To wonder if people actually spend 200+ on a weekly shop

[pleasemothermay1]

Watching eat well for less and I just can't believe people actually spend 200+ a week on a food shop

One lady was giving a teen 20 a week to get chips and chicken 😟

We have 6 in our family

One baby
One toddler
One teen
Me and hubby
And a cat

I spend £65 a week including nappies and toiletries

This gose up to £90 during holidays and the teen is eating at home not collage

It's mad what are these people feeding there kids

My children have breakfast lunch and dinner I don't encourage grazing all day they can have fruit in between meals and I cook from sctrach pretty much 5 days a week junk on a Saturday then roast on a Sunday

My menu for the week from today until Friday is:

Roast chicken dinner (chicken sandwiches for lunch monday)
Fajitas with spicy rice
Burrito Burgers (using tortillas left over from fajitas)with new pots and salad
Baked Salmon with new pots and veg
Lasagne (from scratch with peppers/onions/carrot etc with garlic bread and salad

My meat was all bought from Lidl

Chicken - £2.39
Mince - £1.59
Steak Burgers - £1.80ish
2 chicken breast for fajitas £1.59
Salmon fillets - £2.29

so thats under a tenner

We both work full time, all meals are easily made in under half an hour.

I honestly dont think there is any excuse for people who work to say they havent got time to cook.

I am not being smug or righteous either.. I enjoy cooking, but we are on a budget too, so I try to make nice meals with as little money as possible. It can be done.

Also, we are not going to be so strapped for cash in a few months time, but I will carry on shopping in Lidl, the meat is decent quality, so is the veg and it seems ridiculous to spend three times the amount in more expensive supermarkets when I really dont need to.

Crisp I hate to break it to you but that only takes you to Thursday.

Genuine question crispbutty - how do you cook a roast or a lasagne in under 30mins?

I appreciate that I'm not the fastest at chopping, but even once I've chopped everything the bolognese sauce simmers for at least half an hour (more ideally) then once assembled the lasagne takes 30-40 mins in the oven. So I'm looking at a good 90 minutes to make a lasagne.

Let me into your secret of speedy cooking!!!

And there are two of you?

I don't get the slow cooker business.

Get home from work, bung 2lb cubed braising steak in a bag of seasoned flour, shake, fry off quickly in batches to brown, add to casserole in which you are,sautéing two chopped onions, gour sliced carrots, perhaps a bit of turnip, add a glass of red wine, thyme, beef stock and bung in oven for 2.5 hours. Meanwhile boil some pasta bows, quickly fry salmon steaks, make a salad, stir in pesto with pasta. Have a lovely dinner, tidy up, watch an you of tv. Take casserole pit of oven to cool overnight.

Get up, put casserole in fridge, come home from work, cassetle in oven, peel spuds, mash spuds, having boiled some broccoli.

Why does anyone need a slow cooker?

Crisp you havent told us how much salmon you bought for 2.25 in g.

Crispbutty not everyone lives near a Lidl/Aldi and not everyone want to buy their food there. I find it hard to believe that you get much meat for the prices you mention. If you do it's probably not of the quality that some people like.

Lasagne needs batching. Big spag vol, with bol left over for lasagne. Next day, make a chess sauce/bechamel. Assemble and bung in oven for an hour. You could have maccy cheese that week and make double cheese sauce. Assemble lasagne and bung in oven while you have dinner. Then freeze for another week.

Also - £2.39 for a whole chicken???

Really?

I appreciate that everyone has different priorities, but I can't help wondering what kind of life that chicken had

A whole chicken for 2.39? Two breasts for 1.59? What sort of miserable hellish existence is a chicken going to have endured so that you can make cheap meals? Essentially you're being a bit smug that an animal has suffered so you can get all your meat for under a tenner, well done you.
You say its ridiculous to spend more but maybe if you did you wouldn't be adding to the problem of animals being nothing but convenience foods. Don't get me wrong I eat meat but I believe all meat eaters have a responsibility to ensure the meat they consume hasn't suffered a terrible life squashed into a cage so that you can come on mumsnet and brag about your Sunday lunch costing less than three quid. Well done you, nice slow clap.

