AIBU to be confused when people say it's cheaper to cook from scratch?

[Blueskiesandcherrypies]

(Sorry another 'weekly food shop post'....)

I just don't think it is! I struggle to get our weekly food shop below £140pw. That's for me, DH, ds9, dd7 and dd1 (and soon to be newborn ds). We all love our food, though I tear my hair out every week planning meals everyone will enjoy rather than refuse and sulk about tolerate, and cook from scratch (just things like spag Bol, curry, carbonara, puff pastry 'pizza', roasts...) but I often think blimey if I could just chuck a few ready meals in the trolley and loads of bits from the frozen section (burgers, nuggets, kievs!!) we'd be quids in! But then we wouldn't be eating so healthily and I wouldn't know exactly what we're all putting in our mouths.

Weekly food shop includes packed lunches, loads of fruit for snacks, cat food, household bits, nappies.... but not alcohol, that comes out of DH's 'own' pocket rather than our joint account even if it's wine for me. We never have leftovers so can't stretch a meal over 2 days (DCs have growing appetites).

I am green with envy when I see people saying they can feed a family of four for £50 a week! Just....how?!

And ok, before you ask, I have been shopping at ocado lately but I haven't seen a huge price diff than when I used sainsburys.

Please help me see where I'm going wrong!

OP, you won't find ready meals cheaper if you like good sized portions, they are tiny. I think our best bet is to insist on meals lasting two days, even if this means making a fair bit more. Put the second lot in the fridge or freezer before you serve up, then it can't be eaten. There are threads on here about what is nice at Lidl and Aldi. I always buy blueberries, celery, tinned toms, pasta and free range eggs there and quite often cheese. I always buy for 6 days meals and then we have something improvised such as a veg curry on Thursdays with all the odd bits of broccoli and things. We also always have chilli on Fridays and I make huge vats and freeze it, this makes for a very easy life at the end of the working week. My budget is £80 when there are 2 of us, £90 for 3 and £100 for 4, including cleaning materials but not dog food or wine.

I'my making another very cheap meal tonight- leftover pie. That's all the leftovers from a roast dinner (except potatoes and Yorkshires, obviously) baked in a short crust pastry pie. it's virtually free, but does depend on having had a pretty expensive dinner yesterday.......

Ds likes it better than the roast dinner!

I have no idea what we spend on a weekly food shop, I can only work out what we use per meal or per day. It definitely comes to £6 average including puddings. So yesterday was £1 home made leeks in sauce, £4 fish, £1.50 yoghurts. Four adult portions.

Packed lunch today was 50p fruit & cereal bar, 20p crisps, 50p sandwich.

Breakfast was probably 50p each if that including tea and coffee.

£8.20 not including snacks.

Someone up thread talked about buying strawberries. Who in their right mind buys strawberries at this time of year?

If they're any good, ready meals are expensive. Cheap ones are small, poor quality and not filling.

Aldi's good for some things, but not everything. I like their approach of having just one of everything, ie one olive oil, one bio detergent, one strawberry jam - take it or leave it. The question of pepperami equivalents just comes down to personal taste - and their continental foodstuffs are very good anyway. From Aldi we buy jam, juice cartons, parmesan, olive oil, beer, Tunnock's Teacakes (£1.00 at Tesco, 85p at Aldi), fruit, veg and detergent.

Home-made cake tastes much better than anything out of a packet mix. As a "treat" we tried a Betty Crocker Red Velvet cake mix when it was on offer. You only need to do this once to know not to do it again - far too sweet and synthetic tasting.

Eggs are always good to have on hand - a two egg omelette is cheap and tasty.

I make sourdough bread for probably less than 50p a loaf, which lasts over two days and makes excellent toast.

Whilst I don't think twice about buying ready-made puff pastry, I always make shortcrust. I can make puff pastry if I've nothing better to do with my time.

Cheap pasta is fine and filling. Aldi Specially Selected tagliatelle is vastly superior to Tesco bog standard (though my family can't tell the difference).

Cooking in bulk helps. I only ever make Bolognese sauce in vast quantities and freeze it. Having a large chest freezer is very helpful.

Morefalafel tesco also does big plastic tubs of common herbs and spices for quite cheap, plus most supermarkets stock east end or other similar makes of herbs and spices in plastic bags. Check the 'ethnic' isles.

