to ask how i can cut our food cost?

[pimsandlemonade]

I've seen posts about people managing with a food shop under £100 per week and I just want to know how?? What's the secret?
Do you only buy unbranded value stuff? Offers?

Our food shop is about £200 per week, i usually go to Tesco twice a week, roughly £100 per shop, sometimes less, sometimes more. I don't buy any ready meals, make all meals from scratch but i do mainly Tesco finest or organic. We are 3 adults, 1 pre-schooler , 1 baby.
I'm open to ideas how to cut the cost but without compromising much on the quality.

www.foodsafety.gov/keep/charts/storagetimes.html

Gives a good idea of how longs thing will keep in the fridge.

About 3 days in the fridge. Personally I've eaten stuff much older and been fine but I'm also fairly casual about use by dates.

If you get an instant pot for £100 you can cook from frozen in minutes because it's pressurised. I love mine. I make risotto in less than 20 mins with no stirring!

Oh and most importantly, stock up on and learn how to use herbs and spices well. I spent about £10 at our local Asian supermarket and paid attention to how they were combined in recipes, and this has made such a difference to my cooking. I find it so easy now to make meals that are really simple and cheap but tasty because I know how to use herbs and spices (OH knows this instinctively - I just read alot of recipes!)

Have a trawl of the BBC good food recipe website - I find this really help with getting a bit more creative (but not expensive!). I always look in my cupboard and fridge before going shopping to see what I can use up (eg. half a pot of double cream? make carbonara. leftover rice from the night before? egg fried rice) and having a wider range of recipes in my mind makes it alot easier to think how I could use things.

£200 a week is a lot ! We 4 teenagers and 2 adults and probably spend around £150 a week. We shop at Lidl quite a bit and I often go to our local Tesco express and buy cheap/ reduced bread/ bagels/ croissants etc which are fine to freeze. I try to use up left overs, for example yesterday we had spag bol, tonight I will make me and dh a chili with the leftovers. I buy a lot of fruit and the kids get through a lot of fresh orange juice.

Just to echo that Aldi food is actually surprisingly good. We have reduced our weekly shop from £150 per week to around £100 per week but there are six of us including four very hungry pre teens and teenagers who eat us out of house and home

Meal planning takes me ages but what I tend to do is pick one meal and go from there- so a typical week might be:

Saturday: batch cook bolognese; put several portions in the freezer.
Sunday: roast chicken with potatoes, broccoli, carrots and green beans (frozen green beans).
Monday: chicken, broccoli and pepper stir fry.
Tuesday: chicken fajitas with peppers.
Wednesday: something from the freezer that I had previously batch cooked.
Thursday: pasta with salmon and broccoli.
Friday: homemade burgers and homemade potato wedges.

I would then have salad, cheese, bread and fruit for lunches, eggs on toast at the weekend. Another week might be mostly vegetarian food and/or fish. Batch cooking and making meals out of similar ingredients for a week tends to help I think.

Try milkandmore.co.uk to see if they'll deliver - not the cheapest way to get milk but saves us a midweek top up (though you could get lots with your main shop, freeze and defrost until needed).

barbara its personal taste but ive had food poisoning from two chicken purchases in UK supermarkets (and one of the biggest suppliers of meat in the UK) so switched to musclefood and never had better quality. Each to their own, but from personal experience i am shouting about it.

Does anyone manage to eat low carb and keep costs down?

I grow a lot of stuff myself. It's a lot of work and I appreciate it's not practical for everyone, but I really enjoy it. I am not saying everyone should have an allotment, but if you fancy giving it a go, there are small things almost anyone can grow at home and have fun doing that make a bit of a dent on food bills! Now is the perfect time of year to try, as well. Things like salad leaves and runner beans or even courgettes are dead easy and heavy cropping. It can be a great way to get kids interested in eating veg too.

When I do need to shop from the supermarket, I go to Aldi.

I use two chicken breasts to make a curry for four of us, three adults and one very hungry 10 year old. Quite often bits of the chicken don't make it into the curry as boy cat hovers at my feet crying for some :o

Bulk it out with onion, mushrooms, tinned pineapple (yes, it's lovely in curry) and any random veg you have lying about looking a bit withered.

I don't buy any tomato based sauces, I make my own using passata (35p Asdas own) and oregano, thyme, garlic and a teaspoon of sugar. Add in any veg you want.

I sort of meal plan. I have a freezer drawer full of meat portions. I go to the butchers once a month and buy loads and they bag it into portions for me of 1lb mince or 2 chicken breasts etc. Whole lot gets frozen and then I plan daily what we are having the next day based on where all my family are. I'm at home so it's easy for me to do that and I appreciate not everyone can. I always have loads of veg etc in.

I bulk buy rice and pasta so we never run out. 6kg of basmati rice for around £7 which will last us for months (Amazon Pantry box - do this once every two months or so). Bulk buy the washing powder, washing up liquid, coffee, hot chocolate and curry sauces on there too.

