How much do you spend

[tidytidy]

A week on food, clothes and petrol?

The portions for meat, veg and rice/potatoes etc Greengiant gives sound totally normal to me.

Bought a half price chicken and roasted it for 3 on Sunday. Then made chicken risotto which fed 3 one night and 2 the next, very chickeny.

We also have magic MN chickens. A large chicken is generally about 1.7kg and costs about £8.

There are four of us, me DH and two DSs 8 and 10 one of whom has hollow legs.

This week we had roast dinner on Saturday evening, chicken and brie risotto on Sunday and I then stripped off all the meat (this is key since there is a fair amount of meat underneath and on the wings etc) and this is now in the freezer and will easily be enough to make chicken pasta bake.

Clearly if I was buying the tiny 3 for £10 chickens it wouldn't go as far.

Love a good MN chicken argument.

I buy ASDA Extra Large whole chicken ( typically 1.9Kg) I can get 12 adult meals from that.

I've had to convert 1.7kg into pounds to understand this conversation. It's 3lb12oz, btw.

Our butcher chickens are typically 4lb - 4lb7oz(1.8-2.0kg). They cost around £5-6 if barn, or £7-8 if free range.

We have around one breast and one leg for a roast, then the other breast does one meat-light dish (say pasta bake), and the brown meat does another (say biryani). The carcass is boiled for stock which I freeze to use for gravy the next time we have a roast.

A similar price chicken from the supermarket goes nowhere near as far. A big cheap one shrinks to nothing and tastes of nothing; a high-welfare one is too small.

We are lucky to live round the corner from an old-fashioned butcher (who prices in lb and oz for a start) who provides locally-reared and -slaughtered meat. His prices are more expensive per pound kilo than at the supermarket, but the quality is so much higher you need less so end up spending less.

We can manage two meals out of a 1.8kg chicken. The main dinner, then enough chicken for a risotto or pasta the next day. I do make stock from the bones and make soup with that but that's my limit.

I make a chicken last 3 meals too, but that is because the second two meals are pretty much vegetarian meals with some chicken added.

If I left it out, we would still be able to eat them without feeling - or even knowing - something was missing.

I spend £7 on a chicken, we have roast chicken with mashed potato, red cabbage, green beans, say on the first day, and we probably eat about half the chicken between 2 adults and two small children and lots of crispy delicious chicken skin

I then strip every scrap of meat from the bones. I don't keep the bones for stock though, I just throw them away .

Then next day I might cook a big vegetable curry. I'll divide the curry in half, put one half in the fridge and add half of the leftover chicken (so a quarter of the whole chicken) to the other half on the hob.

Then next day I might make a risotto with leeks and add the other half of the leftover chicken.

And next day we might have the other half of the vegetable curry, without any chicken added at all.

It al depends how much meat you eat I think.
If I make a chicken curry then it is rarely just meat and sauce. I would usually add chickpeas, peppers or mushrooms, and often make another side dish- aloo gobi or daal, with a pile of home made chapatis, rice and salad.
Plates are full, protein levels are high but we don't have lots of meat on our plate.

Cassoulet is another dish my family love, made with chicken or a few lamb chops. Thick unctious tomato sauce, packed full of garlic, meltingly soft haricot beans, studded with lamb, I can make 4 lamb chops feed five people- again plates are piled high, protein and calories high.

For those that eat loads of meat - do you also eat pulses or beans?

We eat a fair amount of meat but that also includes things like tinned mackerel (which my kids love). If I make a stew or casserole then I'll add things like butter beans or borlotti beans to it. Curries will often have lentils or chickpeas added to them and chilli con carne has lots of mixed beans and usually chickpeas too. I often will chuck a handful of quinoa into anything vaguely saucy (so stews, curries, soups and even spag bol) because it's added protein and full of really good things. It goes a surprisingly long way too!

I only spend £40 per month at most on petrol, I use public transport to get to work. Food, split between DP and me, about £150ish each month, I think? I sometimes spend £100+ on clothes in a month, sometimes less. I don't know if it counts though because it's usually a case of wanting new clothes, not needing them. I do put a few hundred into savings each month as well though. :)

Our weekly shop is budgeted to be about £120 per week including cleaning stuff and alcohol.

In practice it varies widely and is generally split between a supermarket delivery and the local butcher / fishmonger. Since we started getting food delivered it's gone down a lot and I suspect that's be we're not DP isn't in the supermarket whilst hungry. At the moment I reckon we spend £80-90 per week.

We have two cars, which is a bit of a hangover from us both commuting (the smaller costs less to keep than to replace if we did need it), but don't spend much on fuel. Maybe £30 a month on diesel for the main car and £15 on petrol for the second.

i've never worked out clothes by week. I reckon I spend £2000-£3000 per year. DP probably the same. Some years towards the higher end (if I need a new coat, new boots or something else expensive), other years much, much less. Depends on weight stability as well.

£100 on food
£30 on fuel for car

Not sure about clothes as I might go weeks with buying anything and then another week I might spend £100.

85 a week for a family of 5 which includes 2 different size nappies and baby milk.

On watchdog the other day it said average family spends 84 so looks like we are spot on average.

Should say there's just the two of us, but we buy organic, good quality meat etc. Obviously we can afford it and if we couldn't we'd cut back (we ate a lot of cheap veggie meals when we were students and had less ready cash but more time to cook).

Oddly we recently got a slow cooker to try to reduce time in the kitchen of a weeknight. An unplanned side effect has been a reduction in costs as we've bought cheaper ingredients to cook.