Food variety....it's costing me!

[CassKins]

I currently don't drive and am recently single. I eat well and am fit/healthy to the best of my knowledge. And...I don't like what food is costing me since everything seemed to shoot up in price!

I usually strive to eat a very varied diet, so lots of healthy lean meat/fish and tons of lovely veg and salad. I don't like large, hot meals such as casseroles or curries as they irritate my IBS, but apart from that and red meat I enjoy a lot of Italian and Greek inspired lighter meals, sometimes with tortilla wraps, rice, fish and chicken. I will buy everything from avocado's, cherry tomatoes, various peppers to making my own coleslaw. I love all of this, but it is becoming so expensive, especially if I look for higher quality ingredients and organic meat.

Problem is, my income has dropped a little over the past year (self employed), so whilst I am trying to fix that, I could do with spending less on food. Some of it, especially decent cuts of fresh meat or fish are really whacking my budget. I was reading about the push to get people to eat more variety, yet I think in my case it might be a good idea to actually reduce it. Sourcing some of my fave foods can be a pain in the arse, too, and online shopping just seems to grow more and more expensive..

Which brings me to my point: for over a decade in my 30's I ate pretty much the same thing almost daily. That was granola with fruit for breakfast, fresh soup and a small bread roll for lunch, and a baked chicken fillet (not home made) with vegetables (around 7 or 8 in number) every evening. Sometimes I swapped the chicken for a fish fillet, usually in breadcrumbs.
I would love to go back to this, as it would be a ton more affordable than what I spend now. My only 'processed' yearnings are in the coating - no matter how well I cook a sauce, etc, I much prefer fish with a batter or crunchy coating. I also love tinned tuna and mackerel, and keep a lot of green veggies in the freezer.
Sadly I can't eat the typical healthy and cheap meals with lentils, beans and onions/garlic due to my IBS, so a lot of typical batch cooking and soups are difficult.
Would returning to that 'diet' be healthy enough? With all the hullaballoo surrounding processed foods I could be overthinking it about the breadcrumb coating...

£6.50 for 3 tins of tuna? Where are you shopping? I have never seen it at this price

i think if you are shopping organically and it’s £7 a chicken breast you will have to either find the budget by cutting back elsewhere, stop buying organic or stop eating chicken, and only you know what compromise suits you best

Would it be possible to shop at one of the budget supermarkets like Aldi or Lidl? It might save you a bit but I guess you'd need to account for public transport/cab to get there.

Are you eating seasonally? What's in season is usually cheapest. You can achieve variety in flavour with a well stocked herb and spice cupboard. Consider growing your own herbs and freezing excess.

@WhenSunnyGetsBlue No idea why but I always screw up when it comes to meal planning. Have tried so many batch cooking ideas then not wanted them on the day, etc. I can't be trusted
Not too bad with nuts as I eat them so slowly they remain cost effective. Pine nuts are silly money now though, even at budget prices (lidl, etc).

Cheapest things are veg, salad, dried fruit, most regular fruit - have no idea why people complain that it is expensive to buy them. You see a lot of arguments online about poverty and access to veg, but I live in a shit town and even here we have copious selections of veg at very affordable prices. I imagine the issue with veg is that you have to have 'other' things to make it palatable - so the cost shoots up. I have often browsed ready meals and they are stupidly expensive now, even a tiny chicken korma.
The only processed food that remains cheap is generally frozen nugget type stuff, which I don't like.

I've been thinking about doing this too, to save brainspace and hopefully money. I just can't seem to get organised though, need to sit down and plan out the right nutrients and amount of calories.

For meat, I've been meaning to try chicken livers because I've heard they're very nutritious, but haven't taken the plunge yet

Frozen fish is alright if fully defrosted in milk, then poached instead of pan fried but it is slightly depressing.

£6.50 for 3 tins of tuna? Where are you shopping?

I think it's called Rio Mare (sp?), but the cheaper ranges are not far behind. There's a tuna I love at M&S (called Ventresca I think) that is a tiny tin at nearly £5! Everything's gone insane.

