5 Frugal Things post 64 – Gingerbread, Bolognese and Insurance

5 Frugal Things post 64

The children have gone back to school this week after half term, much to the annoyance of Jack who asked every day how long until the weekend or how long until the holidays! I have had a productive week with content, whoop to getting a post up and live every day. I have also got a considerable amount of admin done, including getting organised with a fab scheduling tool, more to come on that. Mrs Mummypenny is in a good place for growth at the moment. Traffic is high and social media numbers are growing nicely.

I’ve had a terrible food week, I appear to have developed an addiction to biscuits. And I can’t just eat one, I end up eating the whole packet. Every time I go shopping a big biscuit bundle from Aldi, its so cheap, its maybe 99p and you get 4 packets of biscuits, Nice biscuits, custard creams, malted milk and bourbons. On Wednesday I ate 10, yes 10 malted milk biscuits. I track everything via My Fitness Pal. That was 430 calories eaten in about 10 minutes. Tuesday was slightly worse where I ate 4 eggjoyable eggs from Aldi, that were meant for my children. 804 calories. I feel admitting it on here makes me feel better;-) I have made up for excess chocolate and biscuits with a lot of exercise this week.

What are my 5 frugal things this week

Gluten Free Treats

I have been enjoying a new healthy product. The lovely team at Genius sent me some pancakes, multi-seed bread and breakfast bars to try out. I am loving the bread, its such a nice lunchtime snack toasted with butter. The bread is a lot more expensive than the Aldi white sliced bread I normally buy for the boys. But I have popped it in the freezer and have a toasted slice when I feel like it, so it will last a lot longer!

Car Insurance

Last week I wrote about house insurance renewal time. And this week its car insurance renewal time. Bit more complicated this time as we are changing cars next week and I have a renewal date of 22nd March. Plus we are getting a second car. So that is 1 car insurance swop, plus 1 renewal plus 1 new policy to sort out. Grrr I hate sorting the car insurance. We paid £195 for our Smax insurance last year. So far I have had one quote for the new Toyota and was quote £463!!! Haha far too expensive, and that was apparently 10 months for the price of 12!. I am hoping to get the combined car insurance for less than £400 in total. Wish me luck.

Making treats rather than buying them

Josh came home from school on Thursday feeling a bit sad, and a sure fire way to cheer him up is to make something. He made some gingerbread biscuits using this recipe from cupboard ingredients. A much more fun task to cheer him up being creative rather than buying a snack treat instead.

Pressure Cooker Bolognese

Bolognese is a recipe that I make often, every couple of weeks I serve it up to the family. I shared my secret recipe this week. Its written for the pressure cooker, but the recipe can be easily adapted for the hob. It’s such a great money saving dinner where you can bulk batch and freeze it for weeks to come.

Discovered a new great and free fitness program

Surely everyone in the UK has heard of Joe Wicks the body coach? I watched his TV program this week and was really impressed with his food and Hiit exercise ideas. I thought I would give it a try, particularly given my biscuits and chocolate admission earlier. A 20 minute HIIT session was on the cards on his YouTube channel. It was good and completely free hurrah.

I’m linking up with this Cass, Emma and Becky in this week’s ‘Five Fabulously Frugal things I’ve done this week’ linky.