SUM of expenses per month

I have a worksheet where column A is the date (in format 01-Jan-2004), column C is the amount spent and column D is what is was spent on.

I would like to find out how much was spent on food each month, how much on travel etc. So I need to be able to say

Where column A = November 2004 AND column D = "Food" SUM all numbers in column C

But I'm a novice at Excel. Would this best be done by writing a function in visual basic or is there a quicker way to do it?

Thanks for any help

You may get more help on this one in the VBA forum :-)