Food for thought Fridays - Avoiding the supermarket

Our new house has a supermarket just five minutes walk away. This spells big problems for our budget because we keep dashing to it every couple of days to get the things we've run out of, and end up spending way too much on groceries.

I got a shock reading through our bank statement this week, so banned myself from going to the supermarket for as long as possible.

Well, I feel somewhat ridiculous writing this post, since I only managed to avoid going for about five days. However, I did have to get creative in that time, and wanted to share some of the fun I had with it.

Creative solutions when avoiding the supermarket

• We ran out of garlic and ginger, so I substituted in the powdered form of both where needed. I had never thought to do this before, but I didn't notice a difference in taste and it actually made dinner easier to prepare.

• I wanted to make cannelloni as there's heaps of spinach growing in my garden and I had half a packet of cannelloni tubes to use up. However, I didn't have ricotta so substituted with some cottage cheese and cream cheese I had in the fridge. 

• My cannelloni dish also required either chopped tomatoes or pasta sauce. I had neither. What I did have was tomato paste, four cherry tomatoes, one large tomato, a jar of sun-dried tomatoes, as well as zucchinis, basil and oregano growing in my garden. I chopped these up and boiled them together in a small saucepan of water to make my own pasta sauce. It was delicious.

• We quickly ran out of vegetables and my garden hasn't started producing much yet, so I took L for a walk down to the church garden where we weeded a bit in exchange for a beetroot and some green beans. I roasted the beetroot with an onion and three small purple carrots from my garden to make a small side dish for Paul and I.

• I ran out of cleaning spray, but since I make my own it was no big deal to refill this.

Now, the reason my supermarket avoidance came to an end is because we had friends come over for dinner unexpectedly last night. Paul gave me the call asking if that was OK after I had already prepared our small cannelloni dish and beetroot side for dinner. To make sure we had enough for four extra guests, he headed to the supermarket and bought a hot chicken, a prepared salad and some dinner rolls.

However, if it wasn't for this unexpected event, I think I could have lasted a few more days, and got increasingly creative as I went.

I'm keen to see if I can last a whole week now.