Haven't we done this thread before a few times?
Cheapest of all on a v limited budget is to eat meal to meal crap ready made food, however it is cheaper to cook nice food from scratch than to buy nice food.

whois thats good to know, I go through herbs at a very fast speed! We have planted our own this year in the hope of cost saving!

I'm shocked that ready meals do work out less tbh. My dp could eat 3 in one go, the portions are tiny. The only 'ready' thing we ever get is pizza.

Cheaper pasta is good BUT Dont buy the cheap pasta in Budgens unless you want a tummy like an air balloon

Aldi's good for some things, but not everything. I like their approach of having just one of everything, i.e. one olive oil, one bio detergent, one strawberry jam - take it or leave it

Aldi has at 2-3 choices now of many items, so a value product and a 'best' one too.

Everyone always says go to Aldi, but we don't have one, or anything comparable, and I don't have a car. Waitrose or Sainsburys only.

Well you're stuffed then Ilumanting

I did some shopping for a family member last week in Sainsbury's, I spent the entire time like this at the prices!

I think if you want to reduce your food bill with out buying convenience foods you need together tough with your family. So one size fits all dinners without too much worrying about whether they will eat it. They eat it or they go hungry. At least 2 dinners a week need to be vegetarian or nearly veggie (eg risssoto made with chicken stock). By doing this and shopping at Lidl I can get my bill down to £60 something (me, dh ds(10) and dd (7)) but this tends to be an end of month or saving for Xmas thing, so probably wouldn't include many store cupboard items or treats.

Out of interest I have just price compared tonights dinner!

Bean Enchilada's
2 tins butter/haricot beans = £1.30
Tortillas x 6 (multipack 15p each) = 90p
Chopped tomatoes = £1
Squirt tomato puree = 10p
Harissa spice mix (per teaspoon) = 25p
Cheese 60g = 47p
Yoghurt = 20p
Rocket leaves = £1
Cherry tomatoes = £1
1 Pepper (multipack) = 36p
1 Onion (multipack) = 10p

£2.22 each. Plus I will save some of the beans for beans on toast tmw. I could get the onions and tomatoes cheaper from TFC, and use dried beans but Im basing this on my last sainsburys shop.

Sainsburys actually do a Bean Enchilada ready meal - £3.50 for 2 enchilada's and you only get 450g in each. So we'd spend £10.50 on the same meal, get a smaller portions, and be minus salad.

When I was growing up we had a separate freezer the same size and shape as the free-standing fridge, so about 6ft tall. Mother used to order a hind-quarter of a cow from the butcher who would call her back when it was cut up and ready for collection. She told me at the time this was the cheapest way to buy meat. Seem to recall there could be the occasional issue when they didn't cut it up the way she expected/wanted.

I remember my parents as always economising, so it's a bit strange to remember we ate beef 6 days a week. (Chicken on Sundays!) Different time and country explains it, I suppose.

Someone said cooking from scratch means making your own sauces. If it's a competition, I'd just like to point out then when I first visited PIL, for a couple of weeks, MIL food preparation started with getting out a sharp knife to kill one of her chickens...

DW buys random white fish from a market stall. Apparently if it's not something most people have heard of, like cod or haddock, it's really cheap, because many people won't buy it. I'm not really a fish person, but I think there are many species of fish which for food purposes are barely distinguishable from those people are most familiar with, and presumably trawler nets aren't intelligent enough to only catch the popular types. (Recall reading somewhere that DNA testing showed fish sold as "Cod" is often something else, anyway.)

Fraidycat can't beat the chicken but last time I went to visit my Mum I asked if I could help with making tea. "Oh no", she said, "there's hardly anything to do, I just need to nip out and dig up a few potatoes" ...

I'm one of those odd people who spends very little on food. I claim to cook from scratch but i do buy bread and pasta.
I htink that it is made easier in some ways by there being so many of us: I don't have to risk buying veg that won't be eaten becasue if I stick a platter of various veg in the middle of the table someone will like every element.
In the example on P1 people are talking about saving 40p on a jar of pasta sauce; imagine mutliplying by 10 and keeping the excess in the freezer: that's 4 right there.
If I've made faggots and mash (or similar) and I'm serving on to plates in the kitchen, I'll serve one or two portions into plastic boxes for the freezer, so on nights we get home late and can't be bothered to cook there's alwasy a choice of quickly reheated home cooked foods. I make lots of soup so there's always a snack if the teens ask their friends round. The only food I throw away is egg shells, bones and peelings (though apparently you can make lovely crisps from potato peelings so may start that! I buy onions, spuds and eggs from the farm. the rest of the veg from Aldi. 4oz meat is enough protein for a meal for anyone. Provide yorkies , roast and mash and three veg, then keep the leftover chicken for another day. Use it for packed lunches or in couscous or whatever for another meal.
It is a change in viewpoint I think: we have friends who eat huge amounts of meat at home and none of them have ever complained at our house, as we give them so much else.

