Shopping for the New Month and the Reset

 

From Aldi - £3.13

I went shopping the other day to get some of the things that I need for the start of the month and my rations reset.  I am moving from the 'vegetarian rations' to the 'meat eaters rations'.  Using meat replacements alongside one portion of fish each week in a bid to simplify things and keep them as healthy as possible.

I'll show you a photo of the wartime pamphlet that helped me make this decision on tomorrows post, alongside the way the rations will be for the foreseeable future.  Hopefully this will help it make sense.

Anyway, I needed milk for next week and another milk for the monthly rations and I also needed bread.  As you can see this is not my usual unsliced wholemeal loaf, I am going back to this Ancient Grains Aldi sliced bread for a couple of weeks so that I can assess if it has been the Sainsbury's bread giving me the side effects that I have been experiencing.  

I am dairy intolerant but I can usually get away with eating the products that say 'may contain' or 'made in a factory that handles milk products', but just recently I have been having all the side-effects as though I have been eating things containing milk or milk products.  So I need to do a bit of elimination from my diet and see if it's the bread or something else.  I do know that I can't eat the custard doughnuts from Sainsbury's as they have a 'may contain' label ... I found out after eating some!!

From Aldi - £3.74

From 1st October I will have £3.50 to spend each week on a fish item, this is in place of having that amount to spend on meat.  Back in 1942 the ration amount for meat was whatever you could buy with 1s 2d per person in your family, in today's money that correlates to £3.50.  Housewives could buy whatever the butcher had available, maybe a nice but very small steak or a couple of chops or maybe the choice would be more of the cheaper cuts.  At some times during rationing when meat was really scarce you would have to take some of this ration in the form of offal.

Gosh just imagine if this was the case now in the shops, and instead of being able to stack your trolley up with whatever you want you had to put back one of your packs of chicken and  have a tray of tripe!!

I don't eat meat so I have decided to allow myself fish to this value instead, this I have decided can be any sort of fish, in this first instance I decided on a box of fishfingers which cost me £1.75 ... there's not a lot of fish products that you can get for under £3.50, but I will be searching out other sorts ... and YES I know fish fingers weren't around during 1942, but then neither was I.  😎 

Once a month  in lieu of the 3 eggs that I could have had a meat eater (according to my new info sheet) I have decided I will have one pack of a modern meat-free item, this first month's choice is 'No Chicken Kyivs'.

From Sainsbury's - £3.27

While I was out I had to nip into Sainsbury's for something pussycat related so I took the opportunity to do a little fruit and vegetable shop.  Just look at the size of those British Bramleys, they weigh over half a kilo each.  I should have plenty for a crumble and a pie, with the peels and cores left over to go into the fridge for the next lot of jelly.

My total spend for week seven was £10.14, I was really pleased with that.  

Of the £70 available for the first 7 weeks of rationing I have £28.57 left.

Back tomorrow with the information that changed the way I am doing the rationing and my new planner to try to keep things simple.

Sue xx

IZAL Toilet Paper & Extra Shopping - Beans

We were chatting about IZAL toilet paper on the Facebook group the other day and it brought back all sorts of memories.  It was the only sort of toilet roll that we even knew existed as children, although I have just found out that soft paper was launched by St Andrew's Paper Mill (later to be known as Andrex) in England in 1942, so it was around ... gosh my Mum kept that quiet!!

I have just  found out that it was only in 1935 that toilet paper was advertised as being 'splinter free', gosh that must have been a relief.  😨

 As a child I thought the best use for IZAL was as tracing paper.  😄

This weeks only shopping has been the £1 that I spent on these two packs of Heinz baked beans, which I bought at Booths using the six pounds in vouchers that Heinz/Kraft sent me last week after my polite complaint about being short changed.

So my week six shopping bill was just £1.

I will be putting these in the lower food cupboard and 'buying' them with my Points spend each month.  Baked beans come in at 2 points per tin, so I can have at least two tins every month for the next four months.

Sue xx

Shopping, Fish and Re-workings

Shopping from Sainsbury's £6.50.

I didn't really need to go shopping this week, but as I had to call into Sainsbury's for something completely non-food related I thought I might as well pick up some bread while I was there and also some fish for when I am making up next weeks rations.

I decided at the end of last week that instead of my two eggs each week for the next few weeks at least, I will be taking the two meat-free sausages I have been having since rationing began instead of one of them and instead of the other I will take a single portion of fish.  So once opened this pack will be one portion for this week and the other will go into the freezer for next week.

I saw the potatoes were still on offer at just £1.25 for 2.5kg so I decided to buy a bag of those as well, not realising that I had 7 potatoes still in the fridge.  I don't usually store potatoes in the fridge, it was just during that very hot week recently they were all beginning to sprout in the bag in the kitchen, so I popped them in the fridge drawer right at the back and only discovered them when I went to put the fish away.

As soon as I got home I got the potatoes out of the plastic bag and left them out for an hour to dry off a bit while I had a coffee.  Then I put them into a Stayfresh bag and then into a cotton tote.  Hopefully now it's so much cooler they will last just fine while I work my way through the seven large potatoes in the fridge.

 

I also sat down and did a re-working of my ration plan yesterday to update my new no-egg rations.  Isn't it great having things saved on the computer so  that you can just adjust a few lines instead of starting from scratch.  

