This was Easter weekend which budget wise feels a bit wonky.
SHOPPING
I shopped on Good Friday because that seemed like it might be easier, I had a feeling that on Saturday everyone was going to remember that the shops were closed all day on Easter Sunday and it might get a bit mad. I didn’t have a proper list on my phone because honestly, I hadn’t really planned and anyway I felt like there was too much food in the house. So handwritten list
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I love Lidl and it’s veg offers, this week, new potatoes, shallots and carrots for 25p each which is ridiculously good. Ma and I share the cost of Christmas and Easter lunches so I don’t take them out of my food budget but we did bought a bottle of wine that was recommended in the Guardian, it was £6.49, so later in Sainsburys Ma paid for my eggs and mushrooms (£2.85). So excluding the wine but including the eggs and mushrooms, I spent £10.20 on Friday and later I bought spinach and butter and mini eggs but I can’t find the receipt for those but the total spent this week was £13.84
COOKING AND EATING
Food this week was all about Easter. On Easter Sunday, I ate my Easter Egg for breakfast (thanks Christelle!). It wasn’t a massive egg but it was just the right size for my needs!
I am my mother’s daughter so when I say lunch I mean sometime between 2 and 5pm! We started with anchovy and shallot flatbread, followed (about an hour and a half later) by roast lamb (this recipe which we never get bored with) with roast potatoes, leeks and spinach.
Pudding was mini eggs and jelly bunnies
There was also whiskey
On Monday, we had cross h’s for breakfast. (Cross h’s are just hot cross buns but apparently I couldn’t say that when I was little so they are cross h’s or cross h buns.), I ate roast dinner leftovers late Monday afternoon.
Tuesday was another leftover day for lunch and dinner. I was completely wiped out by the time change on Tuesday.
Wednesday also featured leftovers for lunch and dinner was pasta with leftover shallot/anchovy goo and added mushrooms.
Thursday lunch was leftover pasta and dinner was the last of the leftover potatoes and vegetables.
On Friday night I ate curry at Sarah’s birthday bash.
LESSONS LEARNED
I drank too much. Everyone knows how much I like a drink but I decided after the mother of all hangovers and in light of revised consumption advice, to make sure that I stuck to the guidelines. Over the Easter weekend, I drank more than that and it wasn’t good. However, that’s a lesson about moderation not budgeting. But it’s also a lesson about budgeting, I felt that there was a bit too much food in the house this week and over the next month I’m going to work a bit on underestimating what I need and seeing how I do.
Ma and I headed to Watford for Laura’s birthday lunch. Lunch was great and I learnt all about how anacondas attack their prey. This was a practical demonstration with Oli as the anaconda and me as the prey. Oli and Joe are both lovely. Joe is cheerful, active baby who looks a lot like his Daddy but unlike Daddy is rarely grumpy, even when he’s tired! Oli is just a delight, he’s so much fun to be around and is sucking up knowledge like a sponge and his reading is brilliant (he read me one of his school books).
Thinking about that got me thinking about how 2016 goals are as helping me focus overall, because I don’t think that early mornings would have been easy to make a habit if other goals weren’t also in play. Keeping an eye on money means that I food prep better which makes it easier to get out of the house in morning because I grab breakfast and lunch and go. The same for having a work uniform, it’s just one less decision to make each day.
So I took a chunk of butter (about 25g), a can of anchovies (30g) in olive oil and a load of sliced shallots (about 15-20 shallots). I put it all in a pan and let them cook gently over a low-ish heat until they were soft and browned and just perfect.
Then I put them on some stretched out pizza dough, added some mozzarella and baked in an extremely hot oven for about 15 to 20 minutes.
Sunday was a less successful eating day, I did alright until at about 8:30pm I realised that I’d forgotten to cook dinner, I was reading and involved in my book.
Vegetables and an egg
On Friday and Saturday, I did weekend things and shopping. I did not sleep in.
I had heard a lot about this mousse, it had guinness in it but no egg and was really, really simple. H had found it 
Dinners were more interesting, I made a lemon and mushroom orzo with a chicken leg that was fabulous but needs some refinement and less lemon zest and which I completely didn’t take a photo of..
I finished off the last of the osteotomy bean stew, that I made back in October and needed to be rescued from the freezer and eaten or thrown away! That with rice and some of the roasted vegetables was a good dinner.
Nic Dempsey 