to think the price of shopping is getting rediculous?

[Ilovesunflowers]

Especially tuna. Noticed a pack of 4 was nearly £9 in my local supermarket. I use a lot of tuna and it used to be a cheap meal (pasta, tuna and veg).
Bread is crazily expensive. It's hard to keep costs down for shopping now.

The £30-5 I mentioned was FOOD budget so didn't include other things like nappies (although that stuff is still peanuts in Aldis). We do a lot of batch cooking and freeze portions of what's left after dinner. That way a coupe of nights a week we just raid the freezer. It helps us get through our "skint week"

I have swapped asda for farmfoods. Was really worried the food would be poor quality but had vouchers posted through the letterbox with £5 off of £50 and £10 off £100. This month i have spent £120 and about £80 in asda on other bits i cant get in farmfoods. I usually spend £80 in asda per week so a good saving.

Try the sirloin steaks and pork chops. They are very nice

Yanbu, it's very worrying that in a yet the cost of a typical shop has increased by atleast £30 more
And in a week where i need shampoo/cleaning products that adds on a considerable amount.

I have to use own shop brands of most stuff, most are ok, but the cheap bread leaves alot to be desired and tbh i end up going for the supermarkets more expensive £1 loaf.
But kingsmill etc cost around £1.35-1.65 , very shocking as is the cost of tuna also. I either buy when on offer or buy the value brand, its hardly noticebal in a nice sauce or on jacket potato.

Potatoes have also skyrocketed in price, as have cucumbers-99p in Tesco
I wonder what price the poor farmers recieve though

If i had a car i would go to the local farmshop, its inaccesible by pedestrians.

I dread to think of how much my shop will be in another yrs time, particularly worrying considering the cuts the government are making, tough times ahead

Year not yet, bloody typos on phone

Wonders where the closest agricultural market is to Putney .

It is going up and up. We don't have to scrimp but Asda works out at about £30-£40pw less than Sainsburys. I don't understand why anyone would pay more for the sake of paying more. Can't really shop around much because I work full time and am time poor but if it were the other way round and I was time rich and money poor I reckon I could slice £150 pcm of the food budget.

I walk through Waitrose on my way home every night and pick up reduced stuff for the freezer when I see it. This week I have got 6 Aberdeen Angus burgers reduced from 1.49 ea to 31p ea and two boeuf stroganoffs reduced from £6.99 to £1.55 ea. I have since Xmas picked up a whole salmon for £9 (2.5kilo) and two free range chickens reduced from 11.99 to 2.55. Pick it up when I see it and bung it in the freezer.

That tip about buying an extra tin of something useful every week is a good one. Thank you for that. And value pasta which I resisted for so long is actually fine. It tastes just like well, um, pasta. Someone on my storecupboard thread gave it the thumbs up. And they were right.

I also second frozen veg. Nothing is wasted. I can't remember the last time I threw food in the bin.

I buy the tesco value tuna chunks. They are absolutely fine. Never ever buy tina flakes though, they are absolutely vile.

I buy frozen vege to nfc, stores for ages, tastes better and is much better for you as no vitamins are lost as it is frozen when very fresh

Corn on the cobs much, much cheaper from the frozen section.
And value chicken is just as good as good as the quality stuff, just chop the fat off

married there used to be a market behind where Waitrose is which Nanny and I used to go to. I guess it's long gone.
I'm lucky, we have a good market here, but we're very rural and the market and local greengrocer buy from the local allotment holders, so things are very fresh, local and cheap. I spend around £20 per week on fresh fruit and veg for five, considering we have two veggies in the house, and three that take fruit in their lunchboxes five days a week, I think that's pretty good.
I'm limited on supermarkets. The big names are five to ten miles away, so for nipping in stuff, it's the Co op, quite pricey.
However, one of the things we do is have our milk delivered. We worked out that it saved us around twenty quid a week. The reason, we're not going into the supermarket daily to pick up milk and therefore not picking up other stuff just because it's there. So although the milk is ten pounds a week, it's saving us in the long run.

YANBU. I am lucky we don't have to watch every penny with our food shopping (I think that's because unlike most people we know on similar incomes, we don't have a car which obviously take up a huge amount of money) but we do try and save where we can.

We get loads of value range stuff that is absolutely fine. I would love to be a savvy shop-arounder but due to health problems and aforementioned lack of car, it's just not possible, so it's Tesco online all the way right now.

