Mr Sainsbury makes a delivery

I get a delivery from Mr Sainsbury once a week, more or less, depending... The service I get is great and the value is excellent.

I know that the value is (relatively) excellent because I go through mysupermarket.com which compares the prices and I have found that for me Mr S is always the cheapest, followed by Mr A, then Mr T. What I found interesting is that if I collect a list of groceries, and then just swap from Mr S to one of the others, the comparisons aren't always direct and if you use the swap and save function you can usually knock quite a bit off the comparison. Mr S is still cheaper, but by less of a margin than I had thought.

I think it is the sort of thing you buy, some shops are always going to be cheaper for some things than others. I am sure that some people find Mr T cheaper, and I think I look quite flash to the rest of the street, with a Mr S delivery. They don't see the vast range of basics in there.

Well, this week I had gone a bit giddy. There seem to be piles and piles and piles of stuff - and relatively little necessities. It was all inexpensive, or a bargain, or on offer but not necessary. Part of the problem is that I thought my darling father would be visiting - he isn't. So little bear will have to help dear heart demolish a stockpile of grapes. Rather optimistically I hoped to make a large amount of soup to go into the freezer. Firstly I rather hope dear heart will like this soup and secondly it means using the hand blender. I am scared of the hand blender but I am not going to let the mountain of inexpensive Sainsburys basics carrots go to waste. Then there is four lots of stewing beef each of which should translate into at least six portions of stew. The meat is in the freezer as we speak but at least one of these must be translated into stew or the inexpensive Sainsbury Basics Vegetable pack - very reasonable offer - will go to waste.

I am not sure I have enough appropriate containers. Or energy. Or time. Or freezer space. Sigh.

But I was extremely foolish and typed 'basics' into the search engine and I think I got a bit carried away. However I did blink at some things. Did you know that Mr S does 'basics' smoked salmon offcuts? If I could stand the stuff I would snap it up as a bargain.

I think I need to start in March with a proper budget and meal plan. And a list of what we have in (why did I get half a dozen tins of corned beef? Oh yes, it was on offer). And a lot more enthusiasm than I feel now.