To think that Jamie Oliver is a Goady goady mc judgy pants personified!

[LEMisdisappointed]

judgey much?

It reads like a clip from the daily mail - actually, it probably is!

Now there are people, i have a friend who can make an amazing meal out of apparently nothing (she is italian though!) in ten minutes flat - although she has lots of those ingredients that are expensive to buy in the first place but go a long way,i would never know what to do with them!

I am such a boring cook, i have a small repertoire (sp) of meals that i cook - over and over again, the ingredients in my cupboard are basic because i can't afford capers and porcinni mushrooms etc. I rarely fall back on ready meals and feed my family healthily. But its boring really and i can understand why some people use ready meals - time, money - So yeah, making your own pizza will be cheaper than dominos or tesco fineset but it is not going to be cheaper than icelands £1 pizza is it? Not from scratch, not from the start - yes if you divide the amount of pizzas your flour, cheese, tomato sauce and anything else you want to put on it by 20 it might be cheaper but those ingredients have to be bought in the first place.

See, I would welcome cheap and easy ways to make my meals more exciting and thankfully we are not on the breadline this month, but im not going to watch that smug little bastard telling me how i can just knock out some pucker tucker out of a packet of anchovies and dust from the cupboard!

I have always thought him a smug twat - this confirms it!

But four baking potatoes can cost nearly £2,50 in some places. Maybe cheaper in markets or if you buy tiny ones but that is a lot of money for a family of four or five. And then there's the cost of the salt, butter/spread, garlic and tomatoes Starfish suggested. Not always possible for £3 and if you live in a small village without transport you are totally at the mercy of expensive local stores or public transport (which costs £££) to get to a cheaper store.

I agree with what he is trying to say.

if you batch cook in large quanties so you get economy of scale, and then freeze..... You'll get good quality, healthy food, but at Iceland prices.

I am amazed at how much ready made meals cost!!!!!

"This is totally off topic but why is fish so insanely expensive? We're an island!"

I currently live in Scotland and I'm amazed with the outstanding fish and seafood (and I'm originally from Portugal where fishing is pretty outstanding).

It's actually really cheap when compared to most meat and yet, I very rarely see people eating fish unless it's covered in batter.

And this is why fish is so expensive, because it's all exported due to lack of demand.

Speaking of lack of demand, I bought TWO whole fresh octopus at Morrisons the other day; they were 1.17 GPB each! I'm still gobsmacked!

Good old Morrison's is much better than the other supermarkets for fresh fish I find.

That's because we now farm salmon; mackerel is cheap but because there is such a demand elsewhere prices would rise if we all went for it. However I have noticed that every time I pop it in my internet basket it gets axed, I wonder if supermarkets don't like to sell the cheaper stuff so limit it?

Iceland is not a bad option, as long as you top up with fruit and veg. They sell chicken, fish, freshly frozen stuff that can really be a help. Avoid the oddly flavoured pizzas and you are fine.

squoosh they really are - I go there just to buy fish every week.

He's being smug as fuck but he's essentially right , you can cook healthily and eat well from some very cheap ingredients.

Zengardener that is why again it is cheaper to be rich.

I adore cooking, I have a larder filled with store cupboard ingredients. I a, one of those sad people that makes pouches of stock to freeze and even freezes wine to use in food . So I can go to the reduced section of a supermarket and pick up meat, fish, veg and be confident that I have things at home to turn it into a meal. If you don't have those stocked store cupboards you can't take advantage of the food offers in the same way.

I also wonder if the British are more eclectic in their cooking style , mixing lots if different cuisines, making building a store cupboard more expensive.

But batch freezing assumes a freezer, space for one and electricity to run it.

Snap to sacks of spuds: in fact we have a freezer but we can't bulk buy spuds as we have little storage space and we have a nice enough house (this is not excuses btw, we have enough to eat that we can afford thankfully).

Just looking at how other people with less might think.

I love squid; but here in my part of Wales there is no fishmonger and the supermarkets rarely have it. I could go right into the city but it costs £££££ in petrol etc. And then something else works out cheaper. It''s a vicious circle I guess.

I'll try morrisons next time for fish then.

None of this lovely fish makes it inland to us! It's very annoying.

coley is a cheap substitute for cod.

Tesco has 2.5kgs for potatoes for around £2.50.

I find Morrisons good for fish and meat too. End of day at sainsburys they reduce on the fishmonger counter. I got a whole trout for £1.50 but they are as boney as buggery

Our freezer is 40cm square.

It's a pita. I tend to concentrate on buying reduced meat and bread and freezing it until we need it over batch cooking because it works out cheaper.

Or you can be obstructive and obtuse and just create excuses not to eat healthily, if you'd rather eat crap.

yes.

I bought 6 fresh mackeral last week, from Waitrose fish counter. They were on offer and cost £1.45 for the lot. I bought another 6 and put them in the freezer.

Cheapest meal of the week.

I agree totally Peachy, again further evidence that it is cheaper to be rich. I have a chest freezer as well as my normal upright freezer because I have the space.

Living in a fairly affluent rural area also means that I have access to free pheasant from the shoot, I have a section in my freezer dedicated to animals that rich people have shot that they can't be bothered to eat.

What I don't understand is how can two or three generations have forgotten/not have been taught to cook?

As I said up thread, most southern countries don't even have Home Education classes - people just learn how to cook because it's a life skill.

You teach your children to cross the road; to get dressed; to tie their shoe laces; to swim (even of you're landlocked)... so why the hell wouldn't you teach them to feed themselves?

I love mackerel, great for the BBQ. kippers is another favourite

Trying to get decent fish is a real problem. The worst place is supermarkets. Waitrose has the most limited selection of all considering its clientele w/ money. They stock more brands of Soy sauce and Olive oil than they do fish. The local market has two fish stalls but still limited to the well known species. Squid is cheap yes and My DD regularly buys Octopus from her local Tesco's where the fishmonger has got to know her and texts her when they have anything interesting in.

I went to the coast on bank holiday. I spent a lot of money on not that much fish. I teach clients to buy a small amount of fish and then add it flaked to mashed potato, spring onions all bound w/ egg and old bread turned into crumbs. These will freeze. I can also do a cheap 'fish pie' w/ milk, mashed potato, whatever fish is cheap/reduced and spring onions.

I get clients growing spring onions, onions, garlic and new potatoes in tubs if they have no planting space. We have housing complexes for the MI where they collaborate on growing crops and planting currant bushes with their high freezable yield. But not everybody can do this. And again the outlay on plants/seeds/soil can seem prohibitive for a person w/ £20 weekly for food and all other living expenses.

It is the system. Poverty is exhausting. It drains you of hope. Then somebody like Oliver comes along and sneers at your TV (which is your entertainment and probably purchased when you worked) and makes you feel even more marginalised. As I said, I could weep. And frequently do.

I don't agree that people have forgotten to cook, I think we are being overly harsh on ourselves.

"But batch freezing assumes a freezer, space for one and electricity to run it."

Peachy but you just used Iceland as an example - surely ready made meals and frozen chips don't take less space than meat/frozen veg?

What do people do with squid and octopus?

Starfish In Tesco's on Sunday, four baking potatoes cost me £2,20. I'll scan and link the receipt if you like. No need to use such aggressive language.