This is a guest post written by Heather McAvan who blogs over at www.pret-a-mummy.com.

Moving into January after Christmas is always pretty painful financially for any family. For us in particular, it’s been a financial squeeze since we had a major gas leak just before Christmas. £800 later and we are still feeling it, so I’m determined to economise in another area of our lives to scrape some of it back again. After looking at all our direct debits and making changes where I could, the next obvious thing to look at was our food shopping.Every week I spend around £100 in the supermarket and try as I will, I just cannot get it below that mark! It doesn’t seem to matter how much I plan, or what I buy, it’s always around £100! Well not this week, I was determined not to use the supermarket at all, and simply see what I already had in my freezer that we could survive on until the next pay day.

I was actually quite surprised at what was in there, and annoyed at myself for discounting it. The first thing I noticed was the frozen veg that I must have bought ages ago. There is actually evidence to suggest that the nutritional value of frozen veg is often higher than fresh veg, so nothing to be ashamed of there.

For carbs we had some frozen rice – this is great for money saving as you only need to take out a bit at a time and is SO much cheaper than the microwave variety. We also had some oven chips and various smiley faces that are fine to eat once in a while. For protein we had a fish pie mix that I bought in the frozen section a while ago, salmon, beef medallions and some belly pork.

Weekly menu:

Monday

Fish pie with frozen veg and frozen mash

Tuesday

Beef medallions with homemade pepper sauce, frozen chips and frozen peas.

Wednesday

Salmon Pasta with frozen peas, cream and cheese.

Thursday

Stir fry belly pork with homemade sauce, frozen rice and frozen veg

Friday

Vegetable lasagne with frozen veg, homemade tomato sauce, lentils and pearl barley.

Do you know what, it was lovely! It was so nice not having to worry about getting fresh veg in, and comforting to know that we already had in everything we needed. I’ve saved £100 by not going to the supermarket and just using up what we already had in the house. I am now determined to save £100 a month by having one week where I don’t visit a shop at all – I’ll freeze what we leave over and plan ahead.

I’m really pleased with my efforts and surprised how easy it was to cook healthy, nutritious and tasty meals with frozen foods. Take my challenge – try not visiting the supermarket for a week and use up what you already have in, I think you’ll be surprised at what you can do!