Daily Meal Budgets?

Now I don't tend to plan very much when it comes to meals. They're all homemade, except for Friday where we have a bought pizza that's cooked at home, and normally contain a mix of store cupboard ingredients, garden produce and either meat from the freezer or butcher.

As our little family is getting bigger all the time I'm obviously having to cook more and more food. My eldest daughter, who is nearly five now, will eat nearly as much as my wife on a good day, I eat enough for two most of the time and my two smaller children are starting to have more on their plates (although they tend to waste a fair bit of theirs at the moment).

As anyone that reads this knows I buy a lot of food in bulk where I can (see the potatoes post here) and having lots growing in the garden helps as well, I'll sometimes just go out there and see what is ready and plan my meals around that, making a particular veg the star of the show. The same is true of meat as well, I'm quite often given pheasants and other game when it's in season as well as shooting some myself, all helping to keep meal costs down (pheasant fajitas are a winter staple here).

This picture is from a harvest 8 years ago! 

But when I look at the cost of an evening meal I tend to budget around the five pound mark if I have to buy things for it, some will be much more expensive (steak from the butchers but with homemade wedges) and many will be far cheaper though (leek and potato soup with home made rolls for example). But if I go into the butchers I know that I can say to him that I want roughly £5 worth of whatever and the rest of the meal is going to cost very little due to how we buy everything else.

So what do you budget per meal? Do you meal plan?

First Approved Food Order

Last week I made my first order with approved food. 

For those that don;t know it's a mail order company that sells nearly out of date or out of date food at a much cheaper price.

I've been looking on their website for a while and I decided to finally bite the bullet and order. The one thing I really wanted was the malted bread flour - 16kg for £5.49! That'll make 32 loaves of granary bread at just over 17 pence a loaf!

I was careful not to buy too many things that aren't normally on our shopping list as it's easy to turn a cheap shopping trip into an expensive one, and just because something is cheap doesn't mean I need it!

I also brought a full box of walkers ridge crisps for 50p and I made the order up with washing liquid that knocked money off my over all postage (as well as lots of sweets and chocolates!).

Malted grain flour - makes great bread

I was a little nervous about using the flour when it turned up as it's well out of date (2014), but I can see nothing alive in it, it smells fine and the proof is in the eating as it makes great bread - what a bargain! 

If anyone else is thinking of using approved food go through this link and you'll earn me some money off my next shop! To shop there needs to be carefully worked out as the postage adds a lot, but there are some huge savings to be made if you shop savvy! 

Anyone else use Approved Food?

Budget Greenhouse Staging

I'm always short of space in the greenhouse and I needed some staging.

With my wife's maternity leave nearly over and me going full time daddy soon we're trying not to spend too much money, so I decided to improvise.

 My dad is a tipical farmer and has a field full of junk "stuff". Some useful and some not. A while back he did buy a job lot of shelving, this falls inthe useful catagorgy. One section of this cut in half makes some free staging for me.

 It might not be too pretty but it does the job.

It's already pretty much full but it's doing the job. Maybe one day I'll get round to making some nice wooden staging but until then this will do. Lately I've been trying to look at things we need and seeing what will do in their place that doesn't cost any money, anyone else have some good re purposed items?