We also have a wholesalers locally which sells stuff just going out of date or just out of date. It's pot luck what they have in but we went the other week and bought a crate of 18 bottles of J20 for £5 plus crackers, digestive biscuits and sweets. Also bought two cases of little cartons of pineapple juice for DD's lunches, think they were £4 a case and there's about 60 in a case.

Meal plan and just buy what you need for that
Don't buy finest stuff
Freeze bread and milk so you don't have to go to shop twice a week (everytime I go shopping it costs a fortune!)
We buy value porridge for breakfast (it is just oats so not inferior to any other oats imo) and it saves a fortune on cereals or toast.

or order online and don't step into a supermarket otherwise.

I'm not a great food planner but even our shop is about £120-150 a week for 4 of us and I don't even feed my kids lunch or tea 4 days a week as they eat at school.

This does include alcohol though, usually gin at £20 a go.

I don't meal plan but we do tend to eat the same things, chops with veg, chicken or turkey with veg, stir fries, fish with veg, lots of eggs and yoghurts. We are a low carb house.

We eat a lot of fresh veg and berries and salad which keeps the prices high I find.

If you like eating meat but want to keep costs down, think not only about how often you are eating meat, but also how much meat you are eating at a suitting.

4 chicken breasts is at least 2 meals for 2 adults and two huge and ravening teenagers in our house. Curry (with a couple of tins of tomatoes, half a pack of value peppers and a couple of onions, plus some curry paste and a spoonful or two of yoghurt, or with green thai paste, muchrooms, green beands and coconut milk, plus coriander) served with rice can feed 4 of us with 1 or 2 chicken breasts. Chicken kebabs with lots of veg between the chunks and a good pilau rice with pine kernels similarly.

Equally, we buy very nice mince but our bolognese is a primarily tomato and vegetable based affair with some mince, then we add beands, chilli and cumin to serve the next day with yoghurt, guacamole, wraps and salad, then stretch the mince mixture with more tomatoes and veg such as aubergine or courgettes to make lasagne.

A 1.3 kg gammon joint will serve us roast, cold with baked potatoes and a lentil salad, then either with mushrooms and cream in a pasta sauce, or added to a Sopanish omelette.

It also makes meal planning really easy - start off with 'main meat for the week', devise the 2 or 3 meals from it, then add a pasta and sauce dish, maybe a baked dish such as a quiche or pie, a curry if you haven't done one from the main meat, a meal with fish or sausages - and you're done.

We spend an average of £90 a week on everything, including lunches for all 4 of us for a week. Bit less in summer because we grow our own veg.

and FWIW I would freeze the chicken and yes, we get milk delivered in glass bottles by an actual milkman.

definately meal plan and batch cook. stop buying all the organic/finest stuff.

take advantage of offers and stock up. I always buy a ton of the KTC tomatoes kidney beans and chick peas when they run the offers fir eid/Ramadan in.morrisons.

time your trips so you get the reduced to clear stuff. 3 o clock on a Sunday cab be a good time to go.

forget aldi and lidl as the stuff tastes no where near as good and teh fruit and veg goes off in a matter of hours so no point in cheap if u can't eat it or it takes a tom of additional ingredients to make it taste better.

look at portion size . you won't always need a whole chicken breast depending on size.

eat less meat.

I was spending £100-120pw at Tesco. Switched to Aldi 6 months ago and now shopping is £65-£75pw (and I buy their best 30 day aged Aberdeen angus steaks). Only thing I don't buy there is booze (apart from the occasional bottle of their version of pimms)

and I don't understand why people are saying that one chicken breast per person is "a huge amount of meat"?

Just aldi. It's the best. I sometimes stop on the way home at sainsburys and - I shit you not - end up spending the same as the weekly shop! A) because it's more expensive and b) because there's more to tempt you! Ooh I just need a bloody scented candle, thanks Sainsburys.

When you do your meal planning, have a good rummage in your cupboards, fridge and freezer first to see if you already have the makings of some meals in there.

Also, unless absolutely necessary stay out of the supermarket!! Milk might be a bit more expensive in a corner or convenience shop but you'll save money not buying all the other stuff that inevitably makes it's way into the basket whilst you're there.

Lam, I suppose it depends on the size because sometimes they're massive and sometimes they're huge! We have one each if it's not to be cut up and one between us if it is.

Tiny not huge! **

I suppose for us, we never eat meat 'as a lump' - with the very occasional exception of pork chops. Slices from a roast either hot or in a salad, pieces in a kebab or in a curry, stew or casserole, minced or chopped small in a pasta sauce or to flavour e.g. an omelette or quiche, but almost never as 'a whole chunk of meat'.

Once sliced, chopped or diced, a chicken breast is plenty for a couple of people - if you think about it, well-carved you might, from a decent free-range chicken, serve 4 people from the chicken's 2 breasts with a little leg meat.

I haven't found any issues with the quality of Lidl food Giles. Their fruit and veg is excellent and lasts well. I've been impressed with their wine and loo roll.

At Lidl I now spend in a week what I used to
spend on breakfast at Waitrose.

My only criticism is that you can't always find what you want so not much good for meal planning and sacks of pulses, flour and oil are cheaper from the world food aisle at Tesco. Their kids toothpaste doesn't have enough fluoride.