Food Challenge Update

This post is a little overdue since I actually did my food shop on Friday, but it was a busy weekend so I hope you'll forgive me!

The good news is that Part One of the challenge was a success - I managed to make meals each night without doing any extra shopping (besides getting lunches for Tom for work, but we do that every week anyway so I'm not counting it!). Woohoo! There was a bit of luck involved as I wasn't sure one of my batch meals was going to stretch to 4 portions (it looked more like 3 generous portions or 4 measly ones) but in the end it was just an eyes-bigger-than-belly scenario, haha. Isn't it always?

As for Part Two I've made a good start. Instead of getting a weekly shop as usual on Friday I went to Aldi. Their meat is cheaper than Asda and good quality, but it's the only thing we buy there so I don't go often unless it's to stock up in bulk. I ended up spending about £25 on meat and managed to get 4kg of chicken breast (for comparison this much in Asda would be £30 alone), 4 beef burgers, a pack of turkey mince and a pack of pork mince (which we've never tried before). That should last us quite a while! I also did Asda for our usual stuff, but bought extra veg so that I can prepare and freeze it for future meals.

So far I've done a big batch of shredded chicken - half went to that nights' batch meal (a Mexican Casserole style thing that I just have to share at some point!) and the other half I froze for future meals. I also froze enough chicken stock for 2 meals, so I'm feeling pretty smug. On the menu tonight is Chicken Tikka Masala and I'm adding in some veg we don't normally eat so I'll chop and freeze extra at the same time again.

On a semi-related note I've thought of another project to start that I'm hoping might be interesting, so I'm gonna write another blog on that shortly. Stay tuned!

Is anyone else doing any food challenges at the moment? I'd love to hear about them. :) I always feel like Spring is a better time to start resolutions than January - it's right as the weather picks up and everything feels more positive! What do you think?