Last night and today, I have been updating the shopping list for the very first meal plan we did here, meal plan one.  This was first posted in June 2013. The weeks shopping is to feed two adults, assumed to be one male needing 2500 calories, and one female needing 2000 calories. In June 2013, you needed £15.61 at the checkout, and the food eaten during the week amounted to £12.26.

I re-did the shopping list in mySupermarket, using Asda, just the same as before. mySupermarket don’t show a value basics 47p loaf any more, so I’m not sure if they are in the shop or not, so have included a loaf for £1. Value tomato ketchup similarly, the cheapest one showing os well over £1, so I’ve left that out. I changed Vitalite spread to Best for Baking. Potatoes are currently a lot more expensive too.

But all in all it has worked out extremely well, and that plan can still be done for £15.37 at the checkout. Not bad at all after a year with the way food seems to be going up all the time.

I shall do the same exercise for the other plans too.

Edit: as you can see, the table doesn’t total up to £15.37. That’s because it was pointed out by a lovely reader (humble apologies, I can’t remember who, Katherine?) that the Asda site itself, rather than MySupermarket, shows the 45p loaf, so I changed it. Plus I looked up the tomato ketchup in the same way. And of course, now, amazingly, we can do the plan for LESS than last year. Wow!

For lunch today, I made the smelliest hoummous sandwich I have ever done! I purposely cooked extra chick peas last night so I could make hoummous today.

I put the chickpeas in the food processor with a large tblsp of garlic/ginger paste, 2 tblsps of mustard oil that I got from the Indian shop (I wanted the mustardy hum), a big dollop of caramelised onion chutney, a tblsp of lemon juice from a bottle and half a tsp of salt. Then gave it all a good whizz.

A very rough guide to costs is

100g dried chickpeas, 20p
tbslp garlic and ginger paste, £2.69/kg from Indian shop, 20g? 5p
tblsp lemon juice, 20p/500ml Approved Food, 1/2p
tblsp caramelised onion chutney. No idea how much this cost  me, currently showing in Asda on mySupermarket £1.78/320g, 50g? 28p
2 tbslp mustard oil, no idea how much this cost, say 10p
so a rough total of 63p for a 350g tub, Asda has some at £1 for 200g

I usually don’t bother with adding any oil into hoummous now. It doesn’t seem to make much difference to the texture or the flavour. I just wanted to see what the mustard oil would be like in it this time.

I completely forgot to measure how much the chick peas weighed. Not that I could have weighed them at that point. My digital scales have run out of battery again and I needed to pop into town to get another one. I wrote on the bottom the last time I changed the battery and that was 10th May, so they don’t last long.

The chick peas would have been a good tins worth. The resulting hoummous made a big pot and was very very delicious. I had it in a sandwich with grated carrot, yum YUM.

I’m just going off to make a chicken and vegetable tart, using chicken left from the roast chicken I did yesterday. Rather than amalgamate it into this post, I’ll write it up properly, as a recipe, and post it tomorrow.