Aibu to think I can live on less then 15 pound a week?

[Mosseywossey]

I have just worked out my budget and I only have about 25 pound a week spare. Ideally I want to put 10 pound of it away in case of emergencies and treats.
I am allergic to chemicals so need to cook most of my meals from fresh, but can I realistically live on spending 15 pound on food a week?
And if people have any cheap recipes idea or meal plans let me know. 😋

We ate nearly all vegetarian food though, apart from fish fingers and tuna.

I think that's where we do so well on approx £20 a week food - mainly vegetarian.
Lentil bolognese
mild dahl curry and rice
spaghetti bolognese (quorn mince)
toad in the hole (linda mccartney veggie sausages from Heron/Fulton Foods for approx £1)
etc etc. Stick to veggie alternatives, just as good and can make a good meal out of them for cheaper.

A lot of the supermarkets do a discount the first time you order a delivery from them.

This website www.mysupermarket.co.uk is good for checking prices of things.

It's perfectly doable, but you have to be organised about it.
I spend about £20-25 a week for myself & my son & we eat really well, but I also grow a lot of fruit, veg & salad in the back garden.
I shop special offer to special offer now & stock up when they are good e.g. every few months you can get a 45 wash pack of Persil non bio for £4 from Tesco, it will go on not so good special offer in between.
I started off with a week of living on noodles & ready brek, using the rest of my weeks budget to help stock my cupboards.
Then I started adding things like rice, peas & instant gravy as a meal, or I'd cook long spaghetti, drain it & scramble an egg into it adding one piece of bacon per person diced up small (aka student carbonara)
I froze the bacon slice by slice so one pack = 6 meals.
Tesco do 15 eggs for £1.25
I'd save the empty bag from the last loaf of bread (keep it in the fridge it lasts much longer) then you can freeze half the next loaf if you don't eat it fast enough.
A 'poor mans roast' is also very popular in my house, which is when you have a roast dinner without the meat.
So, 25p packet of stuffing (more than enough for 2), 49p gets you a dozen frozen Yorkshires if you don't want to make them, gravy (same tub as above), frozen veggies of your choice.
You can always add a chicken fillet or something if you want but honestly I find I don't miss the meat & I am not a veggie.

I live far enough away from a supermarket that it's cheaper to get home deliveries.
If I go into town, I will go to the butchers & buy small portions of meat in there, it's usually better quality & cheaper than the supermarket.

Asda will do a home delivery for a £25 shop as long as you don't have a delivery pass, then you have to do a £40 shop to use it.
I find their fresh food seems to go off faster than anyone elses but they are good value on a lot of things.
Their customer service is dire though.

I find I tend to use Tesco as overall I get the most for my money but have to do a £40 shop to get home delivery (I have a delivery pass for them but got it half price)
Not all, but some of their value range is really good.
I have also found they tend to have more free stuff on their site than any of the others, so I have had in the past few months free loaves of Hovis, different free yoghurts, free Cheerios, Special K with freeze dried berries, Soreen, some teacakes with odd fruit in them, free frozen roast potatoes & just last week a random free tub of magnum icecream.
If there is an option for free e.g. Cheerios at £3.00 a pack, even though you have the voucher code to get it free it still counts in your total spend, so then you only need to spend e.g. £37.00 to count as £40.
You have to search but there is usually something you can get free.

Sainsburys tends to be more expensive on everyday stuff than Tesco.
Their frozen mashed potato is as nice as fresh (especially if you add butter) & means absolutely no waste.
I also use it to make basic potato bread which is cheap & filling.

Iceland do free home delivery on a shop of £35 or more but I can never buy everything I want from them & on non frozen things they are often not the cheapest.

I find cooked beetroot (in the packet, not the jar, like this www.mysupermarket.co.uk/sainsburys-price-comparison/Vegetables/Sainsburys_Cooked_Beetroot_in_Natural_Juices_250g.html?TrackingCode=31.YXQI6BsMxU20h8tFSvXBjw really useful for salads and stuff. You can put it in burgers too. Only 80p in Sainsburys, so 20p per beetroot and it lasts a long time before opening.

Asian supermarkets often have bargains on stuff like tofu if you have one near you.

