon juice. There was a LOT of garlic bread made with that one loaf!
A firm favourite now, actually considered a treat in this house, is the meal of pizza bagels, or pittas, or, as pictured below, pizza paninis. Made with 4 Paninis at 19p for 2, then with pizza sauce consisting of an onion fried in a tiny bit of oil, tomato puree, herbs and salt, totalling no more than 10p. They only need a few minutes in the oven or under the grill as the bread bases are already cooked. We paired them with a reduced salad bag at 10p, reduced hummus at 32p and a tub of pasta salad marked down to 26p. Over budget by 6p! If we’d used cheaper bread, such as one pack of bagels reduced to 20p, we would have been under.
It would be cheaper to use the pizzas as a side to homemade soup (see our many soup recipes). Of course, you can add any topping you like to these, but the sauce is delicious in itself.
This next one pushes the budget again, though only by 10p, for a luxury breakfast! It’s porridge (20p worth value range oats) made with water, but with a huge box of blueberries (marked down to 75p) and half a bar of Lidl dark chocolate (bar is 30p, so 15p), smashed up. Yum.
Our local Tesco usually does a big mark down around 6pm. The one in the next town is a little later at 6.45pm and its prices go right down to 2p for many items. Asda starts much earlier in the day with its reductions. Martin Lewis wrote an article on the different supermarkets and their reduction times here.
Unless we’re going to use them that day, we tend to avoid ready chopped things which go off quickly. Whole vegetables and fruit will keep for a few days and bread will be good for a couple of days or can go straight in the freezer. Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve filled our freezer with 10p loaves and buns!
It can be fun to use your imagination and ingenuity to make best use of what’s available on any given day in the reduced section. Please feel free to share your ideas and successes in the comments below 🙂
Ailish Sinclair‘s debut novel, THE MERMAID AND THE BEAR, set in a fictional castle in Aberdeenshire, and featuring the 1597 Aberdeen witchcraft panic, is out Autumn 2019. On Amazon and Waterstones or see Author website for more details.
We hope 2018 is progressing well for you; we’ve been beset with ice and snow again but it’s thawing now.
New to the finance page is MoneySuperMarket.com where you can compare home and car insurance prices with the help of Skeletor and He Man (or is it HeMan? Or He-Man?)!
Simple to make, lovely to eat. Particularly frugal for us as we found these wraps reduced to 10p on Christmas Eve (freezer has quite a pile of them now) and the peanut butter at 4 jars for £1 at Approved Food, and it’s the nicest peanut butter we’ve tasted!
Ingredients for four people:
4 wraps or tortillas of your choice
a tablespoon of vegetable oil
3 or 4 small sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into thin sticks
1 onion, very thinly sliced
1 teaspoon each: dried coriander, ground cumin, dried fenugreek. Or you could just use some curry powder.
1 tablespoon desiccated coconut
1 tablespoon peanut butter
salt to taste
Heat the oil in a pan and fry up the onion and sweet potatoes for a few minutes before adding the spices and mixing well. Add the coconut, peanut butter and salt along with a small amount of water (a few tablespoons), cover and simmer, stirring occasionally, until the potatoes are soft. It should only take a few minutes: sweet potatoes cook much faster than white ones.
Lay out your wraps and divide the sweet potato mixture between them. We lay it out in a line and then fold down the ends of the wrap before rolling the fajitas up for less messy eating!
As we turn the corner past the winter solstice, the sun is out and the world feels a little brighter again. And that’s what we wish for all of you. Brightness. Happiness. All the good things.
If you’d like to see our frugal recipes go here, and here for festive ones. If you want to read up on the basics of frugal living or getting the most for your cash, this is the place.
For good sales places both before and after Christmas, this is the page.
We’ve been discussing Christmas this week and how sad it is that so many people end up feeling overstretched in various ways – financial, physical, emotional – come January. It doesn’t have to be that way! Some years ago one of us wrote an article on having the Christmas you want here.
And if you have to buy pressies, don’t bankrupt yourself! Find the best deals. Places that spring to mind are Everything5pounds and Amazon Warehouse for open box and pre-owned goods.
There’s no getting away from it now. That distinct nip in the morning air says it all. Jingle bells, jingle bells… But it needn’t cost a fortune. Here’s our Frugal Christmas section with all it’s shopping and decorating advice and also our frugal festive sweets, our oatmeal stuffing and even our roast potatoes!
The Sales page has been updated with Holland and Barrett’s Penny Sale.
