Day 16

I discovered this morning that we have already went over budget by £13... This is after only two weeks! I'm going to do my best to not buy anything but the absolute essentials for the rest of the month. With a lot of creativity, I think that we can get through the next two weeks fine for food. I believe that things will be better once we move, since we will have an actual freezer there and space for a chest freezer that someone has offered us (yay!). Since I do not own a pressure canner/cooker (and I don't really want one either), I cannot safely can and preserve meats and low acid meals. This is why the freezer space is vital to us only using £50 per month. Once we have decent freezer space, I'll be doing more "once per month" cooking. This way, if I'm sick or too tired to cook, we can still have a homecooked meal.

Having Jethro stop by the store on his way home is a bad idea for us, but I have been keeping up with what we use the most vs what we use the least so that I can better plan for the following months.

We are down to 1 egg, so we ended up having oatmeal this morning. Jethro picked up some bacon (darn our cravings!) yesterday, so we each had a piece of bacon as well for some protein. I sent a piece of the healthier cottage pie and a creole chicken leg to work with him for lunch, and I had a piece of the healthier cottage pie with a yoghurt and 2 slices of wholemeal toast for lunch.

For a mid-afternoon snack, I had homemade strawberry jam and a bit of "no nut" chocolate spread on 2 slices of wholemeal toast. If you like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, try a chocolate spread and jelly sandwich! Even though I am allergic to some nuts, luckily hazelnuts are not on my allergy list, so I can have things like Nutella. We bought the "no nut" stuff because it was on clearance a while back for 75 pence for a bigger jar than the Nutella comes in for £2.15. I had honestly forgotten that we had the stuff! It ended up getting pushed to the back of the refrigerator where I couldn't see it.

What I've found by researching our food intake is #1, we eat far too much for one meal, #2, we go through cheese and milk like crazy! I may splurge and buy the strongest (we like cheddar) that I can find next month so that we won't need to add so much to our meals and salads to still get the flavour. Once we have a freezer, I'll probably end up freezing milk to keep from getting sucked into the store because we are out. As you are probably far too aware, it is very difficult to get only one item at the store! Impulse buys stack up, and the fewer trips to the store you can make, the better.

I'm doing more research, gathering up cheaper (and still healthy!) recipes, and I'm really looking forward to having freezer space again next month. I'll also be growing some of our own food from scraps after we move, since we will have a small back garden. I have already started a leek root, 3 carrot tops, and an eye/sprout from one of the potatoes we had yesterday. The new house also has a walk in pantry under the stairs, which I am super super excited about!