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!

Apparenty I need 1809 calories a day.

Yeehaw

Get a yoghurt maker for £20 from Lakeland. You just put a little old yoghurt in (Greek if that's your fav) fill with a litre of UHT milk and leave it on overnight. One litre for 57p.

Then use the last bit of that batch to make the next. You can add whatever you like to posh it up, and I use it in cooking loads instead of crème fraiche or cream.

2343 calories to maintain my weight. 3131 calories for DH. We need dinners with more than 400 cals

1970 calories to maintain weight according to that. But I'm underweight. 2970 to gain 2lb

Dh 3781... Just to maintain weight. He isn't overweight either

I have read this thread and do take issue with a few of the claims:

• describing meals cooked previously or 'store cupboard' meals as 'free'. These meals arent free as the food was bought previously.

• some of the leftovers meals described do seem to be using meat at practically homeopathic levels!

• big eating toddlers do not in anyway compare with teenagers!

I agree worrysigh and I wish I had thought up that phrase "using meat at practically homeopathic levels". Pure genius!

Countess will your OH eat pakora?

Nope. Samosas yes but nothing nice.

When I met him he didn't eat pasta. At all. Now we eat it several times a week. That's made a big, big difference.

My toddler does not eat anything like a teenager, yet. But i know by the time he is i will need a second mortgage to feed him. We are expecting another and added to the amount DH eats, when they are teens, i think i will just be a penniless, constantly cooking and shopping machine :(

I have 350 per month to feed 4 adults, a four year old and 3 cats. Cleaning products, loo roll and washing powder also come out of that

Meat is limited to 3 for £10 offers, i buy an awful lot of our food in the evening when it is dead cheap, i buy lots in lidl & aldi and am very organised with coupons and shopitize. We eat well on my small budget but i can't lie, it's hard work.

I've noticed my shopping bill has been cheaper since I've been shopping 'local' more. Do you have carboot sales anywhere near you? There's normally at some of them a veg stall selling all his local produce and that's where we get our vegetables now at our local one. Also try any farms that might be near you, quite a lot of them try and sell stuff off like eggs and milk. Personally the lady near me does me a dozen large eggs for a £1.50 so can be quite good if you know where to look. Just thought as well see if your butcher will do any deals with you. One round here sells meat hampers to locals for £25 and has a lot packed in. We brought one three weeks ago and haven't even finished one pack of sausages yet. Maybe you might be able to wrangle something like that where you are? xx

OP, others are better placed to comment on costs, but I was struck that you consider your current cooking from scratch to be healthy. While better than processed foods, none of the dishes you list are healthy (with the possible exception of curry if made with lots of veg and minimal oil). Carbonara and puff pastry are extremely unhealthy.

Yes, stick with a food that might run around, swim or grow on a tree. Pasta and the like don't meet that criteria which puts me in mind of this old spoof
news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/1/newsid_2819000/2819261.stm

I am just not sure how the supermarkets justify their pricing?
My son loves a particular brand of pizza.
They were £2.99 at out local co op and slightly cheaper at the local asda.
I went into the co op yesterday and the price had gone up to £3.25!!
So I toddled off to asda and they were on offer for £1.50.
So..less than half price.
I know the co op need to find £400 m from somewhere, but this sort of price hiking is ridiculous.
I will not buy anything but essentials from the co op again :(

Something that struck me reading this thread is that it's not necessarily the cooking from scratch vs processed food, but the amount spent on extras and snacks.

People mention things like fruit and yogurts, which might make a breakfast but are generally used as snacks. If you are buying out of season berries and/or nice individual yogurts, these are very expensive, but money could be saved by using frozen berries, cheaper fruit such as apples and oranges, or whatever is on offer - sometimes you can get a melon or pineapple for a pound for example.

People have also mentioned the large pots of yogurts to be decanted into clippy pots as a cheaper alternative to individual pots.

A common sandwich filling is ham, which can be very expensive, so perhaps sometimes use alternatives like cheese, egg, tuna or grated carrot and houmous?

When comparing like with like it is INDISPUTABLE that cooking from scratch is cheaper than processed food in 90% of cases.

You can't point at an Iceland breaded chicken product made from mashed up foreign chicken trimmings and try to argue that it is comparable to home made using organic chicken breast and use this as evidence that it is cheaper to use processed food FFS.

People can eat healthily for very small amounts of money if things like eggs, pulses, porridge and seasonal vegetables make up a large part of their diet.

A girl called Jack does a good comparison of ready meals vs home made here .

You do need to build a basic store cupboard but I don't think it unreasonable to have things like oil, flour and basic herbs and spices in the house and use the costings of small fractions of a pack for these items.

