Tenner Week Jan 2018: Day 1: Eat healthily

It’s the first day of a brand new Tenner Week challenge! Are you ready to stretch a £10 budget out for the whole week? There’s something new – and thrifty – to try every day to keep us all busy.

Today’s activity is to make sure you eat healthily. It’s in two parts: first of all, make sure you have at least five portions of fruits and vegetables today; secondly, make a menu for the rest of the week’s food.

For today, work out how you can have at least five different fruits and/or vegetables. That could be:

• Fresh fruit
• Fresh vegetables
• Tinned fruit or veg
• Frozen fruit or veg
• One portion of fruit juice or a smoothie
• One portion of pulses (chick peas, lentils, beans, hummus)
• One vegetarian or vegan alternative (sausages, burgers, tofu, tempeh)

Hopefully you’ll have enough more than enough ingredients for your 5-a-day today. Don’t overdo it though, there’s the rest of the week to get through too.

After this, make a menu for the week. Again, try to make most of it healthy if you can.

Work out the following for the remaining six days:

• Breakfasts
• Snacks
• Lunches
• Dinners
• Drinks

Think about fruit, vegetables, starchy foods and protein foods to start with. Then you can add in a few treats and desserts to keep things interesting.

Remember to eat the most perishable goods first, or freeze a few things if they can be frozen. I often freeze some milk and some bread, just to make sure I don’t run out of these staples by the weekend.

What’s happening here

I did the Sunday Stocktake yesterday, so I’m fairly sure we’re going to have enough food to keep us going this week. There’s enough in the fruit bowl, fridge, cupboards and freezer to keep us going, at least without being hungry, although we may be low on fruit and vegetables by the weekend so I’ll have to ration those out a bit.

My menu plan is freshly made, and I’ll be using the salad box contents up first because the can’t be frozen. I also have some vegetable soup for lunches that I made yesterday from things that were looking a bit sad in the fridge, but were still good enough to cook up and blend.

I have a crisp new £10 note straight out of the cash machine, but I’m going to try to have a no-spend day so there’s more left for the weekend.

The stocktake also reminded me that I have quite a few new books to read, and we also have a gift voucher for a meal that needs to be used up. I have three classes on this week too, but they’re all prepaid so they aren’t coming out of the budget, fortunately, otherwise I’d have had to cancel most of them. Instead, I’ll be going along so that the credit isn’t wasted. That’s plenty of good things so that we can keep busy.

Can you make a menu for the week from food you already have? Will you be trying to eat healthily today too?