Sunday Dinner

Well Sunday lunch actually. Roast pork, roast potatoes, butternut squash broccoli, peas and gravy. Very nice it was too. Didn't bother with pictures until the end:

Note sure what was wrong with that lone pea!

Followed this with a syrup sponge. I adapted the recipe from the Frugal Queen's Lemon Sponge here, using golden syrup instead of lemon curd.

To be honest I wasn't expecting it to be any good as I couldn't get my head around cooking a sponge in the microwave but it worked really well! The whole thing took me about 7 minutes from start to finish so will keep it in mind for last minute puds. I'm thinking it would work well using chocolate sauce and chocolate sponge too.

Anyway, Sunday is nearly over. Back to work tomorrow. Luckily, I managed to keep enough of today's dinner for lunch tomorrow and the day after. That's frugal right?

FFx

Let The Cooking Commence

So turns out planning, shopping, prepping and cooking takes up a LOT of time and blogging about it seems like way too much faff. Hence brevity will be my watchword.

I spent last night planning this week's meals.  I also planned some soups to keep in the freezer so I have something to take to work for my lunch as I am trying to get through the working week without spending any money.  I am also trying to replenish my freezer as we had an unfortunate accident where the freezer got turned off and I had to throw quite a lot of food away.

So this morning saw me shopping in Lidl and Sainsbury's. I spent just over £100 which was over my budget. In my defence I bought quite a bit of food for the freezer and store cupboard: four packs of cooking bacon, two large packs of chicken breasts, large jar of instant coffee as it was on special offer, 2 loaves of bread and bagels for the freezer and bread flour. These will all be used in the following weeks. I also had to buy some special washing powder as my husband suspects he is allergic to our usual one. This alone cost £7.50!

All contrived to push my bill up over my budget of £100. Please note I don't plan on spending £100 every week. I'm trying to feed my family of four plus all my lunches plus general household goods like washing powder etc on a budget of £75 a month. My two sons eat a truly enormous amount of food at the moment as they are growing teenagers and without wishing to sound like a spoiled brat I am finding sticking to my budget quite hard.

I know a lot of people manage on way less than this and I'm lucky to have the money which is why I called this blog Frugalish Food - I want to produce good quality, nutritious and filling food for my family.  That means I am not always going to buy what's cheap as I don't have to. I buy some value products when they are good quality and I find Sainsbury's Basics very good on the whole. For example I love their cooking bacon, muesli, drinking chocolate, tinned fruit, frozen veg and biscuits for example. However I avoid things like cheap jams because they use  glucose-fructose syrup instead of sugar and cheap noodles etc as they have flavour enhancers. I have no particular axe to grind on this, I just like ingredient lists to contain things that are recognisably food.

Anyway, on with the plan.   Note that breakfast is always cereal, toast or eggs so I won't bother listing these.  Boys have school diners and my husband has his own lunch during the week so I'm only listing my lunches.

This  week's meals ( lunch followed by dinner):

Saturday

Leek and Potato soup, Bread

Oven Roasted Ratatouille, sausages, garlic bread

Sunday
Roast pork, roast potatoes , butternut squash, broccoli, peas, Yorkshires. Syrup sponge pudding and custard

Beans on toast

Monday

Roast pork & veg

Italian rice with chicken

Tuesday

Roast pork with Veg

Baked potatoes with bacon, cheese and salad

Wednesday

Lentil and bacon soup 

Spaghetti bolognese, salad and garlic bread

Thursday
Spag bol and salad

Frittata, with potato, mushrooms and cheese

Friday

Leek and potato soup

Sesame chicken with soy dip, broccoli and egg fried rice

So with the plan written and food bought I commenced cooking around lunchtime. I finished cooking around 6 which seems a bit excessive even for me. I like to get prepped for the whole week on Sat as this saves me a lot of stress during the week and I had a lot to get done today.

I started by using up some leeks I had in leek-and-potato-soup. This is a really nice recipe.

Then I cooked Lentil, Bacon Soup: 

This is a nice soup. Slightly odd as it contains cumin and turmeric which seems a bit odd with the bacon but it is very tasty. 

I then prepped ingredients for oven-baked-ratatouille-sausages which I cooked later and looked like this before going into oven: 

This was really tasty. Served it with some grated cheese. I made tear and share garlic bread to go with the ratatouille which looked like this:

This was ok but a bit dry. I think I will add more garlic butter next time.

In the middle of this I managed to make some blueberry muffins as I had some blueberries that needed eating.  I managed to snap a pic before son polished one off: 

So all in all a productive if long day in the kitchen. I have lots of soup in the freezer for lunches and some blueberry muffins. Dinner went down well with everyone so I'm happy. 

Inaugural

As a wife and the mother of two boys, one a teenager and the other almost a teenager,  I spend a lot of time in the kitchen producing meals, a lot of time in the supermarket buying food and a lot of time sat in front of my computer trying to plan meals and produce shopping lists that won't break the bank.

While I do try to plan food for the week it is sometimes a bit hit-and-miss. I also work full time and find that the weeks when I don't plan properly end up being very difficult. Arriving at home after 6pm to two starving children with no idea what I'm going to cook and  a randomly stocked fridge is a recipe for lots of stress and boring, repetitive food. Add to that the need to trim my food budget and it's clear I need to get my meal planning more organised and efficient.

Hence this blog. The idea is to produce a weekly food plan which I will publish here followed by a review of how the plan worked in practice - possibly with pictures! 

Wish me luck!