Quick question for the grow-your-own crew if I may :) - those grow bag things, can you reuse them for a few years or do the nutrients deplete too much? Our first year we did reasonably well, but the second year was utterly pointless. We don't have a garden BTW, so no compost bin etc. I really don't feel it's worth doing this year due to lack of time/energy.

I worry about the quality of Value/own brand stuff after horsegate. God knows what they put in the processed food or spray on the fruit and veg.

I make our own bread because the others prefer it (I love a crunch baguette myself) and we don't get through much meat (just one carnivore) or fish (2 fish eaters). I try the buy the best quality - some cheap things are a waste of money (bacon that disappears with all the water added or chopped toms that are all juice!). I shop around for certain foods/brands and it does take a chunk of the week!

I should shop on-line but prefer to pick fruit and veg myself.

A grow bag should only be used for one season.

Oh I remember Lacy Road market. I have been in Putney since the early 80's. I was referring to the lady who got her spuds from the local agricultural wholesaler .

There's still a good market in Kingston which is a third of the price of the supermarkets. If I could shop daily I think I'd use the markets more but I find their stuff doesn't lasts up to six days and it ends up costing me more when I have tried. Not sure if the same problem exists outside London. Wonder if the North End Road street market still exists.

Do you remember De'Ath's where you could get keys cut and stuff? That's long gone too - and the dress shop on the corner near the station and the old fashioned Italian restaurant - La Forchetta. And the curtain shop - can't remember its name but they made lovely curtains for my first flat and house for half the price of John Lewis.

Apolgies for hijacking

Thanks dawn. Will get rid then - we don't have the money to replace them anyway and frankly they just look a mess!

If we get a bigger place one day with a proper garden then we plan to devote a good amount of space to growing food, but ATM it's just not worth it.

tomatoes if not grown outside with cost of plant and grow bag etc can mount up, it is best to grow the more expensive veg in a small plot like peas beans beetroot courgettes and salad a packet of £2 seeds will keep you in lettuce from end of may to october etc rather than potatoes onions and carrots though with larger plot that is possible too

Sorry married. I appreciate (but sometimes forget) that not everyone lives out in the sticks with their closest shop being a branch of Mole Valley Farmers . But the flip side of that is we don't have access to cheap Indian or Chinese wholesalers, or a whole raft of supermarkets, which are also often recommended on these threads, but which I'm sure can't be too hard to find if you live in London.

I did have a look for you but the best I could come up with was the wholesale market at Covent Garden

I mention it because in market towns there is often a branch of countrywide, or mole valley or similar where sacks of potatoes can be purchased at considerably lower prices than you would pay in a supermarket. For example, a lady I work with drove from one town to another and passed said branch of Mole Valley but still bought her potatoes in Asda at much greater cost because she didn't know.

And yes, audina potatoes do keep much better in dirt because (as you probably know) they go green when exposed to light. So in order to keep British potatoes from harvest in summer to now, they are kept in the dark, and dirty.

Sorry all if I have offended.

Married north end rd mkt is still there but a lot of very cheap stalls with produce that only lasts for a day or so. Fri and Saturday best time to go tho v busy then.

I was thinking about this thread earlier when I was in Sainsbury's. Haven't bought tuna for ages but noticed today a small own brand was £1.39 - I'm sure just a few years ago it used to be about 80p? John West tuna 60p more expensive.

Oh you didn't offend. It was just funny - and Dawn and I both know Putney and are sometimes a bit tongue in cheek about stuff that nobody else gets. Apologies.

Two Mnetters from different ends of the country with a bit of shared of history.

I forget too that not everyone lives a five minute walk from M&S, Waitrose, Sainsbury's, etc., and can hop on a tube and be in Central London in 20 minutes. .

Oh and BTW large tins of tuna were £4 for four in Asda this afternoon.

dizzydo North End Road Market was ever thus. Put me off markets really - and that's going back to 1980

Can I just point out that yesterday in Morrisons, I noticed that their value cheese comes in 2 sizes- Bigger chunk and smaller chunk.

Ok so far, but I also noticed that bigger chunk value cheese was about 30p per kilo cheaper than smaller chunk value cheese. Why? It was the same cheese, for crying out loud!

Back on tina .... 4 tins of John West were £3.30 in the co-op this afternoon.