To spend between £6 and £10 on the evening meal

[ShouldiWork]

We can 'afford' it - in the sense that all bills get paid on time etc - but I feel a bit sick when I tot up the months groceries - and I remember when I worked to a £2 per meal budget.

On the other hand - maybe it's what things cost now - and it seems a bit mean to scrimp on food for DH and DC - when the cash is there & DH works hard for it.

Our tea, which fed four:

Mince - 500g £3.95
Four potatoes - £1
A splash of milk - say 10p?!
1 onion - 30p
Tin peas - 60p
Parsnips - 80p
Stock cube - 25p

So that's coming in at more or less £7, and I would class that as a fairly low budget tea, certainly not extravagant. I think you're doing very well to get between £6 and £10 for six.

I find a well-stocked store cupboard of non-perishables help. Also, we can get all our veg from our local grocers for a tenner for the week, and tend to buy as we need.

I buy frozen 'chuck-in' veg too - peppers, onions, mushrooms, chopped leeks etc, so there's less waste. For example, we pay £1 for a bag of sliced mixed peppers at farmfoods. This will provide peppers for between three and four meals, when we would normally be paying £3 on fresh mixed peppers at least.

This thread makes me appreciate how cheap being vegetarian is.

A typical meal, which will usually last at least 2 meals for a 3 adults and a very hungry child:

Carrots -50p
Cup of lentils - 50p
Spoon of stock -20p
Onion -20p
Bread -75p

Total: £2.15 for 2 meals / 27p per head per meal

I feed a family of 5, 3 of which are adults, 1 is a vegetarian and a 6 year old that eats continuously. I think the price you give is pretty reasonable, pretty much all my evening meals cost between £6- £10. And I also have to provide packed lunches for school.

However it would be awesome and much appreciated if a few of you ladies threw in some recipes with your ingredients.

Shocked at £600 and £645 shopping bills. You must eat like royalty!

We spend around £300 -350 a month and this includes all food,,non perishable goods, nappies and packed lunch for dh and I. I will add that we shop at Lidl and 99p shop. It makes a huge difference.

Good grief Clash fucking HOW much for a tin of peas? and for 4 taties? and nearly £4 for just over a pound of mince? where on earth are you shopping?
You need to shop around cos that is ridiculous
And I just read your next post and saw you do shop at Farm Foods - I was just about to recommend them. How on Earth do you spend so much on mince and peas when you have a FF nearby?
I feed 2 adults and 3 ever-hungry-hollow-legged DCs for about £60 a week ordinarily and wouldn't dream of paying 60p for a tin of anything

Asian shops along with some supermarkets do massive bunches of coriander for less than a pound which can be used fresh or chopped and frozen in a sealy bag. Not suitable for salads and salsas but perfectly fine for curries or soups.

Our Tesco also does 400g blocks of puréed garlic and ginger for about a pound. Freezers can be great for storing those half used things that go off if you only use a bit at a time like pesto, if you aren't a pasta and pesto as a quick meal fiend - I freeze it in ice cube trays or blobs on baking parchment and transfer to a tub when frozen.

I even have the mythical left over wine in mine in the tiny green lidded ikea plastic tubs so no need to open a bottle for all those recipes that just need a splash or glass of wine.

I have no idea how much we spend on food but I suspect it's not a lot as I shop mostly in Aldi and then meat comes from a local farm shop in bulk and then frozen in meal sized portions.

YY to the cost of 'bits and pieces' like guacamole really adding up. When someone mentioned refried beans, I winced at the price stated as beans are very cheap. Definitely something worth making yourself and freezing in batches by the sounds of it.

Shocked at £600 and £645 shopping bills. You must eat like royalty!
We spend around £300 -350 a month and this includes all food,,non perishable goods, nappies and packed lunch for dh and I. I will add that we shop at Lidl and 99p shop. It makes a huge difference.

Depends how many mouths you have to feed, how old they are and what they do for a job. A family of 5 with 3 teenagers doing athletics/rugby/whatever and parents working in demanding physical jobs are going to eat and spend a lot more on food than a family of 5 with small children and parents in sedentary jobs.

