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.....

when we make pizza, as well as making the base (but not always), we use tomato puree and top that with mixed herbs (just a scattering)
if we're using cheese, that goes on next (we only use organic cheese), then seasonal or frozen veg.

i need 46g of protein a day, it seems, from my weight.

except I think i've lost weight because of not getting enough protein...

anyway, we eat a lot of pulses, beans, houmous, nuts etc for protein.

Garlicbargain - pulses are about 10% protein according to the backs of the packets in my cupboard. Eg split peas, lentils, mung beans. Pasta is about the same.

Sorry, I don't know what's wrong with me but I had to calculate all that. Think I have a problem....anyway:

RhondaJean's lasagne works out to 32g protein per portion and the spag Bol is 26g (if they're having a 75g portion of pasta, 32g if they're just splitting the 500g pack).

A slice of bread from an 800g medium sliced value loaf is 3.4g for white and 4g for brown. So if you're having toast for breakfast you're very nearly there anyway. Porridge made with semi skimmed milk and 50g oats is a massive 26g of protein.

Interesting about the proteins in pulses, nora, thank you. The 25% is repeated over and over on usually-reliable web sites. I'm more inclined to trust the packet info, though!

It is interesting because a quick google came up with both the 10% and 25% figure and I thought 25% seemed a bit high considering that's the same as cheese so I checked. A dangerous bit of misinformation, give that the kinds of sites quoting 25% were where I would look for info if I was a vegetarian.

Lots of foods have small amounts of protein: milk, fortified cereals, wholemeal bread, peanut butter, baked beans, cheese, eggs, pulses, tuna all feature in most of the cheap menus above along with the meat and a bit of fish. Even basics spaghetti provides 12% protein for 100g of spag, so if you add that to the mince,that's nearly 20g without adding any cheese, and not taking into account any protein eaten at other meals. I think it's possible to eat enough protein on these menus.

Can I just point out my lasagne recipe comes from a body building website and is about increased protein lowered fat through using cottage cheese not bechamel sauce.

Ill just check the protein levels in a tesco value premise lasagne and be right back.

Cn only find single portion sizes which are 22g protein so lower than my recipe and cost £1 each so pricier.

If you can afford to you can up the amount if mince or cottage cheese in it or you could add lentils for extra bulk and protein.

My point is though I can produce two meals which are not perfect ( I would use while meal pasta etc which raises costs) but they are nutritionally superior and tastier than premade slop and cost less.

Aren't we supposed to be eating too much protein?

I remember reading that we didn't really need all the meat because we get a chunk of protein from the rest of the food.

But this was quite a few years ago and health advice keeps changing.

I think it's cheaper to cook from scratch, yes you need store cupboard herbs and spices but no one cooks from scratch for only one week and then leaves their herbs and spices in the press never to be used again so I think it's only fair to count their costs as minimal.

If you are feeding your family nutritionally unbalanced meals then it might seem cheaper to make junk food but if you are not concerned about the meal being completely balanced you could also make something from healthy ingredients which would be cheaper than the junk....I would rather my kids had eggs with low GI toast for dinner than cheap nuggets and chips.

If I was really really stuggling with money then I would rather feed my kids on a diet of porridge, milk, eggs, potatoes, homegrown or cheap vegetables/frozen veg, beef mince,pork mince and some chicken (because it is so versatile and kids don't need huge portions of it so it doesn't work out that expensive) fruit from the aldi super 6 or the Tesco special offers.....it may get boring but I would rather they were bored by what they ate but still be as nourished as possible on a budget rather than buy ready made pies and cheap chicken nuggets.

I had no idea pasta contained so much protein. We wouldn't eat 100g each though, that's amassive portion, we eat around 80g, 2/3 of a bag for 4.

There is decent protein in all sorts of things, noobie. A budget diet shouldn't be protein deficient as long as you're not cooking rubbish. I use a whole bag for 4 people, but then the pasta tends to be the main element in those meals and my children are all adult or adult sized bar DS4. It's a lot different eating something like pasta with onions/pasta with tomato sauce topped with some cheese than it is eating spag bol or pasta with other protein rich sauces.

I recently read that about protein - apparently a vegetarian who eats dairy and eggs would be getting enough protein, so an omninvore would be in danger of eating far too much, especially if they were eating meat/fish every day. Can't remember where I read it though, so could be rubbish. It was in an article discussing if veggies needed to eat TVP, and the conclusion was no, they don't.

This thread is fab. Some of the recipes and shopping lists are great. It also really refreshing to see people get down to the nitty gritty of the issue instead of just waffling on about bloody batch cooking like it's the solute to poverty everywhere

There's so many valid points from all sides. Also massive head up to BoF for that perfect quote. I think that's something we really need to save and post on every crappy 'well no wonder you're poor, I eat porridge three times a day' type of thread.

Please don't refer to ready made lasagna as 'slop' though. As proved earlier on the ingredients really aren't particularly bad. Of course it won't take as nice as home made but it is far far away from 'slop'.

Spent far too long today pummelling a packet of bread mix into a budget pizza. Half was wasted and I've ended up with a lumpy stodgy random shape that fits on a small tray.

Home made really isn't economical when you're a rubbish cook.

And back on the protein issue, wholemeal flour only has a slightly higher amount of protein in it than white flour. I can now eat white bread with pride again and can turn my nose up at wholemeal pasta without feeling inferior.

You can, noobie :) Anyway, too much fibre makes more nutrients pass through the body. Kind of like filling up a leaky petrol tank. Slightly less of a fire risk, though unless you're XH1 with his incendiary farts.

That's great news garlic, you don't know how happy I am to be able to eat white bread without guilt.

