Reducing

Another grizzly Welsh day today. Will went out first thing before work and has been chipping away at clearing the back garden. I will take some photos of the garden soon.

I feel like I am making resolutions like this all the time lately, but I have Made A Decision today to really take control of our spending and work on saving up some money so we have a decent safety net. Without a doubt, and for whatever reason, in the last few months our spending has crept up and we have become a lot more casual about this. In part this is because we have been putting a little money into getting the house the way we want it, and in part because we have a lot less energy these days for counting the pennies. But we are not the only people with a child AND a budget, and we have definitely been living in a way recently that isn't appropriate for our single income, and which isn't sustainable in the long run.
One of the biggest, and probably easiest, areas we can cut back on is food. The majority of our money each month must go on food and we give little thought to how much we buy or how much it costs, and as a result we have been over eating, and wasting food. I have decided each week to write a meal plan before shopping and them buy our weekly food based on exactly what we will need each day. Because Will works from home we all eat together for all three meals. Breakfast is easy as we have porridge every day, but for lunches I have decided to stop making hot meals every day and start instead having sandwiches or toast, sometimes soup as not only will this cut back on spending but will also cut back on our over eating!
We didn't go food shopping this weekend as there still seemed to be a lot of food in the house, and I have no plans to go food shopping until the weekend, so I have written a meal plan for the week that will use up all the odds and ends we have.

So here we have it:
Monday:
Lunch - Toast, leftover mac'n'cheese
Dinner - Vegetable & Quorn Curry & Rice (I bought some Quorn recently as I thought it would be worth trying now they do a vegan one. It was very expensive and really 'meaty' so don't think I'll bother again)
Tuesday:
Lunch - Leftover spinach pasta from freezer w/cucumber
Dinner - Curry & Rice
Wednesday:
Lunch - Cucumber & marmite sandwiches, fruit
Dinner - Cucumber & mushroom stir fry w/noodles & broccoli
Thursday:
Lunch - Tofu sandwiches w/miso
Dinner - Stuffed marrow & couscous
Friday:
Lunch - Toast w/miso & tofu & runner beans
Dinner - Baked potato w/curried borlotti beans
Saturday:
Lunch - Parsnip & potato soup
Dinner - Bean & lentil burgers w/mash
And that is far as I can stretch what we have - we will go shopping on Sunday. There is chard, spinach and beans growing in the garden which we can eat with the above.
Hopefully this will lead to less food waste and make it easier to plan proper meals for Ivy as well now she is bigger. If we are not eating to 'use stuff up' or just grazing because we have food in the house then we should feel the benefit of that too and hopefully I should shift a few pounds.