€10 Meal Plan Challenge

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This week I was asked to be part of a challenge with 3 other Irish Youtubers. To make a full meal plan for a week with €10. I was in, no asking me twice. I love a good challenge. Can you guess I might be just a little bit competitive.

The contents for this post

1. Research for the meal plan
2. The shopping experience
3. What I got for €10
4. Meals I made for the week for €10
5. Summary on the whole experience
6. Other participants in the €10 Meal Plan Challenge

1. Research for the €10 Meal Plan

Whats great is we can now look up the prices in different shops without leaving our home. Which makes the planning for a €10 meal plan alot easier.

Before we get started we had set some Rules to make it fair for everyone

The Rules

1. Only shop in 1 Shop
2. No Yellow Stickers
3. No use of condiments unless bought.

I chose to price up Aldi and Tesco. First, Aldi for the great prices and then Tesco as they have great own brand options. Putting together a rough plan of what I would like for my meals and snacks, I began to look up the prices. It soon became aparent that I was going to have to make a lot of choices as €10 really didn’t cover what I thought it would. Which meant looking at options where I could you use the same produce across a few different meals. I finally got it nailed down to €10 and to my surprise and probably yours too, the best value for my €10 meal plan was, Tesco.

2. The Shopping Experience

With my list in hand off I went to my Local Tescos. I picked up the self scanner to keep me on track as I was going around. Everything was going great until I came to pick up the loose carrots which I had priced, 2 carrots at 20c. Ye, it was not that easy. I was back and forth to that scales to get the perfect size carrot for my 20c. Then, what I was hoping would not happen did, an item was out of stock. It was the Tesco curry sauce, my subsitute was 20c extra, then I seen I forgot to add back the stock cubes onto my list too. Meaning I’m now out by 61c sounds like nothing but when you have everything accounted for it really is.

Choices had to be made. I needed the sauce for the dinner and the stock for the lunches. So I needed to cut from somewhere else. My beloved tea, milk, biscuits or a tin of beans. I was so torn standing there in Tescos, going back and fort in my head. But in the end I couldnt give up my tea and milk, so bye bye biscuits. I finally got to check out and everything came to €9.90. Kicking myself, I could have gotten a bigger carrot!

3. What I got in Tescos for my €10 Meal Plan

1.	Tesco Bread	0.75
2.	Tesco Butter	0.99
3.	Tesco Milk 1l	0.85
4.	Tesco 40 Teabags	0.79
5.	Loose Carrot	0.20
6.	****Turnip – Super 6 Offer	0.49
7.	****Potatoes 1kg – Super 6 Offer	0.49
8.	Tesco Boil in a bag Rice	0.69
9.	Chicken Drumsticks x10	3.00
10.	Tesco Chicken Stock Cubes	0.41
11.	Stockwell Beans 420g	0.25
12.	Tesco Madras Sauce 500g	0.99

4. My €10 Meal Plan

Breakfast

2 slices of toast with butter and a cup of tea every morning

Lunches

Vegtable Soup with a slice of bread (3 Portions)

Baked Potato with Beans (3 Portions)

Beans on Toast with butter x2 (1 Portion)

Dinners

Chicken Curry with Rice (4 Portions)

Chicken Drumsticks x2 Baked with Turnip and Potatoes (3 Portions)

Extras

4 Slices of Bread

A bag of Rice

Butter

I toasted a slice of bread if i felt like a snack inbetween meals.

5. So how did I do eating for a week on €10?

To wrap it all up I’m going to go through what I felt the pros and the cons were for me during this challenge.

Starting with the Pros.

I did manage to cover my meals for the week within the €10. It shows it is possible and with going online to look at the options I was able to come up with budget friendly meals that I enjoyed. For instance, baked potatoes and beans are a great comfort food lunch option. I found 25c beans are lovely and I will now be making a switch. By looking up the websites in advance, I was able to see what was on offer and make best use of those savings. The vegetable Soup and Chicken curry were batched cooked making it easy during the week to just pick out the meal and reheat it.

It brought me back to looking at my protion sizes and cutting out snacking. This of course was a complete side affect of the challenge. But a welcome one to my waistline. But the biggest pro for me to come from the challenge was, there was no food waste at all. By the end of the week everything was pretty much used and what I do have left over will be used this week.

The Cons

While there were many great pros there was also quiet a few cons. Yes I did manage to buy enough food to cover my meals but it was extremely tight and it was bare basics. While I did lose a few pounds, this was due to not consuming near enough calories. Which I would not consider a good thing on a regular basis. I was hungry at times and really missed having snack options like fruit or yogurts, which I had to completely omit. Going throught the week I was constantly monitoring the milk to make sure it would last till the end of the week. It was not a comfortable way to be.

6. Other Participants in the €10 Meal Plan Challenge

Overall I thought this was a great experience and I cant wait to see what the other Ladies did with their €10.

Please check out there Results

Santis @thecaribbeandub

Caz @Irishbudgetingjourney

Natasha @my.budgeting.life

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