Shopping costs, cooking and what's on the menu?

[PreachyPie]

There is so much posted about how much people spend, but I'm curious about what you spend, where you shop, and what your typical meals are in a week.

Family of 4 - DC are both older teens living at home with hearty appetites.

My grocery shopping averages out at £98 a week.

I shop at Lidl, Aldi, Asda, and Morrisons.

Breakfasts are typically porridge/wheat biscuits / shredded wheat with fruit and seeds, or overnight oats or yoghurt with seeds and fruit.

Lunch could be a sandwich, something on toast like eggs, homemade soup, salad, wrap, jacket potato, pasta, or leftovers, eaten at home or taken as a packed lunch.

Dinners: pasta, roast dinners, stir-fry, casseroles, curries, homemade burgers, meat or fish with various potatoes/rice/veg/salad, pizza.

Snacks and desserts: cheese and crackers, savoury muffins, sweet muffins, flapjacks, cookies, pancakes, ice cream, yoghurt, rice pudding, nuts.

We try to eat 30g of fibre per day and eat 30 different plants in a week.

I occasionally buy crisps, biscuits, frozen pizza (usually make my own). We don't eat much meat, and I eat a lot of pulses. I'm fortunate to have grown up in a family that cooks a lot, and I learned how to make a healthy meal out of not a lot!

We are a family of four (two DDs in primary school) and we spend roughly £130 a week. I do the main shop once a week in either Morrisons or Sainsburys which I always budget £100 for. We then do a fun top up shop at Waitrose or M&S for the weekend to get a bottle of wine and some treats, which is still cheaper than going out to eat.

That does everything including food for packed lunches, household products like laundry detergent and loo roll etc.

We try to mainly cook from scratch and have consciously reduced UPFs for the past couple of years but we don't aim for perfection. I try for an 80/20 approach so if most of our meals are whole food then I don't worry about the odd junk food! I try to buy organic where I can and shop in person so I can look out for yellow stickers and freeze them. I don't tend to buy meat unless it's reduced but when it is I'll freeze it for another time.

Breakfasts are almost always greek yoghurt and fruit in the warmer months and porridge in the colder months. Occasionally Shredded Wheat or Weetabix if DDs want cereal.

Lunches are soups, sandwich and fruit or something simple like egg/mushrooms/beans on toast. Today was oatcakes, cheese and grapes which is also fairly typical.

Dinners are just normal family meals. Tonight was pasta and meatballs, tomorrow is omelette and salad. Curries, risotto, pasta dishes, roast dinners, stir fries, jacket potatoes, fajitas etc.

DDs take packed lunches to school and I keep the cost down by not buying lots of pre packed snacks. They have leftovers from the night before, or cheese and crackers, or a basic sandwich plus some fruit and veg. I batch make snacks for their lunchbox and freeze them. Banana muffins for example are really easy and can be made very cheaply. As an example they've got pasta salad for lunch tomorrow as I cooked extra pasta for dinner tonight and just mixed it with some olive oil, cheese, a tin of sweetcorn and some chopped pepper. That plus an apple and a biscuit feeds them lunch for about £1 a portion.

We are a family of varying numbers between 3-7! Both adult dds have partners who are often here when the dds are. So 7 adults (ds is 14 but eats probably twice what I do).
dh cooks every evening, he enjoys it, always from scratch but meat is usually the main component. Last night was roast beef and all the trimmings, tonight is lamb rump with red cabbage onion and feta salad, flatbreads and minted yoghurt with some wedges, I think tomorrow we’ll have chicken curry with a chickpea curry on the side. One night a week is fish night.
We don’t really meal plan because we never know day to day who’s going to be home for dinner. Dh goes to the butchers at the weekend and chooses a selection of meat and I do an online food shop for the weekly staples.
no one besides dc1 has breakfast, I try and take lunch to work if I’m in the office (normally a grain salad or leftovers), Dh makes soups for lunches a lot during the colder months so will have that or leftovers, I will also have that if I’m home. Ds has school lunches.
We spend a huge amount on a weekly shop between the butchers and the online shop but food and its quality is really important to us and sitting together around the table is a priority so the cost for us is just what it costs.

I agree about UPF.......we also aim for 80/20

We don’t eat breakfast, children have theirs at school and lunch. We don’t take lunch in to work, my husband has a brilliant canteen that’s reasonably priced and all cooked on the premises. I tend to buy mine as if I make it I always forget it!

We don’t really have a set spend per week as it depends what we are up to. It probably averages about £100-150 a week, maybe more if we don’t eat out at weekends. That doesn’t include wine as we buy that separately. The majority is home cooked, but I am partial to crisps!

I'm very partial to crisps too @Franxi and opening a bag of crisps and pouring a glass of wine on a Friday night is one of my little pleasures......and also the reason I aim for "better" in my food choices rather than perfect. 😄

Family of four with two pets. I’ve switched to doing a monthly shop and then trying to keep weekly shops to things that we have run out of. My monthly shop will be £250ish. It was actually £280 today but I got a few things to stash away for Christmas.

So I’ll buy crumpets, brioche, etc. and freeze them. Things to batch cook. Larger packs of cupboard staples. All the lunchbox items that aren’t fresh. All the laundry stuff. Then just shop for fresh things that we can’t freeze or store on a weekly basis for the rest of the month.

Monthly meal plan includes meatballs, sausage pasta, smash burgers, pasta bake, vegetable risotto, homemade chicken and mushroom pie, roast chicken and veg, pizza and salad, fish and homemade chips, sweet and sour chicken, chilli and rice etc. Nothing too adventurous for this phase of life. Things the kids will eat or where they will eat something similar.