to try and settle the 'which is cheaper, junk or cooked from scratch' debate once and for all

[IceBeing]

I have seen both sides of this recently on MN and on the box.

So. submit your meal plans here.

1. Choose junk or home cooked

1. Give a shopping list plus price for a weeks worth of food for a family of 4, assuming no reliance on a 'store cupboard' and no meal sharing.

1. Give an estimated weekly cooking time plus shopping time.

1. indicate if your plan relies on a local aldi/lidl etc.

Lets sort this the JEFF out please.....

I would expect to get 5-6 adult meals out of a medium chicken.

1. Roast chicken - we eat one breast between us (I am a size 20 and DH weighs 17 stone so not exactly tiny)
2. Chicken pie with the other breast, padded out with frozen vegetables and topped with homemade shortcrust. Maybe some ham offcuts if I've got some cheapies in the freezer
3. Wagamama style udon/yaki noodles with one leg and wing
4. Pasta or risotto with the other leg and wing.
5. Chicken dumpling soup with pearl barley, any odds and sods of vegetables with the carcass.

I try to use meat as a "flavouring" rather than the main feature of the meal. Hence I can make a £8 chicken last a week (and preferably I have got that chicken in the reduced counter)

So we have a thread of people that eat sweetbread and offel?

Yep. And would eat more of it if it wasn't so expensive due to being trendified by like JO. Sweetbreads are delicious.

Cabbage and rice soup is cheap, tastier with lardons and parmesan though. Cannelini beans with bacon, tomato, carrot, celery is good but how do you use up the rest of the celery? I see advantages and disadvantages to budget cooking. I spend way too much on groceries and go without new clothes, eating out, cosmetics and other beauty products, hairdressers and so on.

okay now all the tasty sounding food is making me hungry!

i must get the hang of pies!

My main problem is that the more effort I put into cooking the more upset I am when my toddler takes one look at it and says 'full mummy'.

DD eats one mwave meal a week and polishes it off like she has been starving for days and refuses to eat anything I might make along the same lines....

Neck of lamb used to be a cheap cut until it became "recession fashionable"

I miss cheap oxtail, that's gone trendy too.

I think we've proven we don't have a thread of people who eat sweetbreads and offel.

Some people eat offel. That's about as far as it got.

So all this 'respect the animal by eating all of it' is rubbish. Most people don't eat all the animal. Unless we are going to pretend that most people eat cows eyes?

OhDearNigel that's helpful that you've included the amount of chicken you use in each meal. I can make sense of these magic chickens now

If you were feeding a family how many meals would you get out of your chicken Nigel?

Artemis on this thread anyone who questions the need to eat meat is seen as a militant or if you question why people don't make ethical choices you are seen as forcing your view down everyone's throats!

It is the standard 'I deserve cheap meat every day of my life' person's response to something they either don't understand or don't want to care about.

I do, however, have a great deal of respect for loopy whose postings make a great deal of sense to me.

Oh and Amberleaf your question below was not 'genuine' as you later claimed and it was clearly spiteful and goady.

If you cared that much about animals, you would be a vegan

Why oh why don't you give a shit?

No need is there?

(Just marking place for the tips.)

For once am guilty of not having read the whole thread, so please ignore if I am just repeating what others have put better. The following paragraphs need to go on the list:

1. list the outlay and equipment of your kitchen before you start planning for this meal

1. indicate if you have sole access to this kitchen or if you are in shared accommodation

1. indicate if your electricity is on a metre

1. indicate amount of storage space, capacity of fridge-freezer etc.

1. indicate transport arrangements. e.g. can you pick up bulky bags of potatoes in your car (or at least in a grannny shopping trolley) or are you limited to what can hang on the back of the baby's buggy?

A typical meal plan here. I spend about £60 a week but could cut a bit.

Not sure of prices for all items but for a weeks dinners would need the following (breakfast and lunches can be done cheaply)

Chicken £4
Value carrots
Cabbage £1
Bag large spuds £2.60
Value broccoli 50p x 2
Value flour
Value butter £1.30
Value rice
6 eggs £1.40
Value onions
Value pasta 30p
Value tinned toms x 2 36p
Sausages £1.99
Value beans x2 about £40p
Value coleslaw

Cheese an expensive optional extra for pasta and baked spuds.

Roast chicken - eat half
Carrots
Cabbage
Baked pots
Gravy

Sliced chicken- other half
Carrots
Broccoli
Home made wedges

Chicken soup with dumplings

Pasta with tomato sauce

Special fried rice

Toad in the hole
Broccoli
Cabbage
Carrots

Baked spuds beans
Value coleslaw

I use Tesco for main shop.
Greengrocer for fruit. Yesterday got the following for £4.70
Bananas
Large punnet strawberries
Raspberries
Blueberries
Blackberries x2

LoopyLupo, I would reckon on at least 3 meals for our family of 5 from one chicken.

First day as a roast (prob use about half the chicken)

Then strip the chicken (all of it, even scraggy gristly bits)

Most of the 'nice' stripped meat (ie not the fatty/skin/gristly bits) I would use in a second meal: curry/risotto/stir fry with lots of added veg/lentils/beans (depending on which meal, obvs).

the carcass and scraggy bits of meat I would chuck in a pot with a couple of potatoes and odd bits of veg, depending on what I had needing using up/in the freezer, to make a soup. Also any other 'bits' that might need using up, eg the odd slice of ham or bacon. My dc won't eat soup, so I use it as a pasta sauce or over rice for them, so that is an added expense.

