Back to 1950s cuisine to cope with COL

It depends where you buy it from.

I just priced up the most expensive possible ratatouille ingredients from Ocado and it came to £15.25.

The cheapest beef stew ingredients from Tesco (beef, a casserole pack of veg, potatoes and a casserole mix sachet) came to £8.22 - most of that was the beef, as you’d expect.

£2 now. Shocking.

I live off them. Love the challenge.

How many tomatoes do you get through in a year?

I have a great recipe for red onion, tomato and chilli chutney.

I voted you’re unreasonable but only because the types of foods you seem to be ignoring a whole wealth of international foods in favour of meat pies and basic salads. You could do wonderful curries and tagines with veggies and legumes. Buy your spices from specialist convenience stores and they work out much cheaper than supermarket options. Homemade pizzas are not a substandard option either. Plenty of recipes available online for budget options

We've had some ups and downs but they are definitely more flavoursome than supermarket stuff. I probably saved £300 this year in tomatoes alone (not to mention green tomato chutney at the end of the season which is a firm favourite as a Christmas gift and freezing any surplus crop for sauces).
I am getting an allotment site in spring. So excited!

My meal plan is

Sunday - roast, meat costs somewhere between £6 and £20, all of the other elements are really negligible, a few potatoes, couple of carrots, broccoli or cabbage and whatever else we fancy. Often works out around £2 a head.
Monday - leftovers. Tomorrow is ham, egg, chips and beans as we had gammon today. I’ll make some homemade chips with some potatoes from the bag I used today.
Tuesday - curry / stir fry / stew - if I’ve done a big joint I’ll use the meat from Sunday, otherwise it will be chicken thighs.
Wednesday - jacket potatoes and home made chilli. I make a massive batch in the pressure cooker with lots of different beans and carrots / onions / celery and two big packs of mince. It lasts four weeks for four people, five if I do the portions!
Thursday - pasta and a sauce, sometimes home made, sometimes a healthy jar. Sometimes just tinned tomatoes, garlic and herbs.
Friday - something easy, frozen bits or omelette, beans and toast, eggs and soldiers
Saturday - random. Often something a little elevated.

it makes my life easy and I don’t need to buy tonnes of meat.

Stick with in season veg always anyway - don’t agree with importing when we have so much delicious food grown in our own country.
Have always meal planned and cooked/prepared so leftovers would be used another day - I hate food waste so much. Think it stems from childhood in the 80’s with a single mum & no money, plus the famine in Ethiopia so being far more aware of others real struggles to access nutritional foods - I’ve always been mindful ever since.

Exactly - there are four of us and we eat all the chicken meat

We all have a certain amount of money we consider reasonable to spend on food and if you are a good cook you don’t have to forgo steak, “fancy” vegetables etc you just make them go further. I waste nothing (edible) and never have done consequently my weekly foot bill for 2 is between £40 and £50, the amount many people spend on a takeaway yet we eat 5 star food. Tricks like combining lamb with chickpeas is a simple hack, making meals serve 4 so we have leftovers etc.

last week we had: shepherds pie and veg (2 days), steak Caesar salad, mushroom and lemon pasta (vegetarian), homemade pizza with peppers, courgette , palma ham and mozzarella , rice dal and aubergine pickle (vegan), duck with red cabbage and potatoes dauphinois - hardly roughing it but my bill was £34.29 when I excluded the loo rolls, dishwasher tablets and pack of ibroprofen.

The brown meat has much more flavour than the breast.

Which is why chicken thighs used to be cheap (alas no more - same with lamb shanks).

I have a herb box on my window sill. I had a basil plant that lasted a good 7 months.
You can get rosemary in many places, the park opposite my house had a huge bush and I would grab a sprig when I did lamb before I moved.
Frozen herbs are really good too as you can buy in bulk.

This is extremely wasteful!

How??? Literally, how can aubergine, peppers, onion, garlic and tinned tomatoes ever cost more than beef stew?

I used to buy a whole chicken for the DC and me, we only ate the white breast meat, and as I can’t bear leftovers of any kind, and seeing the carcass just sitting there made me feel sick I’d throw it in the bin immediately.

Just DD2,.and me now, since DD1 moved out, so I only buy chicken breast fillets, and have that on the few occasions I make a roast, we had that for our Christmas Dinner too.

I can’t bear seeing any leftovers on plates either, so they go straight in the bin, I could never make anything out of leftovers! Can’t stand reheated food either.

I accept that I’m very strange.

We didn’t have avocados, peppers, aubergines or chillies growing up. Vegetables were seasonal and UK grown - although the sprout season seemed never ending (nasty little things). Salads were lettuce, tomato, cucumber, radish and beetroot (another of my pet hates) with a splash of vinegar and some salt. No olive oil.

We didn’t have pasta and rarely had rice.

Pretty sure it was sarcasm

I think with modern supermarkets we’ve lost sight of eating seasonally and locally. Avocados and pomegranates flown thousands of miles never used to appear on a weekday menu, they might form part of a special meal but the idea of avocado on toast as a routine breakfast never would have been in my house growing up.

While it’s nice to have greater variety in food, it’s not economical to buy out of season, but it’s hardly post war rationing either. There’s a middle ground to be had.

God, let's not start this debate again

You chucked fillet steak in the bin … why not keep it for sandwiches.?