...to doubt posters who say they feed a family of four on £50/week

[twofingerstoGideon]

I'm really broke myself, so I'd love to believe this is true, but that works out at £1.78 per person per day (£50 divided by 7 days divided by 4 people).

Some people go even further and say they 'run their household' on this amount, implying that they manage all bills, buy loo rolls, cleaning products, sometimes even nappies, etc., for fifty quid.

I'm really good at budgetting, freecycling, buying second hand etc., but I can't help feeling a bit about some of these claims. It's just a kind of one-downmanship, isn't it?

(Awaits flaming...)

Get him to get as many as he can then simmer them down a bit with some sugar or honey, cool in tubs and freeze. World's best sauce for ice-cream when defrosted and warmed up again - or can be mixed with apples or other fruit for a great winter pie.

Didn't think of taking the meat off for sandwiches ! Fab

I have a thing for ham houghs that's v. popular with my kids, for anyone that's interested -

ham and green beans

3lbs potatoes, peeled and diced
bag frozen green beans, thawed
2 onions, chopped
bit of chopped garlic - 1 or 2 cloves
ham hough
black pepper

Lay the potatoes, onions and green beans into the pre-heated slow cooker, add garlic and pepper. Lay a ham hough, or even 2 if you like, on top. Cover with boiling water. Cook on high until it returns to the boil and then reduce heat to low and cook for about 8 hours.

Strip meat from the bones and add back to dish. Serve using a slotted spoon because it should be quite a dry dish. The cooking liquid makes great stock.

marriedinwhite my granny used to make that as well! We called it bacon and onion 'roll' or pie, I think. We had boiled bacon and pease pudding quite often, with carrots, a really thin stock/liquer type gravy, and plain boiled potatoes. It was lush.

The other thing my gran used to make which I have never seen since was boiled lamb (sounds grim) and onion sauce. Oh those post-war menus - they were great weren't they?

I detested pease pudding as a child but we never had it with ham. It was always with salt beef (Jewish part of the family coming out there) and it put me off salt beef - which is amazing - for years. Not until I was very grown up did I learn to appreciate it.

I'm glad you remember that dish though because I have never met anyone else who has ever been able to recall anything like it.

I also remember my father bringing chickens home from Petticoat Lane market when he was in London to make loction. They used to have three or four eggs at various stage of development inside and I thought they were amazing. As indeed was the loction. My grandparents (maternal) had a farm and the chickens from there used for the same recipe simply didn't make the same chicken loction even though they had the eggs. I read somewhere it might have been because the kosher chickens could have been cocks but the cocks wouldn't have had eggs and I digress from the thread. Even though I try, I cannot recreate a loction made from the sort of bird you buy today - it isn't even as good as that made from an old farmyard hen. What my grannie called a "boiler". Far removed from today's pristine breasts and even corn fed organics jobs.

I am currently boiling a chicken carcass with potatoes, carrots, a bunch of celery and an onion for soup. Total cost? Less than £1, and will feed us all (8) for lunch tomorrow :)

Leftovers is fabbluussss!

I get a bacon joint rather than use lardons or bacon in dishes that call for it.

Cook it in the slow cooker, then chop it up in the food processor and add it to soups, risottos, crumbled into yorkshire puds before baking (with cheese) for lunches, or into egg fried rice.

I think when you only have 50 quid a week and 4 people to feed you learn real fast how to do it.

I once fed the 2 of us on $6 for the fortnight due to a mix up moving funds between countries, but we already had plenty of store cupboard stuff so just cleared the cupboards until next pay day. It got weird

indeed, necessity is the mother of invention.

Just went to lidl for the first time- top up shop. I then typed everything into my tesco online thing- saving of over £5! Will def have to go back there in future, thanks for drawing my attention to it! Also thanks for letting me know that tesco is now the most expensive of the big 4- I thought sainsbury's was! Confirmed by a woman on BBC news today saying she can no longer afford to shop in tesco.

It's a bit shit for people like me who physically CAN'T shop around, and are lumbered with Tesco. I KNOW it costs me more, but there's nothing I can do about it without making my disabilities worse.

Aldi, its all about Aldi. We buy pretty much everything but our meat from there (including nappies and the like although sometimes get them from home bargain type places) and I spend about £30 there a week. We are lucky in that my husband does a bit of work for a local butchers so we get a decent discount on really good quality meat. Basically really good meat for Aldi prices.

Before the Aldi opened though, we were spending quite a bit more as the only other supermarket in our town was a sainsbury's.

But its just 2 Adults and a toddler. (and a cat who we buy a 10kilo bag of Wisker's for £14 that lasts a couple months from the local farm superstore)

Like everyone's saying, its easy to do if you know the right places to go.

CouthyMow - I guess online shopping and using MySupermarket to compare Tescos v. Sainsburys etc isn't an option?

Or there's a really cheap online shop that people rave about, where they sell food that's past its Best Before date. Is it called Approved Foods? Plus I think BoffinMum has recommended somewhere where they sell dry goods online in very large quantities.

Yes, Approved Food is great. So is Rosspa.

Online I struggle with - lots of the supermarkets take a double payment as a 'ghost' payment, meaning you have to have twice the amount you are spending on shopping in the bank. Yes, I get that money back in 7-10 days, but OT doesn't help me put electricity on the meter that week!

Both Asda and Sainsbury's have done that to me, Asda twice. I can't risk being left skint like that again.

Can't afford Waitrose/Ocado prices. Tesco online is the only one that doesn't do the Jeffing 'ghost' payment thing to me.

I tried approved foods, and the issue I had with it is the ingredients weren't listed online, meaning I can't check if things are suitable for DS1 and DS3. Especially as ingredients can sometimes change from one week to the next, if a brand decides to 'improve' the recipe.

Tesco online I have given up on - too many subs even when I have typed no subs, and it's been swapped with products that I can't feed my DC's with allergies.

A good example is Coleman's seafood sauce. On offer, but would have bought it anyway, as it is part of one of the few lunches DS3 can and will eat (prawns, avocado & seafood sauce). Subbed with Tesco own brand, which contains milk protein, which he is severely allergic to. As in, anaphylaxis allergic.

I HAVE to do the shopping myself, unfortunately!

Oooh! StreesedHEmum I didn't know about Rosspa!
Thank You so much :-)

couthymow

do you realise ocado price match tesco?

(though of course they dont sell some value brands to price match those)

There a few items on my weekly shop that are cheapest on ocado.... also i got a yearly delivery pass free on groupon which means that i dont pay petrol either

(though maybe not be the best place to feed a whole family for £50 for a whole week)

Just jumping in with a random question about pork/bacon shanks and hamhocks - hope no one minds :)

To those ladies who mentioned these above, when you cook these in the slow cooker are they left extremely fatty - i love the idea of it but I can't do fatty meat?

im also wondering about the shanks and are bacon and pork shanks different?

CouthyMow - that does sound difficult.

There is a thick layer of skin and fat on a ham hough that you have to take off after it's cooked. There's also a lot of connective tissue, that's why it needs to be cooked for a long time.

I think that bacon shanks and pork shanks are the same thing that we call Ham houghs here.

i cook a bacon shank today. Most of the fat just kind of melted off and the rest I cut off.

Me again- discovered the pound shop today. Why I ever shopped anywhere else, I'll never know! Seems that if you have the resources (which luckily I have), then you could easily do it. Market, pound shop, lidl, then sainsbury's or morrisons for meat and the stuff you couldn't find elsewhere. Sorted!

i think we could do with a dedicated cheap cuts of meat thread with idiot guide to cooking them

Long and slow. The answer to many things