Your diet is so important for your health. Only cut back if you really can’t afford it. When you are older you will benefit from the healthy diet you have now

Well i am 50 now and have always eaten healthy but if i have to downgrade to a decent but not optimal product I might. I will likely opt for an appropriate substitute, though, so won't be slurping down reconstituted fish fingers

You have expensive taste in tuna Tuna is up near the top of the food chain and can contain too much mercury.

Try sardines, mackerel, herrings etc. Check out your local polish shop for interesting tinned fish.

Have you tried tofu? Low fodmap and great for stir fry.

I found a good way to make the coating for fish without needing to deep-fry

Make up 50gm of couscous. then dip a dry fish fillet in beaten egg. cover the fish fillet in the couscous. Lay it on a sheet of foil and bake in the over for 15-20 mins. The couscous goes crunchy while sealing in the fish which remains moist. Add lemon juice & black pepper to the couscous for extra flavour.

I buy Waitrose rainbow trout, and fillet that which works out about £1.80 per decent sized fillet. Or use frozen hake, defrosted & dried first. About £1.60 per serving. Occasionally, salmon tails if I can find them.

I always cook from scratch and in the face of rising prices, have learned how to bone a chicken leg. You end up with a flat piece of meat about 3" by 5" once trimmed. I cover it with grated lemon or orange zest and dry-fry in a non-stick pan. Or cover the meat side in a paste of butter, chopped shallots and garlic and dry-fry.

It is an inexpensive cut I buy from a neighbour (truly free-range hens ), tastes great, and my very picky ds loves it. A very sharp knife is essential.

Since the CoL crisis, we eat less but better quality meat. I buy most at the butcher now. Tonight we had venison burgers with pear chutney and salad.

I make a lot of veggie soups. Buy large bottles of black olives in brine, but rinse them before cooking, or put them in herby oil for an hour before eating. Large packs of mixed nuts for salads.

Eating well on a budget requires much more careful shopping but is still possible. For one adult, one teen boy, I spend £60 a week which includes our 30 fruit & veg a week. Up from £50 two years ago.

Yes, OP, why are pine nuts so expensive now? They are a crazy price.

Thanks for the coating advice, will definitely give that a go! I would love to retain decent quality foods that I can work with.

And mackerel is a favourite too, so will explore more. Glad it's not just me here, I used to spend a crazy amount on food, and it felt justifiable to a point. But I can't keep it up now.

Thank you again, everyone :)

@CassKins Have you tried flexible meal planning. I could never commit at the beginning of the week to eating a meal on a set day. I note down a bunch of recipes that use similar ingredients and then choose from that list throughout the week. Eg. Say you bought eggs, & some veg. You could make a quiche, Spanish omelette, ramen. The eggs would do for scrambled eggs in the morning, you could use the veg for a stir fry etc.
Eggs, potatoes, aubergine, butternut squash etc are so versatile. I also find it quite fun to play ready steady cook, knowing that the ingredients I bought go together and could make a hundred different recipes. That way you can still have variety. By the end of the week you'll look forward to switching up the ingredients. Follow the seasons and you can make different meals most weeks. I very rarely have any waste.

These days I think that eating what you want when you want it is a luxury. But you can certainly still eat a balanced and healthy diet on a budget, you just might have to get more creative.

Also I don't assume that expensive=better quality. I bought minced beef from Sainsbury's and compared it to Lidl. Lidl had less water and felt like much better quality produce at half the price.

If you're buying organic meat, it can be cheaper to get a bulk organic meat box delivery thing and freeze it in portions.

If you live in a city, go to local ethnic food shops - they can be way cheaper for veg that's sold as an exotic luxury in supermarkets. Things like avocado, mango etc.

Did you also look at too good to go type apps (is that the name?) that sell off surplus food from shops and cafes - you can get bargain bags of all sorts of stuff if you're able to be flexible and pick up .

I was under the impression that soil had to lie fallow for a number of years before being considered organic for this reason, is that not the case?

