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!

I'm a very poor person. How is it not an option?? As said above, small pack if seeds 40p. Earth from anywhere (have in the past filled a few tubs with soil from a country park!), stick seeds in chuck water at that occasionally. Stick them on window sill. Once big enough put in bigger tubs (pound land often seek gardening troughs etc and I save coppers from bus fares until I have enough to do a pound land trip), stick in garden when it's warm enough and water if hasn't rained much. If you don't have a garden I used to just cover all window sills and keep windows open in summer.

I started doing this when I had left refuge and benefits we're being mucked about as I could afford to spend more than £30 a week in supermarkets. I still do it now as a single parent of two on benefits with money guzzling gas and elec meters and no car so reliant on expensive buses. If you faff a round at the garden centre buying large troughs and compost it's expensive but not if you use your noggin and utilise recycled boxes, tubs, check skips etc for old watering cans, containers that could be used for growing things. It's people's mindset that's the obstacle not how much money they've got.

Homemade pizza:

(HFW recipe)

250g plain flour
250g bread flour
1tsp yeast
1 tablespoon olive oil
1.5 tsp salt
325ml hand hot water.

Make bread dough

Roll out as flat as possible on baking parchment

tomato sauce (copied from Apples for Jam cookbook)
2 x 400g tins of tomatoes.
2 x garlic cloves
olive oil.

Apart from that I use whatever cheese is in fridge and whatever bits and pieces are knocking around for the topping e.g. an egg and half a bag of spinach is fiorentina.

Put pizza (still on) baking parchment directly on oven rack at hottest oven setting and cook for about 10 mins.

Makes 4 x very large pizzas or 4 slightly smaller pizzas + 12 x dough balls. (mix butter and grated garlic for garlic butter dip).

Ingredients cost is about £5 depending on the cost of what is in the fridge.

Obviously it's expensive to whack the oven on at it's top heat, and I don't make any claims for the health benefits except that I don't add sugar or preservatives. However it is certainly cheaper (and I think tastes better) than 4 x pizza express pizzas + dough balls.

Just place marking to post proper reply later.

I'm feeding family of 6 and 2 cats for less than £100 pw. Got it down from £130 - £140 thanks to starting a thread on here :)

ok I haven't got to skip checking stage yet. I still think that actually growing veg is no cheaper than buying it but it depends on what it is.

I do grow herbs though which does save money as they are fiendish in the supermarket. I always buy two pots of basil and repot them into a planter on the windowsill, they last a good 6 months and we have loads.

Growing stuff does not cost a bloody fortune! I have this month obtained seed pots from egg boxes, big tubs and troughs in the form of an old sink, a watering can and an old metal bin. I have managed to grow potatoes before by keeping back 6 potatoes from a bag of white potatoes from tesco, putting them in a sack in the back of a cupboard and leaving them there for 4 months. When I took them out they had grown huge hairy shoots, stuck them in a big dustbin full of compost and they grew into pot plants. Cost me pennies. Like I said, if it's costing lots you're doing it wrong.

ooh thanks for baking parchemnt tip. cheese is the expensive part, I use 3 balls of mozzerella between 4 pizzas, I do buy the basics mozzerella but it is really watery

I think it's worth going to the better value shops ... for me that means more trips to very local LIDL and less to handy and user friendly (but more expensive) Co-op.

Also from your OP I think it's good to make more food and kind of plan for left-overs. We often have some tasty grub left over from our evening meal which DH will generally attack for breakfast, and if I'm lucky there'll be something for healthy/tasty lunch. I've just had last night's chick pea and green beans paneer curry for lunch with a toasted paratha. Fab!

More and more now the DC are hitting teenage years with accompanying appetites it's good to have something in for those just back from school cravings too. But have to admit this is more often a snacky thing. Bananas very good though, or crumpets/muffins/pitta's.

I think getting more serious about left-overs is a good way to go - think a lot of TV chefs are picking up on this ATM - and it makes a difference with us.

look at your portion contol.... 100g of chicken really isnt a lot. its about half a chicken breast ot 1/3 of the massive ones i get

a chicken can last but only if its a bit player, not the starring role

I am desperate though, as like I said, I don't have the option of spending more as when my money's gone it's gone. I've currently had benefits stopped while they recalculate so this month I'm very grateful for dustbin full of motley veg! It wouldn't win any prizes but it's edible and has all the nutrients that tesco veg has. I can't grow my own meat or milk my own cow so the veg has to be the thing that I grow or we just wouldn't eat it.

I used to use mozzarella but switched to cheddar and nobody complained. Cheddar can still be really expensive, but when it's melted nobody seems to notice whether it is Waitrose organic or corner shop value range.

