FOOD WONDERFUL FOOD

I talked a few days ago about being able to cut my food budget in half. It sounds easy to do, but actually, you need time to make that work. I still am working on reducing the amounts I spend in the supermarket and changing my shopping habits but it takes a little while to get the hang of it.
What exactly am I trying to do : I figured that the amount my supermarket got out of us for sheer convenience shopping was simply too costly to the environment on many counts.
1. It takes us 2 hours per week to shop
2. The journey was 25 miles using the car
3. We used to shop at random
4. The media got our kids in telling us which powder or cereal to buy.

The first thing I did was weigh up the cost of changing from actual shopping to online shopping. The charge was quite high but no higher than going by car and the other benefit was that you could shop exactly what was on my list and monitor the total amount of shopping. No sidestepping on special offers, they could be checked but again, the temptation was less than standing in front of it.

Little tip, if you tend to go shopping with kids, feed them before going and why make it hell. My kids love shopping.....they like to tell me what cereal they want, because it has a toy in it and it is a good lesson in teaching them about advertising.Now they eat less cereal.

I make a menu weekly, in fact for 2 weeks, check my store cupboard and make a list of what I need for the next 14 days. Whenever I run out of anything in the kitchen I make a note of it on the pad stuck to the fridge. I keep the menus because I figure that when it comes around next year I will be able to check what we ate and how we have made progress in our menu.

Shopping online made me realise that we have a habit of buying certain things every week whether we needed them or not and actually informed me about different choices I could make.

Its a gradual thing, but if you keep chipping away at it, you will get to reach a balance.

I love cooking, so would rather do that than work in an office,and making a meal with love from scratch, makes me happy, I know exactly what is in the food and it smells heavenly.

I used to buy, bread, yoghurt and cakes, now I make them all at home and the result is less packaging, less salt and more variety.
Give it a go and let me know how you get on.