Yes, most of my meat/fish/bread purchases go in the freezer. I have 2 chest freezers

pombear

To be fair, we didn't get the potatoes from farm foods. I think their mince is £3.95 a bag. May be wrong though. Thinking about it, it might have been 3 for a tenner with the chicken fillets, so maybe £3.33? And we usually buy frozen peas, but didn't have much space in the freezer so I got tinned.

We make our own refried beans too. About half the price and much nicer.

Tbh - I've never tasted refried beans - no idea what they are - but they sounded proteinous and a change from tofu as the standby veggie substitute.

I am sure someone has already suggested this, but I have found Aldi to be an absolute lifesaver when it comes to cheap groceries. I actually feel a sense of ridiculously emotional gratitude when I think what my diet would have been for the last year if I were restricted to the major supermarkets.

I can second the cheapness of veggie meals too, particularly if you substitute meat with more veg and not with tofu or Quorn.

I think you can get too hung-up on pricing each meal.

I don't usually know what individual meals cost me, I just know what I spent overall.

I try to be thrifty, buy vegetables that are on offer or in season, plan to use up everything I buy.

I know meals with meat in are generally going to cost more, but veggie meals are just as expensive too sometimes. Eg when I make spaghetti bolognese, I use minced beef at 3.96 euro per 500g. Tonight we are having a veg-based meal (aubergine parmigiana) and I bought 3 aubergines at 1 euro each, plus 2 packs of (value) mozzerella at 45 cents each, and the other ingredients will be similar for each - onions, tomato, passata, red wine, herbs, parmesan cheese, garlic bread with one, spaghetti with the other.

I just cook things we like to eat, I try to use up all the fresh ingredients I buy, I alternate meat and vegetarian meals to give variety, I don't get hung up if a particular meal costs more, because I know I will cook others that cost less and it will balance out.

I love Lidl - but I can't justify the 30min drive when tesco deliver... Yy to it giving a champagne lifestyle on beer money!

I keep trying to bring my budget back down again - we can afford it but the price of food has risen drastically in recent years. (And I have had to get lazier in terms of cooking from scratch as I have been increasingly time poor and have a fussy child who is underweight so needs calories!!).

My average weekly shopping bill is roughly €120-140, for 3 people. Last week it was only €80, but I didn't need a lot of stores items, just meat, veg, milk, potatoes and a few extra bits. This week, I need to add in oil, cleaning items, lots of tinned tomatoes, and a few other bits (and a decent bottle of wine for me! I want to relax this weekend) so I am expecting roughly €120.

I spend on good meat, we get a lot of fresh veg and a reasonable amount of fresh fruit, I have 2 calves drinking milk (DH drinks loads, and DD drinks 300ml of warm milk going to bed at night, as well as more in the day), and we all like our cheese.

But I am working on reducing the cost and making it simpler as well at the moment. So doing more double batches of freezer dinners, making large batches of homemade tomato sauce to freeze in dinner portions, baking at home. And making sure that when I get chicken breasts or pork chops, I freeze some whole but some already diced (for fast meals); I keep frozen prawns for the same reason; bacon lardons have a range of dinner uses. And trying to spot the yellow stickers a bit more often too. I'll be increasing my productivity in the garden this season too, for beans, peas and some other veg.

That's the problem with working to a weekly budget.

Fluctuations are often to do with whether you're stocking/reducing the freezer - and non-food items/seasonal items (eg school bottle stall * 3 kids is never kind on the budget!).

For a couple of years, I was doing the monthly grocery challenge on MSE, and that worked well to keep me on track (I had a basic budget I was trying to keep to for the year). But work blocked MSE access and I can never manage to get on at nights.

If you are into any kind of Asian food (Chinese, Indian, and Thai especially), try to find an Asian supermarket near you. The spices are really good and sold in bulk (not sackloads, but 200g-500g packs which do loads). And they do very good value larger bags of rice and noodles (up to 20kg of rice!! But I tend to stick with 5kg). They often have interesting vegetables too, and they are generally good value. I try and go about every 3-6 months to my local(ish) one, to stock up on herbs and spices, and rice etc, and then add a few fresh things while I am there.

