Shopping

 Shopping is a love/hate experience for me!

I love to find bargains, but hate it when everything I usually buy keeps going up.

I remember when we used to visit home, in the 1990s, my Mom would do a big weekly shop at Tesco. The store she went to was a massive place which sold all the groceries Mom wanted, plus clothes, household items, toys and books. All the shopping was done in one place, and the prices always seemed reasonable. I'm guessing that's not the reality in the UK now!

Here I go to about 7 different supermarkets and two different drug stores in the hope of getting what I need. David usually stops by a discount supermarket on the way back from work. He gets a lot of daily things like bread, milk, cheese, eggs, and cleaning supplies. That helps a lot!

I buy most of the vegetables, meat, fish and yoghurts. Between us, we spend over 10,000 yen a week, about £50. Sometimes less, most of the time more. Plus, Christopher picks up things from his supermarket if there's a sale on stuff that we use.

Today, Mikey took me to two supermarkets. One has a good selection of fruits and vegetables, plus the fish was reasonable today; the other usually has good meat.

Today, however, everything was very expensive! I know that a lot of items went up this month, but I wasn't expecting to see such a large increase in basic foodstuffs!

These packs of beans used to be 70 yen, now they are 88 yen.

They are small packs, but great for putting on salads or throwing into soups. But a price increase of 18 yen was rather shocking.

The same with breast chicken. For many years, the price was 39 yen for 100 grams, making it a good choice for a tight budget. Today, in a discount supermarket, breast chicken was 129 yen for 100 grams. I know that there's been a problem with chickens and eggs worldwide because of the bird flu, but that's a crazy increase.

If it's just one or two items that have gone up, it's not a problem, but it looks like everything is a lot more expensive. According to the news, about 2,000 items have gone up.

I wanted to try something new, so I bought these today.  

Quail eggs.

I plan to wrap them in pork mince and bread crumbs and fry them. Mini scotch eggs! These are for Christopher's obento; he likes these quail eggs, I don't know if anyone else does!

We really have to grow some vegetables. David has bought a few little plants to start. At the moment, they are in my room. I hope they grow!

pumpkin plants

Watermelon and green pepper.

We wanted to get some strawberry plants, but they didn't look healthy at all!

I'm really trying to save money and be frugal, but it feels like a losing battle.  I cook mainly Japanese-style meals, as buying imported food is very expensive.

Any ideas for budget meals?

I have a few that I'm trying out, I'll let you know how that goes in another post!