to think £18 a week for food isn't that much of a "tiny" budget?

[Oakmaiden]

I just downloaded a free recipe book. It is actually a very good recipe book, and I am dead impressed by the author making a budgeting recipe book and then providing it free to people who need it. But.

It is subtitled "Eat well for £18 per week", and all the recipes are costed, and they have recently redone the costings etc, so I am quite impressed with the idea. But, as I say, there is a but. It is £18 a week per person. AIBU to think that is not actually a very tiny budget? For a family of 5 that is £90 a week. Sure, it is not a luxury budget by any stretch of the imagination, but it is not tiny, is it?

Also - I need to get through this month with a family of 5 on a genuinely tiny budget. I am aiming for around £50 a week if I possibly can (though I am not completely certain where I will find £50 a week, but I am sure something will come up. It generally does.) Anyone got any genuinely cheap recipe ideas please? I have a feeling we may be in for a lot of scrambled eggs and vegetable soup...

I'm in a really bad situation atm and I spend around £4.50 to £5 a week for all food and drinks. I would love to have £18.50 a week.

@FinnBalorsAbs

We spend £70-£80 a month for two adults and two children, including cleaning stuff, toiletries, loo roll etc and the odd bottle of wine / treat

How would that be possible.Seems very low..

If, as PP said, you have the tools, the fuel and some cupboard basics, you can certainly drop down below £18pppw for a while if you need to.

breakfasts: toast or porridge 20p pppd, presume using syrup or sugar from storecupboard.
lunches: soup or salad. ( I use the cauli leaves as the basis of a cauli cheese soup with some onion, stock (from MN chicken, ), and potato for thickness with a sprinkle of parmesan before serving.) Ditto broccoli stems. Salad is something you have to but but make sure you plan to eat it all: you don't have the budget to feed the bin as well.
Dinners: carbonara, pesto pasta, veg chilli with rice or value plain tortilla chips, kedgeree, pilaff, daal, aloo gobi, any veg curry really. Bacon/gammon is the cheapest meat in a flavour vs cost basis as you don't need much at all to impart the illusion of meatiness.

I buy a kg of full fat greek yogurt each week and use it for sauces, instead of sour cream with chilli, to make raita, a sauce for mushrooms, in fact anything that needs a creamy lift.

At this time of year I swap with my neighbours for their excess veggies or even buy them. We are currently eating courgettes in many guises as the little girl next door has grown enough for the county in her first 'very own veg patch'. I have nuts in the garden so they are having some of those, and I'll make some courgette chutney which they can have. To really save you have to be willing to eat the same thing in different ways to maximise on the economies of scale.

in WWII if you had a garden it was compulsory ( or almost) to grow fruit and veg in fact you were supposed to dig up lawns to plant veg
people may have had hens too there was definitely a black market for fresh eggs

when buying for one it is more difficult;while if 3 eat well on £60 it is harder for 1 on £20 as often you can't buy small quantities and some deals would not work unless you had a freezer so yes you can buy just 2 sausages at the butchers but it will be more expensive than a 1/3 of a supermarket deal
we spend about £80 for 3 ( with an extra 15 a month on toiletries laundry items etc) but I could get it down to £60 by cutting out treats, and extras
we shop mainly in aldi frozen veg/ biscuits/ crisps/ from farmfoods and extras from waitrose especially as had 6 x £8 off if you spend £40 coupons recently

One of my kids' favourite meals is caramelised onion Pasta. To feed five, you need a bag of pasta, a kilo of onions, a little garlic salt, pepper, a teaspoon of sugar and some oil. Top with a sprinkling of grated cheese. Cheap as chips and delicious.

Add a couple of tins of Chick peas and some more garlic for chick pea Pasta.

If you get a bag of dried chick peas, you can make the pasta and then use the other half to make this soup.
3 cups cooked chick peas
3 large onions
2litres veg stock
A bulb of garlic or a tablespoon of dried garlic
A couple of cups of pasta.

Fry the onions and garlic until soft.add chick peas and stock and simmer for fifteen minutes. Blitz until semi smooth then add Pasta. Simmer until Pasta is cooked.

So that is three meals based around the same basic ingredients. If you have the stock and garlic in the cupboard, then it would cost about £7 and you would still have cheese and half a bag of pasta left over for other things. The soup will probably do two meals, so that puts it up to four meals for that price. If you have any extra money, you can add in a lettuce, a cucumber and some tomatoes for a couple of pounds and have salad with the pasta or in sandwiches with the extra cheese, if you get a loaf. That puts the cost up to £10 for 5 meals for 5.