The same with Lidl or Aldi. I like things from both, but don't get there too often. (Well, Lidl more often). So I will stock up on Lidl bacon lardons (usually have about 6-8 weeks to use them), loads of cheeses (big blocks of vintage cheddar, a couple of gorgonzolas for gorgonzola pasta, feta, parmesan etc), their beer and wine are good (we've trialled extensively to find what we like), a few packs of parma or black forest cured ham, (they've got braeseola now too, yum!!), frozen fish, frozen oven chips, individually wrapped criossants/pain au chocolats for breakfasts, loo roll, kitchen roll, cleaning things etc. And then get loads of fruit and veg, and 6 cartons of organic milk, for that week while I am there.

I do "shop the offers" on things we eat. So use the freezer wisely to stock up on some of those offers.

I do big batches of roasted veggies (1cm diced red onion, courgette, red and yellow peppers, tomatoes, garlic, mushrooms - tossed with some olive oil and seasoning, roasted for 20-30 minutes) - using some for dinner and then freezing in roughly 1 rounded cup batches. That's enough for 2 adults as a side dish another night, or for all 3 of us when added into tomato sauce with pasta - sometimes with bacon pieces, chopped sausages, diced chicken or prawns, sometimes just veggie.

I agree with the asian supermarkets - i live in a "deprived" town with, for Sussex, a high ethnic population (hastings + st leonards). The ethnic food shops are a great resource.

In my experience lidl and aldi aren't as wonderful as they are made out to be. When we moved here i had a bit of a love affair with lidl but i have gone back to tesco, morrisons and independants now. There are some things that i only buy in lidl (antipasti, strong flour, pizzas, juice plus the weekend deals) but unless you buy branded i don't find it's significantly cheaper. More importantly for me they only reduce by 30% and that's not enough for me. I get their veg deal of the week if it's worth it. You have to know your "big 4 prices"

I'm very dedicated to my food budget, it's like a hobby. I'm also moulding SIL up to be just like me lol.

If you are on fb get "10 ways to earn money as a student without working". This is how i got £200 free fruit and veg at morrisons in the sun last summer as i found out about the £5 vouchers (you could use dozens in one transaction on their first offer, halcyon days !)

I regularly spend that and more on our evening meal. We can afford it, I like cooking interesting meals and I don't feel the need to explain to anyone why I buy what I buy.

If I had to do budget food I could.

It's true though, spending a large amount on your food bill is seen as very profligate on Mumsnet. Everyone is always telling everyone how to do it cheaper. It's normally the first thing people who are struggling financially are advised to look at. Designer clothes, smart cars, kids activities, people are not so judgy.

Lots of people just see food as fuel, not as a pleasure though.

Threads like this always turn in to a competition to see who can cook the cheapest possible meal.

There is nothing wrong with buying the best you can afford if it tastes better and makes you happy. I love cooking, but don't own a single designer item.

But saving money on food and taking pleasure from it are not mutually exclusive Tinkly, far from it.

It's not about being judgy, saving money on food can be very easy to do and very lucrative. If you take an extreme starting point where someone mostly eats out, buys their lunch out, or eats ready meals from M&S or Waitrose, they could easily be spending hundreds of pounds per person per month on food. A family could be spending well over 1k on food and eating. Now this is fine if you can afford it, but you have to be well above average on the income scale to be able to afford to eat like this and afford all your basic bills and to afford days out, holidays, activities and clothes/accessories/household items etc.

Most people can't afford to spend like this, so one very effective way to free up more money for stuff other than food, whether it is other basic living costs, or fun stuff and luxuries, is to look at what is being spent on food.

You can save massive amounts if you cook your food yourself for example, or make inventive use of leftovers, not waste food, or use cheaper supermarkets or shop around for offers. And if you can cook, you will eat much better food than if you are eating cheap takeaways or ready made or processed food.

Making a few changes to what you eat could literally free up hundreds of pounds a month or more, without compromising good nutrition or pleasurable eating. And to most people that will make a huge difference to their financial wellbeing without taking away the pleasure of eating good food.

No I absolutely agree Ilkley, and I am someone who cooks from scratch and pretty much always takes a picnic. I like decent quality meat though, and I don't find that all value products taste as a good as branded ones, even stuff like tinned tomatoes.

YANBU - you're clearly being sensible with what you're eating and unfortunately if you want to eat quality food then it does cost a lot. Personally I think that prioritising spending on good food is important if you've got the luxury of spare cash - apart from rent and bills there's not anything else that springs to mind as being "essential".

fireside I agree.

There is no moral imperative to spend as little as possible on feeding your family.