I think you also have to factor in what you are getting out of your meal.

If you don't spend money on going out (restaurant/pub/cafe anywhere) you may feel that spending on better quality meals is more necessary.

Re: cooking from scratch, it depends what you are cooking and the equivalent ready meal. 4 x 400g waitrose tomatoes from Ocado is £2 so 50p a tin. Add that to a slosh of olive oil and a clove of couple of cloves of garlic and you have a basic tomato sauce. Even factoring in the cost of heating, I'd rather have that than a £1 jar of ready made tomato sauce.

If you don't spend money on going out (restaurant/pub/cafe anywhere) you may feel that spending on better quality meals is more necessary.

I do agree with this. If we have a few days off together we will sometimes have what we call a 'home pub' lunch. This will be our individual choice of easy cook pub grub type food and a bottle or two of wine. The thing is that we will spend the same amount per bottle on a supermarket wine as we would have spent in the pub. Obviously the quality difference is huge.

Argh, two slightly annoying things. I don't think avoiding beans cos your husband doesn't like them is 'pandering to a grown man'. It's not nice to make someone eat something they don't like. I actually love beans and pulses but my dh is less keen as they give him bellyache as I suspect they do for most people. They are pretty 'windy' foods!

The other thing is 'tinned tomatoes are cheap'. They have shot up in price over the last 5 years, it's actualy difficult to get them cheaply at all now. Where is everyone getting these cheap tinned toms?

Otherwise great tips here :-)

Yy to frozen berries - toddler ds loves them and at £1 a bag from lidl they are a yummy dessert.

Also agree re eggs - I've started making a quiche each week using homemade pastry (so cheap and easy) and whatever meat, veg etc is in the fridge. We usually have some left over for packed lunch the next day too.

The other thing is 'tinned tomatoes are cheap'. They have shot up in price over the last 5 years, it's actualy difficult to get them cheaply at all now. Where is everyone getting these cheap tinned toms?

Tesco basics stunned toms are 35p. Passata is the same or slightly less I think. Lidl does tins for around 30p.

I thought 30p was reasonably cheap.

I'm single and on a relatively low income. I tend to shop at Sainsbury's or Tesco or sometimes Waitrose and never buy value stuff. I've worked out I can make myself a good cooked meal for around £1.30 per portion.

Costco is brilliant if you have the space to store bulk buys. I buy a tray of 24 tins of tomatoes for under £4 and the quality is as good as Sainsburys. It's also cheap for milk, 2x 4 pints for £1.69, cat food, washing powder, loo roll etc especially when on special offer. Also Petit Filous, 18 tubs for £1.89. I buy trays of chicken thighs, whole sides if salmon and portion them to freeze.

I spend around £80 in Tesco or Sainsburys for general stuff, not including booze but including toiletries, nappies etc. Always buy reduced meat and freeze.

Biggest expense is probably fresh fruit and veg.

We have cut down on our meat intake as I'd rather have quality rather than quantity. We eat pasta 2 or 3 times a week.

Dd does eat the occasional toddler ready meal or fish fingers.

As I said earlier, I think, what people often forget is that shopping around and bulk buying are things that very poor people often can't do. Transport can be a problem, and many people won't have the money up front to bulk buy.

And if you are on a very limited budget, you really really can't risk experimenting with something your children might not eat.

Also, being very poor is depressing, dispiriting and incredibly hard work. Telling the poor to eat up their nice scrag end of mutton and gruel and be thankful is so insensitive and patronising. (Not saying anyone on here has done that, by the way- but it is a recurrent theme from government ministers over the years)

The market is the place to be for fruit and veg, not some artisan farmers, organic market but an old fashioned weekly one if you have it! Last time I went I got,

1 huge bowl of golden delicious £1
1 huge bowl satsumas £1
8 large bananas £1
2 large heads of broccoli £1
1 carrier bag full of carrots £1
1 carrier full of large onions £1
Large brown bag of sprouts £1
1 cabbage 50p
1 cauli £50

And a salad deal they do which has a large bag of mixed leaves, a cucumber, brown bag of cherry tomatoes and 2 avocados for £2.

Bargain for £10, it will do lunch boxes and dinners.

Then from hone butchers there I got.

5kg sausages 5kg bacon = £15
2 large gammon slippers = £5
3 large whole chickens = £10

Then I spend £10 on things like rice, beans, juice etc from Aldi and I have a shop that I can if needed eek out for 2 weeks for £50.

I bulk but laundry powder, dishwasher tons and nappies and toiletries so I never but them with weekly shop.