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!

It's also very easy to make some cheese, we use natural yoghurt and salt and strain it through a muslin over night, we add garlic/herbs (if we have any lurking) or chilli. It's cheaper than buying soft cheese and it tastes the same as Boursin.

I always buy per kilo. Honestly, if you start looking at the per kilo or per litre price for everything you'll be amazed at how much you can save and how the well advertised 'end of aisle' stuff often isn't the bargain you think it is .

Combined with from scratch cooking (ie making curry pastes/spag bol sauces etc) I manage to feed my outrageously hungry brood very cheaply indeed. A basic store cupboard, buying expensive items 'in bulk' when they're on offer and a good size freezer helps too.

A 'cheat tea' always costs far more than a from scratch meal in our house.

I can't make a chicken last a week but I can buy it for less than £2.50 per kilo whole and chop it into it's components myself following (although I don't 'top' my drumsticks like him). No £6 per kilo for breast in my house

Feminine you can go down any route you like. I'm not sure why we think that cheap meat is worse than expensive, there's no way of knowing whether it's worse for you than, say, cheap tins of tomatoes, which may have been sprayed with chemicals or picked when unripe and then enhanced with colour. Sad fact is nobody knows.

In probably helps to buy branded meat (eg Black Farmer) because they have a reputation to uphold and there is no middle man as it were. Tesco's buy their meat from all over the place and its true origin is probably very hard to detect.

I tend to buy food that 'ought' be be good - because it's either in season, grown in a hot country, or is unlikely to have been tampered with.

I like Lidl and Aldi because they don't bother with millions of suppliers - only one or two options. This means that their checking system is likely to be less over-burdened and they are probably more thorough as a result. They also have a lot more to lose if they have a duff supplier as it will constitute half their range. Tesco's on the other hand can happily sell horse meat knowing that they have another 200 suppliers of beef if it all goes pearshaped.

Aldi get most of their meat and fish from Scotland for some reason, not sure why.

you know aldi happily sold horsemeat too, so not sure of the logic there

I buy a tray of 15 eggs and boil them all at once for healthy snacks, I also make hummus from tinned chickpeas and keep some chopped up carrot sticks in the fridge for snacks

genius

Titsalina, your menu sounds great. I'm going to try making nut butter in the food processor, presumably I could do it with any nuts?

Any tips on growing tomatoes? I use a LOT of fresh tomatoes to make pizza topping and pasta sauces. I also have a small patch in the garden where we filled in a pond. It is rather a shady, north-facing corner though would tomatoes grow? How do you plant them? What do you do to take care of them?

That's very useful Titsalinabumsquash and looks very similar to the sort of food we eat.

I got a kilo piece of gammon from our farm shop last week for about a fiver. It would easily do two meals for four people, so a good chicken alternative. Eg roast dinner and then cold meat and chips/salad/pickles. If used in something like quiche or pasta bake it would do 3 meals for four people.

How much do our imaginary skint family spend on food and what do they eat? There are pizzas on the iceland website for a pound, and if we are being generous, they would feed two people, so 50 pence per portion.

Similarly you can get a pack of veg fingers for a pound which could feed 2 adults and 2 small children if accompanied by chips and beans, so £2.50 for a meal for four? Do people do it cheaper than that?

Processed food: family of four, average 50 pence per meal, is £42 per week, but would be nutritionally poor with insufficient fruit and vegetables.

£42 per week for things like porridge, eggs, seasonal vegetables, pulses, a small amount of meat or fish, pasta, canned tomatoes and allow a couple of quid towards building up a store cupboard is perfectly doable and would be much healthier.

So you can spend very little on processed food and not starve, or you could spend an absolute fucking fortune (M&S ready meals).

You can also spend very little on cooking from scratch or an absolute fortune (lots of fish and asparagus).

But if you want to eat well for little money, cooking from scratch is probably the only way to do it and it is wrong to say that it is not possible to do so.

We've tried it with Cashews and Almonds with some success, I think it's the oils in them that make it work so well with peanuts.

Here is a handy guide.

Tomatoes, I just buy a baby plant and put it in a grow bag in a sunny spot. I keep it watered and tie it to a cane to support it as it grows, if I have some money and see any of those tomato feeder things (that you stick upside down in the soil) I'll get one, pound land do them sometimes.

My eldest son is 9 and part of his health condition means he doesn't get full, he's always hungry. He also cant maintain weight so he's on a prescribed high calorie/fat diet so he's always hunting for snacks, he's like a small teenager with the appetite of a grown, male athlete,

Chilli for 6 (which also does pots for school and a chilli lasagne the next day)..