I had no idea how much meat and fish cost until I met DH. I look at how much less my weekly food bill would cost without it and could cry. I am a very simple eater and pretty much see food as energy, so I don’t share his food enjoyment. I never buy him fish now, though, as it’s just too expensive.

Yes, the meat is the problem! A single person sized tray of sandwich chicken at M&S is £4 online. I don't even particularly want it to be cheaper at this point because the standards (both animal and worker ethics) and quality are already grim for the large part.
I would much prefer to cut it down, but wish I knew how far I could go without iron or health issues arising. Many Veggies on MN say they haven't eaten meat for 30 happy years, but most vegetarian women I have known needed various supplements or ferritin, which then opens up gut issues and I already have IBS.....aaagh!

If I look into ethical supermarket info I feel so depressed I want to stop going out ever again. Its's best if I don't go there, since I have so little power to choose at the moment as don't live anywhere close to a farm or wholefoods shop and don't current'y drive.

Money is tighter lately, but not dire. I don't really need to plunder the reduced section yet, but need to rethink my position on meat.

I have been vegetarian most of my life, so my body doesn’t know any difference. It’s never occurred to me to take any supplements for lack of meat intake.

@PotatoPudding I wondered this too, since I have barely eaten even poultry for most of my life, and managed to have monthly periods, I must have dodged a bullet there!
I have always eaten fish, although only with regularity after 40, when I started reading about women's health. I would hope that if I was going to experience iron issues it would have happened prior to meno.

At the very most I would prefer to only eat meat once per week. It would be such good news for me to not have to worry. I am the type of person who thinks it ruins a perfectly good pasta, so I am probably in a minority!

I eat very similarly to you, generally following a Mediterranean sort of diet to keep my gut as healthy as possible as I have IBD.

I shop with Ocado and most weeks will find that they have some sort of fish on flash sale which halves the price and then I buy whichever free range chicken breasts are on offer. Same with yoghurt, I just buy whichever live yoghurt is on offer. I find that by being flexible re brands I can keep costs down.

Re coatings for fish I have managed to come round to a homemade coating using eggs, very well seasoned, and a particularly good panko breadcrumb (a brand called Yutaka), and a little finely grated parmesan. The coating ends up very crunchy if cooked under the grill and I now prefer it to bought fish fingers or whatever.

It is, I think it's four years.The PP is just against organic for some reason.

That probably is the case officially. Doesn’t happen around here I can tell you!

Also there is the issue of an organic field being in the middle of two non organic fields. When they are spraying the two either side, the wind blows it into the middle one, I have seen it happen many times.

I am not against organic, but after listening to farmer friends laughing about it being a joke and then witnessing the spraying, I really wouldn’t waste my money.

If you can’t eat pulses, going completely vegetarian would be difficult. Can you sub dairy products for meat - eg cauliflower cheese as a main meal occasionally? Aubergine parmigiana? Cheese isn’t cheap though. Frozen and tinned fish is definitely cheaper. I try to buy free range meat, but only eat it once or twice a week due to cost, but then I eat a lot of pulses.

I think meal planning is essential to keep costs down, I do a plan for the week based on what I’ve got in the fridge/freezer and then buy anything else I need. However, it usually includes at least one (home made) freezer meal. So if I get to a night when I don’t fancy what’s on the plan or if I get asked out I can skip that one, bring it forward or push it further back.

I don’t get on with batch cooking, instead I cook once and eat twice, if you do this a few times and freeze the second portion you’ve soon got a few ‘ready meals’.
I feel your pain, every time I go shopping I look at the total in disbelief - everything seems to go up and up.

If you are buying frozen fish fillets don't buy basa. It d fine as a protein source but doesn't taste of much, which isn't surprising as it's a freshwater fish not a sea fish.
I recommend hake . Cheaper than cod, full of flavour and cooks well from frozen. Lovely big flakes.

@ODFOx thanks for the tip!

Do you cook it in foil? What do you serve it with?

I am rubbish with fish recipes