To everyone saying jars of sauce are cheaper sometimes - perhaps, but a tin of tomatoes contains actual nutrients instead of just sludge. I'd rather pay a few pennies more to not die of scurvy (exaggeration.)

Any leftover vegetables like carrots, potatoes, pumpkin or whatever that look like they might go bad, I cook and mash up with lentils and make burgers - season them with cumin, salt and pepper. My friends always ask me to make them and they cost almost nothing to make. I make as much of it as I can at one time and freeze it in individual portions, then I always have a quick tea I can make.

Nothing wrong with egg and beans for lunch/tea - I used an app to figure out the nutrients and it's 19g of protein (2 eggs) and 18% of your iron for the day. Those are the two nutrients I worry about missing out on most when I'm skint, so I tend to eat that a lot.

perfectly doable, I have been living on less than this for months ( I have children, and have more money to feed them, and of course many of our meals are combined, but calculated out, the budget for my meals is less then that.

bread and butter
potatoes
carrots
rice
bananas
marmite not actual marmite, but a supermarket own brand vegetarian yeast extract, tastes like marmite, full of vitamin B
odds and ends from reduced to clear,
cheap orange juice, a little bit with breakfast, a little bit with tea.

My son did Uni at £15 a week - Morrisons.

Sainsburys basics meals are about £0.90 and if you look at the ingredients they're not that bad. My DD stumbled across them when she didn't have enough money for a sandwich on her lunch break.

The cottage pie is:

Ingredients

Potato, Water, British Beef (15%), Onion, Cows' Milk, Double Cream (Cows' Milk), Fortified British Wheat Flour (Wheat Flour, Calcium Carbonate, Iron, Niacin, Thiamin), Cornflour, Tomato Purée, Salt, Worcester Sauce (Water, Spirit Vinegar, Sugar, Tamarind Extract, Onion, Garlic, Ginger, Lemon Juice from Concentrate, Clove, Chilli), Malted Barley Extract, Black Pepper, White Pepper.

Would be substantial with a pile of frozen mixed veg (90p kg)

Not saying it's ideal everyday, but the options are there. Also, think of cooking a batch of mince with a basic tomato & onion sauce, portion it out & add different flavours for chill or spag bol or cottage pie.

Veggies from the greengrocer are cheaper than the supermarket I find.

Supermarkets mark down products at certain times of the day - ours is 11am & 7pm. You can sometimes get real bargains.

They key is really menu planning. See how you go on £15 & then you might have to rethink your savings.

I see Snugglepumpkin mentioned a 'poor man's roast' My version of this was to make a nutroast, out of equal amounts of basic stuffing and chopped mixed nuts. For meateaters, roasted sausage meat is a good cheap alternative.

See if you can get a small chest freezer for frozen meals when you batch cook soup, chilli etc. I did this in a shared house due to lack of space and just had it plugged in the corner of my room. Good luck, it is do-able if you are determined.

We live £30-40 pw without eating pasta as hate pasta not sure could do £15.

Asda do 3 packets of meat (chicken, mince, steak, bacon, breaded fish) for £10. The mince usually lasts us at least two meals, and also the chicken and fish do two meals. So if you have freezer space it's a good choice if you want meat.

Just noticed the discussion on the previous page re jar sauces.
I can recommend Sainsburys own brand chilli sauce, 95p for 4 servings, some basic rice and a sprinkle of grated cheese, makes a meal for about 40p. Or vary with a jacket or baked sweet potato. This was actually one of my favourite meals when I was skint. You can add mince or extra beans if you want and it's still cheap.

If you live near a cheap supermarket, have freezer space, cooking facilities, self-discipline and a well stocked spice cupboard, it is do-able. Especially since you will have the wiggle room to spend over £15 if you have an expensive week.
Agree with any of the points other people have made.
Seasonal fresh fruit and veg is normally much cheaper than out of season stuff, so vary what you buy as the seasons change. Some imported fruit can be cheap; fruit (like bananas) which are easy to transport and store is generally much cheaper than fresh berries etc.
Be a bit careful with some pulses, as although they are very cheap and nutritious some of them need a lot of energy to cook. There is little point in reducing your food budget if your energy bills then go up by the same amount!
Red lentils are fantastic, because they cook quickly, are very healthy, versatile (can be used to bulk out different meals) and tasty if well seasoned. Kidney beans and chickpeas in tins are good too, as unlike the dried forms you can use them instantly. They only cost 25-30p a tin if you get them from a cheaper supermarket too.
All of those things would be super bland if you didn't season them well and combine with dried onions, other veg, garlic, etc.