I don't accept that cheap meat = high standards of animal welfare. I don't eat meat but my family does. I'd buy no meat rather than cheap meat for them.

12 pints of milk a day????. 5 of us don't even get through that in a week and we are all adults.
Crisp you must only get a tiny bit of mince for that price.

You're right roses and that is what I usually do with a lasagne. But even then, with the bolognese made already, I'd struggle to make a lasagne in 30 mins.

I don't think I could buy meat that cheap, it's like those cheap eggs you can get.

Actually Lidl does frozen wild salmon ( sustainably caught) for £1.59 for 2 bigger than average steaks. Doesn't have skin so not great for pan frying but delicious for steaming.

Well i suppose impossible is the wrong word, perhaps very very difficult and would result in someone eating their dinner miserable, late and very tired. If say you had to care for a sick relative and clean their house, do their laundry, shopping, provide their food etc also had 2 children under 4 that wouldn't sleep, one with ASD, were pregnant and everytime you tried to nip into the kitchen to chop something the children would smash up things,scream, bite each other and their grandfather, your dh worked long hours so wasn't home till 8-9pm, which means you would have to start cooking then and for people who were not happy to eat 'quick' foods, after you had just been thru a hellish 2 hour bedtime fiasco, so dinner is often eaten unhappily at 10pm? Isn't it better to buy more expensive ready made food? What about all that and the newborn to look after too? Is that still lazy?

Lasagne is a hellish faff. I only make it now for largeish parties, ie, 10+. Then bung a Cpl for four in the freezer. Oh, when I make the vol with at least 2.5kg good minced beef.

Ds2 goes through 2 pints of goats milk a day and ds1 and dh go through 6 pints of milk a day.

They only drink milk and water.

I don't understand is the disconnect or inequalities which threads like this reveal within the MN community. Every week now, we get posts from members with a fiver left to feed their kids on for a week - and then we get threads like this, in which others of us spend half the UK's per capita income at Waitrose.

You're absolutely kidding yourself if you think cheap meat = good welfare.

Tut tut Mrs koala, crispbutty judges you and like she states 'there is no excuse' maybe she'd be generous enough to come round and show you her amazing 'misery chicken' recipes?

It just seems very bizarre that people can confidently declaim that because they work full time and do something, anyone can, when 'full time' can apply to such wildly different circumstances. A full time job could be 35 hours a week, it could require twice that. It could be a doss, it could be physically and/or mentally exhausting. A full time worker could be based at home, or a five minute walk away, or a two hour commute. It could be a 9-5 day, it could be split shifts starting early and finshing late with no time for anything in the middle. All these things are possibilities. With this in mind, how on earth are people saying that because they work full time and they do something, no other dual full time working household could have circumstances sufficiently different that they couldn't?

Ohtheroses, in answer to your slow cooker question, you just described a meal that takes 2.5 hours to cook, plus what, 20 mins prep time?

What time do you eat dinner? You'd have to be getting in very early from work to eat at a reasonable time.

If I get home by 6 or 630 that's very very good....I don't want to eat dinner at 1030...this is where the slow cooker is brilliant.

Agree that threads like these show the inequalities, but nobody is forcing people to eat battery chickens.

We had a period where things were very tight (redundancy plus maternity leave) and we ate a lot less meat rather than a lot cheaper meat. Everyone has that choice.

Some things are better in slow cooker and can be left unattended. I do a chicken chipotle chiili with left over chicken. Wouldn't taste as nice on hob and would need constant stirring/someone in the house with it.

Also cheaper to cook as uses less fuel, casserole could be cooked in slow cooker so no need to prep day 1 and reheat day 2. An oven on for 3 hours plus over is a lot more expensive than a slow cooker.

When i worked full time with no dc i had a 2 hr commute either side of a 9-6 job and i still chose to cook because i enjoyed it and i wasn't utterly exhausted. Now i don't work it's much much harder and that was a piece of piss in comparison to having dc and fil. As i said before, something has to give and i don't want it to be my sanity. So cooking from scratch is fucking off right out the window.