Our last shop was £68.38 at Aldi and that will last a fortnight because on 3 nights last week I used meals that I had previously frozen. There is me, DP and DS (7)

I bought:

Pizza
Baby spinach
Broccoli
Carrots
Bananas
Babycorn
Mange tout
Cucumber
2 x baby plum tomatoes
Asparagus
3 x packets of crusty cobs
Luxury hot cross buns
Tortilla wraps
Tunnocks caramel wafers (8)
2 x Cadbury Variety packs
Chocolate chunk cookies
Specially selected lemon cheesecake
Strawberry cheesecake ice cream
Cat litter
2 x double cream
1 x sour cream
1 x cheese
Greek yoghurts (4)
Fromage frais (6)
Premium coleslaw
Minced beef and onion slices (2)
Chicken and mushroom slices (2)
Pork pie
Antipasti
Chicken thighs
Pork belly slices
Beef mince
Frozen basa fillets
Pork belly joint
Lamb breast joint
2 x Sausages
Gammon joint
Cat litter

Meals we have had last week or will have this week are:

Pulled pork cobs with stuffing and gravy
Pulled pork carnitas
Homemade beef burgers
Chicken curry
Ham, egg and cheese toastie
Sausage and egg sandwiches
Lamb breast with veg and gravy
Fish pie (will probably do 2 meals)
Asian style pork belly slices
Sausage casserole (will probably do 2 meals)

I buy washing powder when it is on offer and stock up. Washing up liquid and multi purpose cleaner is 99p each but I don't buy it very often. It seems to last ages. We probably spend another £20 per fortnight on.

MinesAPintOfTea When you say you use a shot of washing powder what do you mean? Do you mean a shot glass? I use washing liquid and use 50ml per wash. A 2250ml bottle of Ariel cost me £6 when it was on offer and lasts 6-7 weeks.

Investing in a chest freezer was the best thing we ever did. It was a big purchase at the time but has more than paid for itself since we got it. At the moment there's only two of us, so we don't spend the kind of money you do on shopping. BUT having the freezer there means that if you're shopping when the supermarkets bring all their prices down to get rid of things you can buy 5 or 6 loaves of bread and stick them in the freezer. I only ever buy meat on the 5 for £15 deal at our local supermarket (not a national chain but I think the bigger places do similar deals, or 3 for £10 maybe?) and, again, stick it all in the freezer. If I'm making things like lasagne or shepherds pie I always double up quantities to make two and (yes!) stick one in the freezer. Also, making things like casseroles, chilli, curries etc in the slow cooker can be very economical and also fills the freezer up!
Since I started using the slow cooker/freezer I now only shop once every two weeks in the supermarket for "bulk" things or cereal, pasta, rice, household goods etc and then get all my fruit and veg weekly from the local market (last week I bought 2 big carrier bags full of fruit and veg and it came to just over £7 on the market. out of interest I did a comparison with the Tesco online shopping and the equivalent would have cost nearly £17 there!
The added bonus to all this is that when our baby arrives in 6ish weeks we should have about a months worth of home-cooked "ready meals" sitting waiting in the freezer!

I do mean a shot glass (I had one left from a novelty set) and the boxes are 5kg. The given number of washes is 65 but if I use that much the perfume makes me sneeze and as I said upthread this amount gets our clothes clean (less and they smell even after washing).

FraidyCat
Did you grow up in Australia?
I did and meals usually involved beef. Sometimes lamb bought from the farmer. Sides of beef cut up by the butcher and then packaged and labelled at home for the freezer. Fish from the river and vegies grown by us

I brought a 5 litre box of soap powder from Costco for £8 that was last June and I am only half way through it

Costco is the way to go also you can use it to mop your floor [ it says on the box not just randomly mopping my floor with soap powder ] lol

I never eat anything I put in the freezer once it's been there for more than a week. I forget about it and find it a year later. It currently has lots of food in it but very little that's actually edible.