I do have to make this rationing malarkey work for me if I want to do it long term and if it takes playing around with things for a while at first I am quite willing to do that.  Sorry if it gets a bit confusing for you when you read the posts. 😌

Sue xx

One Full Month on Rations

 

It's been exactly four weeks since I started on my new rationing lifestyle, so I think it's time to have a little recap and check my figures.  Here's me just popping on my reading glasses.  😄

Each week up to now I have been able to take my ration foods from the stores of food that I already had in, so for the first month I have not had to buy any of the milk, cheese, fats, oil, sweets, sugar etc etc.  It was the same for the monthly, bi-monthly and points shopping.  All came from my food cupboard or fridge.  So the only spending I have had to do was on bread, vegetables, some washing up liquid ... oh and multipack of sanity-saving crisps.

My spending has been as follows:

Week One from Booths - £5.25

Week Two from Sainsbury's - £13.80

Week Three from Aldi - £1.15

Week Four from Booths - £3.59

So a total spend during this first month of rationing of just £23.79.

As I am allowing myself £10 a week at the moment ... it might change  further down the line if that proves too little ... that leaves me with £16.21 of my first months £40 in my royal mug.

Now officially, as I have been doing this for four weeks it should be time for me to have another twenty points to buy the next months Points shopping, but I have decided that doing this mid-month every month is just too complicated, so from now on I will get another twenty points on the first of each month.  Luckily I still have a lot of the foods I bought with my points available for me to be able to ride out these three weeks, although the three biscuits that I have left are not going to last me three weeks!!  😄

Now all I have to do is complete the rest of September on the foods that I already have in and the additional weekly rations that I should still be able to get together from the fridge and cupboard each Monday.   

I have also decided that I am going to try not to spend any of my money until the first of October.  If I have to then I have to, but my aim is to get to the end of the month with NO SHOPPING AT ALL.  If I use up the fresh vegetables that I have left in the fridge first and then work my way through the frozen ones in the freezer that I have had since before the Challenge began, this should be possible.

I am already out of bread, but after last weeks mouldy bread incident I think a couple of weeks without eating bread will be just fine.  I do have a couple of boxes of crackers in the pre-rationing food cupboard and once they run out ... Potato Pete will be my new best friend instead.

So in a way the last three weeks of September are to be a bit of a reset.

No, or very minimal shopping.

No points rations available.

Use up what I have in the freezer to make space.

Top up The Royal Cash Pot with as much as possible ready for future shopping.

Sue xx

Week Four's Shopping Went Mouldy!!

 

This week's shopping cost me £3.59 from Booths.

Just a loaf of unsliced bread and four nice large potatoes, I still have some spuds left from last week so I should have plenty for now.

I only bought the bread from Booths as Alan wanted to grab a coffee and cake after we picked his car up from the garage.   I actually prefer the more National Loaf style bread that I can get from Sainsbury's at less than half the price.   The car was only at the garage for an MOT and it passed, sailed through with flying colours once again ... perhaps we were celebrating!

Anyway that was late on Tuesday, yesterday morning ... Friday ... I went to cut myself a couple of slices to toast, and although the loaf was nice and soft when I turned it over to slice it, I noticed it was riddled with mould.  Not the little dots of green that you could pick off and turn a blind eye to, but more the cobwebby sort of mould you see lurking in the corners of a derelict house.   

Imagine that happening during the war years, you would be heartbroken.

I think mine was having a war all of it's own!!

It went straight into the bin and I went next door and stole two slices of bread from Alan's kitchen ... it's much too hot for porridge at the moment.

Sue xx

This Week's Non-Ration Shopping ... and Scrumping

 

The fridge was looking pretty bare so I decided it was time to go to the supermarket and pick up my non-rationed foods.  There's also an invader in amongst all the almost authentic WWII goodies.

A banana!!  🍌

Alan wanted one, and it seemed a bit much to make the cashier do a single banana as a separate transaction so it's on my receipt and therefore in my photo.

The single potato as well as the bag of potatoes is there because I could get 60 extra Nectar points by buying loose potatoes ... so one was enough to qualify me for that.

I weighed all the potatoes together before putting them away and I have just under 7lbs of spuds.  Enough for me to be able to have the recommended 1lb a day.  It's a good job I like potatoes!!

And on the subject of potatoes, I have really been fancying some crisps this past week, so I thought what are the oldest crisps around, I'll buy those.     In the UK seemingly it was Smith's crisps, and by 1934 they were selling 200 million packets of crisps in Britain each year.

Smiths Potato Crisps, now owned by Walkers and called Salt & Shake.  

I remember getting these as a child and loving the little twist of salt in the blue paper.  Now it's a sealed packet of salt but back then it was just twisted closed.  The thrill of getting two, and the disappointment of not getting one at all, is still in my memory.

Here's my receipt ... and the apples that I scrumped from the park while I was walking the dogs on the way to the supermarket.   There were some lovely looking larger ones higher up the tree but even shaking the branches a bit couldn't dislodge them yet.  I'll have to go back with Alan and see if they're ready to fall off in a couple of days.

 Free food ... yes please.  😄

I know I went over my aimed for £10 per week spend this week, but as I was so far under it last week I thought I would let myself off with the overspend.  What took me over was buying the packet of fish portions.  

Fish was never on ration as it was regularly unavailable or only in the shops in small quantities.  So if you were near the front of one of the long snaking queues you might have been lucky.  I'll allow myself some sort of fish two or three times a month ... if I get in the queue in time.  😉

Sue xx