Our Frugal Week

I am still emptying one of my freezers and doing my best not to fill it with other foods bargains that I find so hard to resist. This week I found two small packs of cubed stewing steak and a pack of bacon bits. I decided to make a beef casserole and looked in my pantry for any ready packets of casserole mix. I am embarrassed to say I must have around 50 packets of sauce and casserole mixes stored in 3 different tins. I buy these when I find them on offer and stock up on them. I managed to find a beef in red wine mix and used this with the beef in the slow cooker. I cooked the bacon bits first to give them some colour and then added onion, carrot, and swede for a hearty casserole. All the meat had been reduced so I reckon I will get around 6 meals for a total of about £6.

I also found two small packs of lamb mince so bought some soffritto mix and made a lasagne using up some ready made sauces from my pantry. I had bought these on offer from Waitrose when you could get the tomato sauce mix, be heal sauce and pack of sheet lasagne for £2 all in. The lasagne has cost around £4.00 to make and will provide 4 meals for us. I also found one pack of beef mince and so made David's favourite of shepherds pie. I used a mix for this too. It makes me sound like a very lazy cook but I need to get some of my pantry clear too as I cannot find everything and sometimes have two jars of the same thing being used at the same time. I am determined to get these freezers in order and the pantry better organised. I am such a foody person that I always seem to have too much variety which takes up too much space. I used the Loyd Grossman sauces for the lasagne. They are quite pleasant especially the white sauce which I always top with some grated cheese and some freshly ground nutmeg.

We went for a meal out on Tuesday to Pizza Express in Hale which is one of our favourite restaurants in the chain. It was really busy and we had to wait for a table but as usual the food was great and I used one of my £20 Tesco Clubcard Vouchers so the meal was half price as the remaining bill was just slightly over £20 which included starters and a bottle of wine. We love the Dough Balls Doppio which we share betwee us usually bickering over who is taking most of the garlic butter and daring each other to take the biggest amount of 'nduja because it can be fiery hot. We have tried many of the dishes over the years but have now found the happiness of familiarity and routine and we always order the American and La Reine Classic pizzas now and have of each one each. David always takes the olives off his half of the La Riene pizza and gives them to me because I love olives as much as he hates them.

I called in at Waitrose on Thursday for a few items and ended up spending more than I had planned. This was because they had 25% of wine if you bought six bottle or more. I ended up buying 6 bottles of cava to put aside for Christmas and Boxing Day when I have all the family over. This worked out at £5.24 a bottle. I also bought 3 bouquets of a dozen roses because they had been reduced to 99p from £6 each. I have yellow ones in the kitchen and some red and white ones in the dining room.

We have had our two settees in our lounge for 14 years. They are Tetrad Alicia settees and when we bought them they came with Ivory chenille covers with a free set of covers. The spare set that we ordered were in a dark orange/yellow and at the time we were living in a different house and this colour would have gone really well with the decor. We realised this weekend that 14 years of wear and tear had become quite obvious and it was time to change the covers so we got the spare set out if the loft and put the covers on. We replaced some of the foam in the seat pads and fixed a squeaky piece of wood within the arm of one of the settees (the arm on the side of the settee where I always sit). It now looks like we have two brand new settees. Although we are delighted with the outcome we are not quite sure on the colour, but plan to update the lounge with a rug that we bought use in there but which ended up in the spare bedroom. We will have a complete new look for nothing, or next to nothing as the foam seat pads cost around £10.