Eggs are very versatile too - think of things like vegetable fritters as well as the more obvious omelettes etc.

Try to reduce waste as much as possible - towards the end of the week, check what needs using up in your fridge and plan your meals around that. Every now and again have a look in your freezer and store cupboards to see what you've forgotten about. Cook extra at dinner time and eat leftovers for lunch the next day. If you cook too much, freeze some. Keep yourself well stocked in tinned tomatoes, seasoning and dried carbs (rice pasta etc) as these are useful for turning leftover fresh foods into a meal.

Don't forget to treat yourself (inexpensively) with home made cakes/biscuits/etc sometimes! It will be very difficult to keep up if your diet is too spartan.

Try sprouting whole lentils, pulses, cashews. They can be eaten raw as a snack or on baked potatoes wtossed into veg soup or stir-fried. Sprouting increases the nutritional value and takes only a few minutes each day. Some provide complete protein.

Porridge and potatoes are quick and easy for slow-release energy. Grow salad greens on your windowsill. Very healthy and might help reduce your fruit bill. Buy multivitamins.

My ds is allergic to a preservative/s we are not 100% sure of which one as there is no skin test available. I know he is 100% allergic and it is not a sensitivity or intolerance as the first reaction his faced swelled up badly then the second time it swelled so much he couldn't open his eyes or nearly 2 weeks and the thrid time he stopped breathing from the swelling in his throat he now has an epi pen. Worst day of my life. The last 2 cases were caused by school not believing he was allergic to them as it was not possible in their opinion.

Lol wtf? OP here has £15 to feed herself and presumably no money for anything fucking else, at all, and people think this is the time and place to question her about her allergies?

It's doable OP, I spend that myself. Stick to protein it's more filling. Cheap veggie sausages, greek yoghurt, eggs, cheese, carbs make me hungry so I avoid them.

NJORDSGRRL If your post was aimed at me, my post about my ds was just saying these allergies are real and nobody ever believes you.

For context, I used to earn more than that in a day. In my basic Saturday job in the nineties, over twenty years ago. I'm glad you're getting some great advice with this too OP

God no, Pickled, it was more about the first pages. It sounds dreadful for you and your poor DS.

Yes you can;

fyf20quid.co.uk/

Try sprouting whole lentils, pulses, cashews

Sprouted chick peas are delicious! They taste like pea pod peas. (Don't try is with kidney beans, though)

Thanks guys for all your help. Sorry for the late reply but I've been moving into my new house and trying to see what shops and places are near enough for me to get to. Which unfortunately is not a lot. Also my fridge freezer space is not as big as I thought. So I'm frantically trying to think of ways to optimize everything and getting a bit panicky (stupid anxiety😅)
I have however discovered there is a poundland and aldi about 40 mins walk from me. So it looks like I might try and save enough to to buy a granny trolley to get my shopping.
Unfortunately 15 pound is all I can spend on food as I need to save the other 10 pound for emergencies, such as getting the bus and paying for things I need for my course i.e. Books, printing and shopping deliveries.
Plus the odd chocolate bar when I get desperate😂😂😂😂.
I have been given some amazing advice about budgeting and how to shop. And the recipe ideas are brilliant. Thanks you so much your brilliant ❤️

Are you studying at university? If so, do try the SU for part time jobs, or the university itself. Don't worry about a lack of experience, most students are very young so don't have a great deal.

"Plus the odd chocolate bar when I get desperate"

...This sounds really obvious, but it is probably a good idea to sometimes to include multipacks of "treats" like this on your weekly shop. Whatever you do, avoid picking up extras like that when you are out and about as the price difference is huge!

Beans on toast with cheese

Porridge

Instant noodles

Pasta with tin of chopped tomatoes, herbs and cheese

Do you have cupboard space? Could you see if you could get a shelf for your bedoom, maybe in gumtree? And a big plastic box with lid? Lots of bread (additive free?) cereal, rice, pasta, herbs and spices, if you're allowed them, potatoes, eggs etc?