Preparing to Live Below the Line

Tomorrow is the start of our 5 days Living Below the Line. 5 days where we will live on only £1 worth of food each. This weekend we have been clearing out the fridge of any fresh things that we're not allowed during the week (either they aren't in budget, or not on my shopping list of meals we can afford to cook) and are now ready to start the week!
I have just made the lentil soup we'll be having for the next couple of days. I chose not to make it all in one go as this was the first time I'd tried this recipe, and wanted the opportunity to tweak it if necessary. I have to say its yummy! I'll be posting the recipe tomorrow.
Here's our shopping for the week. (and a cheeky monkey snuck in the photo!)

As you can see there is an awful lot of Smartprice stuff. I have to say I have no issue with buying smartprice/Tesco value things normally. For basic ingredients I think there's little difference in quality really, and if you can cook you can make something nice anyway. I did feel quite strange filling my trolley with almost all smartprice things. But as I looked around at others shopping I noticed a few people in the same boat as me, and yet I don't think they were doing this. I think that's the way they have to shop. One thing I take for granted is my choice. I choose to buy which brands I want, and have the choice of Smartprice if I want, or I can have the supermarket brand, or even a named brand. This week I didn't have that luxury.

Here's a list of our purchases and total cost.

Quantity	Food	Shop	Price
6	Onions	Aldi	69
6 large	Eggs	Aldi	100
1kg	Porridge	Asda	75
2l	Milk	Asda	100
2 loaves	Bread	Asda	100
454g	Jam	Asda	29
5	Bananas	Asda	62
12 packs	Crisp	Asda	66
1kg	Rice	Asda	40
3	Naan	Asda	54
4	Yogurts	Asda	33
3x500g	Passata	Asda	87
500g	Yellow Split peas	Asda	58
30	Biscuits	Asda	31
450ml	Ketchup	Asda	28
1 pack	Pancake batter	Asda	7
400g	Tinned sweetcorn	Asda	32
1kg	Mixed Veg	Asda	75
250g	Pasta	Asda	19
500g	Mince	Asda	155
14 packs	Raisins	Quality Save	79
400g	Chickpeas	Quality Save	39
2 packs	Stock Cubes	Tesco	30
1	Butternut squash	Aldi	89
		Total	1457

As you can see most shopping is from Asda, and interestingly I price checked most stuff that Aldi do with Asda and they're the same for things like pasta, rice, passata etc. Fresh veg is definitely cheaper at Aldi though, but not bananas (think most supermarkets do them as a loss leader). The only thing I bought from tesco were stock cubes (Asda and Aldi don't do basic stock cubes) and the cheapest place, by far, to get chickpeas was Quality save/Home bargains. They were only 39p compared to Asda 64p. We have 43p left  in theory, but I'm using some curry powder and spices in the curry and some garlic in spag bol, so will need to account for that too.
I'm going to miss my cups of tea, but can't afford another carton of milk!
If you'd like to sponsor us then you can do it on the Live Below the Line website here.
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