How low can we go?

June has so far been an interesting month money-wise (for lack of it that is). After Mike broke his hand, he was unable to work for a few weeks and then when he did go back, he could mow, but not weed-eat. ACC had stopped and so we had no other choice than to try and continue however we could. Mike's brother helped us out tremendously, but when he was also unable to help any further, we had to employ someone to come in and that meant Mike's wages were cut by 75%. Ouch!

So, once all bank accounts were depleted and we still had bills to pay and had already borrowed some money, I decided it was time to play 'how low can we go' - on groceries that is. In those few weeks, I got very creative. A lot of my recent baking was the product of using what I had in the fridge that needed to be used up, as well as using what else I could find in the pantry. When we had no bread, the kids had the corn muffins I made and even a day of cheese and crackers. They enjoyed the desserts I cooked up as well, especially on the nights that dinner was kind of interesting!! We had shepherds pie with pumpkin as a topping when I had run out of potato. I found a packet of Kings soup mix and threw in all sorts of other vegetables and made a nice thick soup (no bacon bones like it would normally have, but it was still good). One night we had toasted sandwiches for dinner, which come to think of it must have been the night before we ran out of bread for school lunches (poor planning there).

I used up loads of the canned food I normally keep in stock, which was good as I got to rotate in new stock when I finally did go shopping, which is something I often forget to do week to week.

It was amazing how long we were able to stretch what was left in the fridge/pantry before finally going shopping 3 weeks later than our usual shop (although we did end up getting some milk, fruit and bread in between). I know Wendy has done the $21 challenge before and this was kind of similar. I found out that it's good for loads of reasons to do this every now and then, including - you spend less, rotate stock and get real creative about meals. I made good use of my Destitute Gourmet cookbooks during this time, that's for sure! So I have now decided to try and move my shop by a day or two each time - ie stretch my usual fortnightly shop to say every 16 days. That's 4 less shops a year already and although I put my shopping off for 3 weeks, when I finally went and did it, the difference was only about $25 dollars more than usual, so totally worth giving it a go.

So how low we can go - apparently very, very low!