If I made curry I would expect it to feed the 5 of us once, then at least 3 or 4 portions for dd1 to use as lunch (she takes hot meals to school), or a further meal for the children and a couple of portions for school lunch.

the soup would do us all (with added pasta/rice as above) once, then a further meal for the children.

so, adding up (I reckon my 3 children eat the equivalent of 2 adults), 1 chicken would do:

3 adult portions as a roast
6 (probably) adult portions as a curry
4 or 5 adult portions as a soup.

sorry, that should say 4 adult portions as a roast

first time poster, I have joined just to enter this debate:

I shop weekly at Tesco. Lots of fresh fruit (mostly gets thrown away), TONS of fresh veg, and chicken or fish each night. I cook from scratch every night though I work long hours (DH pours the wine & gets in the way) .....it's rare that my bill is less than £200.

DH shopped when I was poorly for a fortnight; bought mostly ready meals and the bill was £90 despite them being 'finest' types.

Step-son has just got his first flat, I bought him a Le Crueset and an 'ingredients cupboard' stock-up (herbs, flour, oils, dried goods etc), the food part was more than DH's weekly shop experiment

It's FAR more expensive to eat fresh. However, I just bought our first flat screen TV recently .....

twistyfeet - homemade mayo is basically just olive oil (not the posh stuff) and egg yolk. (with a little bit of mustard, lemon juice)

you have to mix it really really slowly, while dripping in the olive oil slowly.
I got the recipe from the booklet that came with the Kenwood chef, so I don't know it offhand, but I'll try to google it for you.

here we are
the one most like the one I use is this hugh fearnley whittingstall one.

we don't tend to add salt to stuff, though, and I don't think the sugar is necessary.
It really doesn't last long at all, so it's more frugal to use one or two eggs at a time and make it when you need it (that's the beauty of most of it beiong storecupboard ingredients)

To be honest, it must be dreary enough living a hand to mouth existence without also having to live on a diet of pulses and pasta without a bit of meat or flavour to perk things up. I buy welfare meat but I am fortunate enough not to have to worry about whether I have enough money for next week's food/electricity/rent. If I had to live on baked beans and economy bread I think I'd be less interested in whether the chicken had lived in a cage. Simply pleased to have some affordable variety.

If you've got 3 kids in an overcrowded, damp 2 bedroom flat with no outside space, your husband works split shifts as a kitchen porter on minimum wage for 12 hour days, you work as a hospital cleaner for which you have to travel on the bus an hour each way, you have no family around to help you out, and no spare cash at all to do anything enjoyable I expect that your dinner is the only small highlight of the day.

aha! found it!

wink1970, do you really spend £200 a week on food?

for how many people?

why do you buy so much fruit if it is mostly thrown away?

I am astonished that anyone can spend that much on day to day food (especially if the waste part is so high). I am not on a tight budget, and buy mostly organic/finest/ready to eat stone fruits etc. and it is a rare week that my food bill is even approaching £100.

you can bulk up ready made things, though, and add nutrition - so you can buy the value baked beans at 20p a tin, and bulk it out with veg.
frozen veg is always cheaper, but if you can't keep it in the freezer, then you could buy a smaller bag of frozen mixed veg and keep it in the the fridge for up to a week, and just use it in every meal.

for example, we would make beans on toast, using the beans and mixed veg - if we used frozen, then it's £1 for a bag (500g of mixed peppers, or 1kg of more traditional veg like broccoli/carrots/cauliflower) - that bag can easily do 3 or 4 meals (peppers maybe not so many).

but we also buy seasonal veg, which makes it cheaper than out-of-season.
Kale is nice, but you can buy bog-standard cabbage to save money.
spinach is good, but dearer.

We bought 2 bags of fresh mixed peppers from the veg aisle yesterday because they were reduced to 39p (the same amount of fresh peppers would have cost £1.80, as there was about 2 peppers' worth of sliced veg in there)

one of my friends has an aunt who will only buy food that's reduced.

she then makes all her meals based on that.

cory, If you look back at the meal plan that I posted, it is full of the kind of things that we eat in here all the time. In answer to your questions

I have a very basic, small council house kitchen. I have a cooker, some pots and pans and very basic utensils etc. but nothing like a microwave, food processor, garlic press or the like. I have 2 kitchen knives and a bread knife which I use for all the peeling, chopping and cooking and a cheap box grater for grating. No idea what the outlay was because everything is years old, but at least 10years, except the cooker which is probably about 5 years old.

I do have sole access to the kitchen but I have lived in shared accommodation and cooked all the same kinds of meals.

My electricity (and gas) is indeed on a meter.

V. little storage space - tiny council kitchen where the cupboard doors are broken. I have 1 double cupboard unit for food storage. There is only 1 other cupboard in the house outwith the kitchen and it houses the gas and electric meters, the boiler, DH's wardrobe and the freezer. Said freezer is a standard sized one door upright so doesn't hold that much.

I get my shopping delivered by Asda on a weekday afternoon because it is far cheaper than going into town on the bus and, as I have M.E., going on the bus is almost impossible for me anyway, never mind the walk on either side of the bus journey. It costs £2 to get your shopping delivered on a Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday afternoon.