I haven't been able to read this whole thread but want to say I'm totally for cooking from scratch, it was how I was brought up.

Junk food us a treat and not staple in our. family and that's what we do. Plus I can't afford junk food. Good veg, good meat and fish, although I'm lazy on the fish, and afew ingredients to make it all tasty.

Afew pans and utensils. We forget some of them are there.

Although....I really do not enjoy cooking. I have to because I think junk food is for a manic day, and the guilt isn't there because it's rarely in the table.

Home cooking all the way,

I think it depends where you shop more than anything. I used to shop at asda and could afford a packet of mince and a chicken in my weekly shop, two packs of potatoes and then the rest of the shop. The potatoes lasted for the chicken and mince and that was it.

Then I discovered a meat market :) has saved me an absolute fortune and tastes so much nicer!

From asda a tiny chicken is around £3.50 from the meat market two medium chickens cost £5.50,

We used to buy ready made shepherds pies for £3 or £4. To make our own it costs us maybe £3 at the max.

I buy in bulk so that makes a massive difference,

A sack of 12.5 Kg of potatoes costs £7.50, A kilo of mince costs £5, Frozen beg costs around £1, Butter £1 Milk £1, A pack of cheese costs £3, but the potatoes last around 8/9 meals, the mince 4 meals, veg around 6 meals, cheese around 4 meals, and butter and milk vary as use for different things. So all in all a homemade cottage pie shepherds pie costs around £3.14 to make but it lasts us 4 meals between us which is 0.78 per meal! And its all homemade,

Because there's two of us we make large meals then freeze half of it and eat it later on in the week.

If you can get yourself to a meat market or a farmers market it is well worth it.

From the one I go to in Bury:

2 Medium Chickens: £5.50
A Kilo of mince: £5
12 chicken fillets: £10
3 packs of ribs: £5
3 gammon: £5

They do deals as well, I can't remember what they include now but some are only £20 and others £40, most of the time if your cheeky and ask they'll throw in a bit extra.

Ooh we also make our own pizzas!

Bread Base: 0.30
Tomatoes: 0.16
Chicken fillet: 0.83
Peppers: 0.41
Sweetcorn: 0.11
Cheese: 0.70
All in all £2.51, you can buy cheap nasty pizzas for about 60p from asda but their god awful.

All in all depends where you shop and what you like, I prefer homemade any day :)

Hello,
Very late to this thread....I have finally managed to get to the end. Very interesting great George Orwell quote. I work with deprived families and there are so many factors influencing the way people shop, cook and feed their children. I think generalisations are unhelpful.

I like many other middle class women take pride in feeding the dcs (and DH) well and economically. (Weekly spend £60-80 occasionally down to £40) this means there is more money in the potfor other tthings.

I think we are fairly typical, I have a good understanding of nutritional content of food, I love cooking and have a nice big well equipped kitchen to cook in. It is a pleasure for me to stretch a free range chicken out for 3 meals, to make soup and DH to bake bread and make hm pizzas. I also make all cakes and biscuits and atm have apples, tomatoes and chard from the garden.

In no way at all is this comparable with a family who have £40 a week to feed themselves every week. JO has no idea what he is talking about. He needs to live the life for a whole month and see if he is still so fucking sanctimonious. How can you blame people for giving their kids a few treats? Life at the bottom of the pile is usually a unremittingly gruelling experience and kicking someone when their down is just plain nasty.

I agree with Iceini on £40/ week it can be done but it's hard work and time consuming. On less probably not.

it can definitely be done, Wish. I know because I have done it every week for years. We are at "the bottom of the heap" in spite of Dh working 2 jobs, and things are getting worse all the time for us. But food is one of the things that I can control up to a point.

When I was less ill, I baked all our own bread/cakes/biscuits, made all our own jam/pickles/chutneys etc, even hm tortilla chips and the like. I can't do that any more, so the same amount of money has to stretch much further. I've also had to give up my landshare, as I'm not able to tend it anymore - so now I have to buy all our veg and potatoes instead of growing it all. So that's even further to stretch the money. But I still manage to feed us a decent, balanced, varied diet.

A lot of it, I think, is to do with education and growing your skills. But when your completely ground down from the sheer drudgery of being poor and you can't see any end to it, it's hard to draw up any motivation for what is basically just another demand on your time.

It's also about educating your family to accept a new way of eating and we all know how hard that can be. A lot of folk, when faced with a plate of bean chilli and rice, just think "I can't eat that", or they don't think that HM soup and bread is a meal. It takes a while to adapt and in the meantime, you can't afford for your family not to eat what you've cooked, so you stick to what they know.

it's a hard issue and people like JO being sanctimonious don't help. Many people feel bad enough about what they feed their families and the fact that they can't afford to cook delicious things like steak in red wine or Moroccan lamb tagine, without others pointing it out to them (I'm talking about you, grannie.)

Excited! I am using this thread as evidence in another JO rant...

fun fun fun.

Just spent £36 in Aldi including getting 9 loo rolls. Have a small amount of stuff already in the cupboard but basically that's 7 days meals and snacks including 4 packed lunches a day. I'll let you know how I get on!

Meals this week will be:

Sausage casserole and rice and cabbage
Cottage pie with carrots and broccoli
Tuna and egg pie with peas, sweetcorn and mash
Lasagne and dough balls and salad
Spaghetti bolognese
Baked potatoes with beans, cheese and coleslaw
Carrot and lentil soup and rolls

Lunches are all leftovers for me and Dh and a sandwich, piece of fruit, flapjack or crisps, salad sticks, cheese etc

Snacks are a giant cookie or ginger cake and a glass of milk. piece of fruit or carrot in an emergency. Old stale oatcake from the back of the cupboard if you're still whining.