OK shadow, not doing it wrong, just differently. I have a fab veg patch courtesy of dh :-) but once you factor in the time it doesn't make it partiuclarly cheap. I have done that with shop bought potatoes but I usually buy seed potatoes as I worry about disease

merrymouse I might try and stretch it with cheddar, trouble is dd2 hates cheese and just about tolerates mozzerella

Yeehaw

Growing things COSTS A FORTUNE

I totally agree. We have a fairly sizeable allotment. I dread to think what it has cost us over the years with planting things like fruit trees and fruit bushes.

I think there is a difference between growing things because they taste nice; and growing things because they grow easily, you will be able to eat them and they contain vitamins and will stop you feeling hungry, even though you might not choose to eat them given a choice.

What growing your own fruit and veg does allow you to do is get the pick of the crop. It is a bit like comparing home made with shop bought equivalent meals. You need to compare like with like.

Allotment broad beans are never going to compete on price with frozen. They will however compete very well indeed on price with fresh broad beans.

Allotment grown strawberries compete on flavour and quality. Supermarkets are more interested in appearance and shelf life than flavour.

I once read 'growing things' described as 'spending hundreds of pounds and hours on saving a few tens of pounds on vegetables' and I would agree with that statement wholeheartedly.

In my experience, growing things only works if you have the right conditions and are able to put the effort in, which I don't except for rhubarb, which grows like weeds in my garden, but I don't actually like it.

It is probably best to concentrate on things like tomatoes and herbs, which are not great in UK shops and are quite expensive.

Well done to the poster who managed to make a success of it though!

Depends if you subscribe to the 'fruit as childcare' policy of my earlier years: 'Off you go and pick some raspberries dears and I'll sneak off for a quiet cup of tea.'

There are four of us, a dog, a cat and a newborn – we usually manage to get a week's shopping for about £50 or £60 (depending on if we've run out of pet food or cleaning stuff etc). We get everything except meat and bread from Aldi.

That is horrible about the stinking chicken breasts, you poor thing! That would really put me off. We still tend to get meat from the butcher, just a couple of times a week, admittedly, or occasionally we'll buy a side of lamb for £50 and stick it in the freezer. It lasts quite a while. Bread comes from the baker but we often get yesterday's bread for a lower price

I'm an Aldi convert, despite not trying the meat (although we had the streaky bacon last week and it was great). The fruit and veg is really good quality and very cheap. The cleaning products are brilliant and super cheap, too. It has been interesting watching the customer demographic change in our local store over the last couple of years.

Admittedly my children are still very young, but the lady who runs the Utterly Scrummy blog does her food shop for a family of five for about £60 a week, and her teenager eats as much as her husband does. She does buy frozen veg, though, as it's cheaper, but still lots of fresh fruit. At the end of each week's budget post, she shows the price comparison from her online shop. Tesco can be up to £20 more expensive than Asda, for the same items!

So, a long-winded way of saying that cooking from scratch can be cheaper, in my experience, but it depends on where your groceries come from! I agree that you can probably get a jar of pasta sauce for the same or less than the raw ingredients – but I like cooking so prepared to pay a tiny bit more. Other ready-made foods are probably more expensive, though (I'm thinking curries etc).

Oh I feel off that growing bandwagon. I have two bereft 1x1m raised bed veg plots if anyone want to come round and plant them up for

I think some of these recipes are great - like the toad in the hole...but I find it hard to balance out trying to diet with a reduction in costs - eg its easer to fill up with 'hearty' meals like sausage and mash - I fill up too much lol.

Well Ive really ejoyed reading this thread.

Oh christ, just realised I listed the newborn after the dog and cat!

-slinks shamefully away-

We have just been to LIdl to do our first big(ish) shop there. I had dh with me so we probably picked up extra bits, we bought lots of fruit, veg and a small amount of meat ( chicken breasts, bacon, cooked meat and some fish) as well as bits for lunch boxes for dh and the dd's, we didn't buy any pet food or cleaning products and the cost was £63, we had a lot more in the trolley than we would in Tesco, I often get half a trolley full for £80 in Tesco so LIdl seems much cheaper, there were a few items I could not get that I will have to pop to Tesco to get but over all I think we did well, we seemed to get quite a lot for our money.

im amazed you lot have left overs i feed seven of us most days on 70 to 80 pounds a week including top ups. leftovers do not exist in our house. We only have a small portion of meat each, each meal is bulked out by extra veg, potatoes, or pasta. i have less on my plate so the hungry teens can have more. If they eat the crisps, biscuits etc before the week is up then tough.

I do buy a lot of basics stuff though and Ilove Aldi

I wish i could afford more meat but thats impossible. Mind you I did buy a chicken from Asda for a fiver the other day and that fed six of us when it said feeds four on the label. We did eat the wings, legs and all the underneath and skin though, we did get a load from it.

Marking my place to post properly later

Tinned tomatoes can be expensive but passata from Lidl costs about 31p and goes miles.

Also when we have pizza we make a version of our own. Realise it is not strictly pizza but we enjoy it.

Round of toast or if we are feeling flush long slice of French bread toasted, couple of tblsps passata spread around and a bit of grated cheese toasted.

Kids love it.