Doing a $21 Challenge

The $21 Challenge is from Simple Savings. Its a great way to use up food in your Freezers, Pantry, garden etc.

This is the book that is very helpful with the challenge.

The challenge is for a week. But because our freezer and pantry is so full from the Christmas season, we will be doing this for about a month. The $21 is for a family of 4, so we have $31.50per week. For our family it doesn't include milk, which is $21.95 for a weeks worth of milk. So our true total is $53.45 including milk per week. Also the $31.50 is only for food, not non-food items. Not that we need to get any non-food items, laundry full with what we need.

So I have taken a stocktake of all our food we have.
Then have made a weekly menu plan, based around the food we have.
From that menu plan was able to see if there was anything we needed to get for the week.

Wont share with you the stocktake because it is very long a quite amazing how much food we have. But here is my menu plan for this week.
Breakfast: put together in one container rolled oats, toasted muesli and honey puffs. That has made one full container to last us the week as a crazy muesli :) also have weet-bix, and lots of bread that can be toasted up.
Lunch and snacks: have lots of bread that we can use. As well as fruit, and baking (have to finish of my birthday cake, my sister brought me)
Dinner is more planned
Monday: Beef stir fry with veggies and noodles
Tuesday: Roast chicken with roast veggies and broccoli
Wednesday: Chicken rice risotto (with peas)
Thursday: Chicken pot pies with potatoes and mixed veggies
Friday: homemade Pizza and chips (Hawaiian and Chicken)
Saturday: BBQ sausages and salads (green and either pasta or potato salad)
Sunday: Tray-baked Lamb with cous cous

We don't always have dessert but do have some jelly and instant pudding that we can have sometimes.

Have already brought milk $21.95 and with my $31.50 have only spent $18.70 for kumara 500g, onions 1.5kg, Apples 1.5kg, and 12 pack of eggs, ice cream 2L and a extra milk 3L for kids milkshakes.
So have $12.80 for the rest of the week.

And yes I believe we can make it through the week and not go over budget.