Oh, what an embarrassment. Our grocery shopping is definitely NOT frugal this week. We’ve had three mouths to feed plus friends over for dinner and that means lots and lots of food.

On the plus side, we’ve had some lovely meals, including prawn stirfry, bubble and squeak, baguette pizzas and chicken fajitas. Yum! And loads of veg are being eaten in these parts.

We also did lots of baking. We tried our hand at making bread using this recipe from Jamie Oliver. His countertop mixing method was a huge hit but the flavour didn’t blow my mind. I’m keen to try making his sourdough starter and see if that makes things more interesting. We also made some delicious chocolate chip cookies using this recipe and some fat chocolate chips we got in the States (although we used self-raising flour because it was all we had and scooped the dough instead of slicing it, as the recipe calls for).

That said, we’re definitely spending more than I’d like us to and I’m also annoyed with how careless we’ve been about receipts. But this month is about tracking and next month we’ll get down to the business of trimming away the nonessentials.

Here is where we stand:

Running total: £103.25

24th August – £3.20 lunch stuff
23rd August – £28 misc lunch and dinner stuff (E didn’t save his receipts so this is an estimate)
22nd August – £5.20 baking stuff for chocolate chip cookies
21st August – £37.24 (guessing again here, as I also lost my receipt. argh!) mainly on fajitas stuff and also rye flour which we will someday use to make sourdough starter
20th August – nothing!
19th August – nothing!
18th August – £20.13 Abel & Cole order – fruit and veg, milk, eggs and bread
17th August – £5 on 2 x 500g steak mince, £1.50 on 2 x 750g tomato sauce
16th August – £1.80 on stirfry stuff for dinner, £.98 on cereal
15th August – nothing!

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