Stretching the housekeeping

Afternoon everyone,

I'm experimenting, at the moment, with the cheapest way to shop for groceries. I cook everything from scratch and don't buy any processed or ready-made foods. This is personal choice as I love to cook using fresh ingredients. I've tried buying all my fruit and veg from the local farm shop but found that choice was limited on the fruit side and, also bizarrely, some of the fruit looked past it's best. This sort of defeated the object of buying from source to get better quality products. The veg was good quality though, and a little bit cheaper, but after weighing up the fuel to fetch it and the fact that I still had to buy fruit elsewhere I decided it wasn't working out. I tried two other farm shops but found the same problem here and they were quite a bit more expensive, plus even further to travel. I've wondered about having veg boxes delivered but never got round to trying that as of yet. We have red meat once a week and the rest of the meals are either chicken or vegetarian. I only buy chicken breasts as hubby and daughter don't like thighs, whole chicken or chicken on the bone. This works out expensive so I try to do a couple of meatless meals a week to keep costs down. We have two supermarkets in the next town, Tesco and Aldi. I like Aldi and find their products good value and good quality, the only problem is the middle aisles which hold some sort of magical attraction for hubby causing the shopping bill to rise with unnecessary purchases. Zero willpower!! We have Tesco here, too, which is slightly more expensive but does have some good offers. The problem with going to both supermarkets is that you tend to overspend. For the past month I've tried a different approach. When we get paid I go to Aldi and buy enough of the  non perishable items from there that we either prefer or are better value/quality, these include washing powder, toilet rolls, baby wipes. I then go to the discount store Home Bargains and again buy items for the month that I know are cheaper from here than Tesco, this is usually Lenor fabric softener, toilet cleaner, food bags, shower gel, teabags.  I don't go again till next payday.
Then I've taken out a delivery saver pass with Tesco for 6 months which is £3.49 a month and I have my fresh shopping and any offers that are worth getting delivered each week. At the moment, I would honestly say this seems to be working. The home delivery is very good and if there are any items not available they always substitute with an item of equal or higher value. Last week I had extra chicken breasts as the size ordered wasn't available so they sent two slightly smaller ones which equated to more for the same price. They often swap items for the Tesco finest range too. If an item that I would normally buy from Aldi or Home Bargains comes on offer at Tesco and works out cheaper I will buy a few from there and then knock these off next times shop. Like I have said in a previous post I also pop into the local coop some evenings and check out the reduced fruit and veg. Last night I got fine beans for 20p, 3 large punnets of strawberries for 40p each and 3 punnets of cherries for 33p each.This is really helpful as we do eat a lot of fresh fruit, especially our daughter who is on a diet permanently as girls are!

Time will tell but I'm happy with how things are working out so far.
What little tricks do you have for stretching the housekeeping? Do you find avoiding visiting the supermarket helps cut spending? Do you visit various shops to get the best prices?

Until tomorrow
Jules x













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