750g minced beef at £4 per kilo. £3
3 cans kidney beans at 21p each. 63p
4 cans tomatoes at 31p each. £1.24
2 lge cans sweetcorn at 30p each. 60p
splosh of balsamic (optional but 99p for 750ml). 10p
2 large onions at 40p kilo (farm shop)..lidls are 79p kilo. 20p(ish)
2 stock cubes. 15p
chilli powder is 69p a bigger tub so 15p ish
garlic powder is similar so 10p at most
rice from 5kg bag at £12 roughly £2's worth
next day add
lasagne sheets 29p per box so 29p
pint of milk 25p
cheese (extra mature bought at under £5 per kilo) £1
half baked baguettes x 4 at 39p for two. 78p
Altogether that's £10.49 for two days main meals for 6 and lunch pots for 3.
Add in two pieces of fruit per child and squash for the lunches and it's still under £12 and at £2.20 per school dinner alone that's some saving

Thanks Titsalina - I think I will try that.

Really sorry to hear about your son, that must be tough for him and for you.

tit would you mind sharing how much your weekly £ bill is please?

It looks very similar to how I/we cook...it made me hungry! :)

Titsalinabumsquash - thank you for your meal plan, was quite interesting to read. Wish I was as organised as you! I actually thought I was quite organised….clearly not.

Those of you who referenced the blueberries and greek yogurt that I couldnt find at Lidl, thank you for letting me know that you did. There is hope.

Do some of you lovely MNs think the quality of Lidl's items might be better quality than Tesco Value or would you say it was same? Guess the answer might depend on item to item, but on the whole? We've tried Tesco Value and really didnt like the quality and just preferred the Tesco own brand (Not Value, not Finest, the middle range).

I desperately want to convert to Lidl, and I love how so many of you find it's a great Supermarket.

Would anyone mind letting me know how you bump out your Bolognese/Lasagne with lentils? Which lentils do you use? How do you cook it?

One of my dds doesn't eat much and she's quite tiny. I don't bulk out meat with lentils because when she gets meat I like her to eat it for the protein, eg I would rather she had 7 spoonfuls of meaty bolognaise than 2 of meat and 5 of lentils. Or maybe I am maligning lentils unfairly.

Lidl is certainly much nicer quality meat than Tesco and much cheaper.

I tried LIdls, I really did. I would say 10% of what I bought I would buy again, and most of those were luxuries anyway - eg their feta stuffed chilis and smoked trout - both delicious but completely unnecessary as only I eat them! The passata was good value. The pizzas were disgusting as were the seafood bake things (dd1 loves seafood in sauce). The bakery stuff was nowhere near as nice as farm shop bakery and we don't eat much bread and cake so I figured we may as well buy the odd nice stuff rather than cheap and not as nice more regularly. Even the dogs didn't eat the dog food! And I ended up buying a load of crap from the Wonder Aisle. So basically not successful for me. I love it at xmas though

JustBreath The quality of standard Lidl and Aldi is at least comparable to Tesco Finest or Major brands.

Lidl Deluxe and Aldi Specially Selected are similar to naice delis

I don't put lentils in bolognaise sauce, but do use lots of mushrooms, carrots, onions and celery. But I think red lentils are the way to go, as they cook quickly and melt into the sauce after 20-30 mins?

What I found when I was on a tight food budget was that £1 / week had to be allocated for store cupboard top-ups like spices, oil etc. (That might have to go up to £1.50 or £2.00 now as this was many many years ago.) However, having allocated that meant that more tasty meals were possible from the fresh ingredients.

Regarding Aldi and horsemeat - iirc it was found in their frozen lasagne? Their fresh stuff is carefully sourced as far as I know.

www.aldi.co.uk/en/product-range/fresh-bakery/best-of-british-meat/

The only own brand stuff my lot will eat is Waitrose.

lol
I think as long as the basics are good - decent bread, decent coffee are my essentials, then probably good meat but less of it. Good wine also although I don't drink very much. Everything else you can fudge IMO.

My lot don't have a choice of whose brand they eat.

horsetowater. Mine neither. They do know why Mummy rummages for the biggest chickens though.

My lot don't get a choice either. They eat what they are given. But then I buy hardly and branded products.

Sometimes I get a convenience curry and then I sit there with six things which all say "microwave for best results: for 4 minutes". There's only room for one at a time so it takes 24 minutes and half of them are cold by the end. Don't know why I bother .