Food glorious food...

or emergency food blip ;-))

This is probably the most boring photo in my entire blip journal and the following write up won't be any better.  

The purpose of this blip is to serve as a reminder to myself in the coming months of how organised I was, in the event I slip back into old, disorganised habits.  So please feel free to stop reading and move on to something much more exciting instead, such as watching paint dry :-))

Note to self....

One thing lockdown has taught me is to be organised with my food shopping.  

Due to Alan being on the vulnerable list (as I am but I keep forgetting that! lol) and wishing to keep contact with the outside word to a minimum, we have relied almost entirely on supermarket online deliveries for our food shopping.  We have been fortunate that with constant checking clever timing, we have always managed to get a delivery slot and have fallen into a pattern of taking delivery on a Thursday morning between 9 & 10am.

So far, so good.  

But the added challenge has been the supermarket's restriction to 80 items or less, per delivery.  I've lost count of the times at the start of lockdown where I would get to the checkout and a message would pop up telling me I was over the 80 item limit and would need to amend my order, and the annoying task of deciding what to delete would begin.  Oh how I huffed and I puffed!  Impossible!! I'd cry.  Oh for heavens sake, but I need all of these items!!!  

Pre-lockdown, whilst I always had a shopping list prepared before I placed the order, it would perhaps contain the ingredients for only three of four main meals as I would assume we would eat out at least once in the week or perhaps get a takeaway on a Friday evening.  

I would order the items on the list, then meander my way through my "favourites" list, randomly clicking items that took my fancy.  I am ashamed to say I have no idea on average how many items my shopping basket contained by the time it reached the checkout.  All I do know is I would be shocked at the cost, (hasn't food gotten so expensive ?!  I would lament on an almost daily basis) the order would arrive and over the course of the week I would puzzle over various items wondering what I had planned to serve them with or even worse, realise I already had plenty of that thing in stock (usually coconut milk or tinned tomatoes!)   Inevitably a lot of food would make it's way to the holding area before being eventually binned freezer.

Fast forward to now and what a transformation!

Eighty items or less (it's now up to 95 but I am doing my best to stay below 85) has been a great teacher.  

I now prepare a weekly meal plan, write a shopping list of all that's needed for every meal, David does a cupboard and fridge check and gives me an additional list of every day stuff we are getting low on (he can reach the tall cupboards :-) as well as a note of stuff NOT to buy :-))  I know the basics to cover breakfast and lunches and have learned to reduce my number of items by buying fruit and veg in bags/bunches, rather than loose.  

And now, three months later, we are enjoying a healthier, tastier diet, meals made from scratch using fresh produce (to be fair that was nearly always the case, but I would sneak in some ready made or frozen stuff as back up for the nights I just couldn't be bothered cooking) and we have virtually no food waste other than the bits we don't eat anyway such as apple cores, onions skins etc.  AND....the cost of our weekly shop has plummeted!  It's amazing.  Eating much better for much less. 

Necessity really is the mother of invention ;-))

P.S. And every meal on the list is a Slimming World recipe and they are all absolutely delicious.  Healthy food, not diet food.  

PPS To support our lovely local restaurants we buy one lunch and one main meal a week from them as a treat and even including the cost of that, our weekly food bill is still less than it was!