Prep for next week, part 2

Posted: April 26, 2015 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Back from my journey to Aldi, followed by a walk into the city centre. The good news: I got a 1.27kg red cabbage (grown in the UK) for 45p! This is by far the cheapest I’ve seen red cabbage in a supermarket, they’re usually about 80p a kilo. The bad news was that there were no fresh potatoes available for less than £1. They had 500g bags of carrots for 27p, and I decided to buy one of those instead of a 1kg bag for 49p, even though it works out at 5p more a kilo, because I think 100g of carrots a day will probably be sufficient and it gave me a bit of extra cash to play with.

carrots 500g 27p Aldi

I left Aldi and walked into town via the medium-sized Sainsbury’s on Humberstone Gate. I was hoping for better potato luck there, but the only loose ones they had were bakers for £1.25 per kilo, so I didn’t get any, but what I did get was a special offer tin of tomato purée for 20p, which I think is going to make my split peas taste a whole lot better, so I’m really pleased with that! That means I have £1.17 left to spend.

tomato puree 142g 20p Sainsbury

I also dropped by one of the Tesco Express shops in town. They didn’t have any usefully-priced potatoes either, but what they did have (although I didn’t buy them) were 500g bags of oats for 68p:

oats 500g 68p Tesco

Now, you can get 1kg bags of oats for 75p in Morrisons, larger Tesco stores and Aldi (they didn’t have any today though), so these aren’t the best value around, but if I end up being desperate for oats with less than 75p left it’s worth knowing about them, as until now I thought 75p was the lowest price available for oats.

Prep for next week, part 1

Posted: April 26, 2015 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’ve already got my dry goods ready to go, and I’m just about to take a trip to Aldi for the fresh veg. I’m not a regular Aldi customer as it’s not within my usual walking area so I was a bit dismayed to read on someone else’s blog that the 39p potatoes I was hoping to buy there were part of a special offer which ended last week.

I have £2.09 left to spend, and I was aiming for a red cabbage (45p), carrots (49p) and potatoes (which I thought were going to be 39p) which would have left me with 74p for a jar of cooking sauce/tomato puree and a bulb of garlic, or some jam, or a litre of soya milk – I hadn’t quite decided yet. If I just buy cabbage and carrot that leaves me with £1.15. I could either just buy a couple of loose potatoes, or I could spend the whole lot on a big bag of potatoes, or 65p on a bag of frozen basics chips from Sainsbury’s leaving me 50p for more flavouring options. Ack, I dunno! Maybe I’ll just leave the potatoes altogether for now and see how I get on! Might be good to have some spare pennies.

I really dithered about whether to set up a fundraising page for the challenge next week or not. In the end I decided it couldn’t hurt to make a quick way for people to donate if they felt like it, so here’s a page for Unicef, partly because they say they’re already in place to help those affected by the dreadful earthquake which has just happened in Nepal. https://www.justgiving.com/dropsconelbl15

I’m also open to suggestions for other charities, preferably those that are already linked up on JustGiving or another site which offers mobile phone text message donating, because donating by text seems not to incur an admin fee so 100% of the donation goes to the charity.

Jan62 day 26 – five days and less than a fiver left

Posted: January 26, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

A friend was shooting a video for one of her songs yesterday and asked for volunteer “crowd” so B and I drove to the shoot (mildly exciting!). On the way back we were passing Aldi and dropped in to see if they had any flaked almonds. Unfortunately, they seemed to be out of almonds completely, flaked or otherwise, as they were last time I visited in December, but I did manage to pick up a kilo bag of oats for 75p.

bag of porridge oats

I wanted to see if my oat and coconut flour pastry would work in savoury format but had been low on oats, so it was good to get more to play with. I tried the pastry with a ratio of 2:1 oats and coconut, plus a splash of olive oil, pinch of salt and water to bind. I made a simple red onion and chickpea flour quiche-type filling. Seemed to work okay, though the coconut flavour is a little unexpected in a spiceless savoury dish.

You may be wondering what I’ve used to fasten up the bag of oats, although those of an urban-foraging disposition may already know. It’s a strip of bicycle tyre inner tube, tied to make a sturdy rubber band. I cadged loads of inner tubes from a local bike repair shop, and they were happy for me to take them as they were much punctured and repaired and would otherwise have been thrown away. Once I’d brought these home I cut them across once to make a tube, then slit the tubes end-to-end. I popped the tubes into the washing machine on wool cycle and they came out nice and clean, ready to be used for craft and DIY projects! They’re a perfect free sub for rubber bands as you can make them almost any length and they’re much less likely to perish.