feeding a family of four on a very tight budget...

As you know, on my bucket list is a holiday with my kids. The current choice of location is Day Dream Island - as long as it withstood the catergory 5 cyclone that blew through north Queensland last night...

Anyway... in order to be able to do that I have to tighten up an already tight budget. I came across Sandra's Blog  and seeing as how she is/was in similar circumstances to me I thought I would take a leaf out of her book - or blog as the case may be - and see if I can feed my family of four (1 adult, 2 teenagers - one that eats like a locust! and one pre-schooler) for $120 for two weeks. Her premise is based on 14 meals, or dinners.

I went through my pantry, fridge and freezer and listed every thing in them. Sat down with the copious recipe books, and recipe magazines I have, and menu planned for 14 days, based on what I had in the fridge/freezer/pantry. Anything that I needed to complete the meal went on a shopping list. The shopping list has ten items on it. TEN! and half of them are fruit and vegetables.

So begins the challenge of feeding my family... so we can go to day dream island....

Wish me luck!

and here is her suggestion for stocking your pantry...  happy to report that my pantry has about 95% of what she suggests... :-)