@Comefromaway All those lunch things are normal, but they are more expensive lunch items.
We often have cheese sandwiches and an apple. 50p for a wholemeal loaf. Just over a £1 for about 12 slices of emmantel cheese (so not the cheapest) and a bag of apples - 70p. Easily does a week of lunches and is what was a pretty normal lunch when I was growing up.

NothingSince1985 hope things pick up for you

The onion pasta sounds lush

Lots of veggies and tins of things like chickpeas and lentils are your friend (and whatever veg is discounted at your local supermarket)

buy 2 large chickens cost me £8.50 last week and cook them both at once which saves fuel cost, this then does a nice roast dinner and 4 other meals in the week eg stir fry, tortillas, pasta bake.
I hope you are freezing these meals, or it will definitely be economical as family won’t be eating for a day or two afterwards due to food poisoning!

£18 per person per week is manageable (but not great) if there are several of you but really hard for an individual.

Big bag of red lentils and some potatoes and make a Dahl

My cheap go to s all involve a tin of budget beans and a cheap carton of passata. So veg chilli is one onion, fried, add 2 tins of beans plus one carton of passata and a chilli (or use dried if you have them). I usually whizz any odd veg like carrots up in the blender and add them too. Serve with rice or pitta toasts. (Tip if you blend say a third of the cooked chilli before serving it has more of a meat like texture). Total cost is about 50p a portion.

SImilar is a chopped onion, fried, add carton of passata and tin of budget beans (wash the sauce off to be more healthy) and add 1/3 of a chorizo sausage. Serve with rice or pasta. Although chorizo is expensive you don't need a lot to add flavour - you can use another third to flavour a risotto with green veg - eg peas, green beans, broccoli - whatever is cheap or on offer.

2 heads of broccoli cooked, chopped finely with a tin of mashed up anchovies stirred through is a good and filling sauce for pasta - about 80p a portion.

Jack monroe vege burgers are good

Good luck

£18 a week for an individual is perfectly doable. By eating pulses, cheap veg, eggs, pasta, bread and rice and drinking mainly water. You could also eat things people used to eat like liver, tripe, pigs trotters, etc. People used to eat much more cheaply than they do now.
It is about £2.50 a day, it is really not that small an amount of money for 1 person. It is impossible to do if you want to buy decent coffee, anything fruit or veg that would have been considered exotic 30 years ago, or extras like nice ice cream, ready made lunches, takeaways.

Jenny - cheese sandwiches every day for a week would not be very nutritious or sustaining for a 17 year old who is an athlete. (would the pack of cheese last all week without going off I don't know I don't eat cheese)

A pack of 6 wholemeal wraps (she can't eat bread whilst training it bloats her ) is £1

A tin of tuna (lasts 2 days) is 0.98

A tin of sweetcorn to mix with the tuna is 0.35

A chicken portion (cooked at home and slices lasts 2 days) is £1.25 or a pack of rady cooked chicken slices (lasts 2 days) is £2.00

A pack of salad leaves (lasts a week) is about 0.90

A bag of 5 apples is 0.95 She does often buy banannas which are more expensive but more sustaining

A pack of 4 yoghurts are currently on offer at £1.25

A bag of cous cous which would last her about 3 weeks is £0.70

I haven’t RTFT but one thing that always strikes me in these posts is that if you are having to cook on a very tight budget, you probably don’t have much money for electricity or gas. So saying baked potatoes are cheap might be true, but not if the oven needs to be on for 1.5 hrs etc. Food is very expensive.

The OP said the title of the book was eat WELL for £18 per week.

I wouldn't class some of the ideas as eating well. I mean yes, I could eat for £18 per week if I iived on porridge, egg on toast and pasta & passata (but that does assume having lunchtime cooking facilities) but it wouldn't be healthy long term.

I mean porridge is an excellent breakfast and egg on toast an excellent lunch. But with no fresh fruit and veg it's not exactly a balanced diet.

I think it would be boring but probably pretty healthy (think WW2, or the Mediterenean diet)

opened cheese of the hard cheese type cheddar parmesan etc will keep 3 weeks in fridge soft cheese 5 days
but 2 pieces of bread cheese and an apple is not enough lunch for most adults unless very small and sedantary a teenage boy would probably need double that at least

@NothingSince1985 that’s very little. Can you try your local foodbank?

OP/ NothingSince: check if your local area does any community larders or anything similar. Ours does a deal where you get a big bag of food for £2 xx

At least at this time of year you can often get fruit free - blackberries are ripe where I live (good source of vitamin C), plus there are apple & plum trees in lots of places if you look for them, randomly on the sides of roads. DS and I have been gorging on cherries, strawberries, blackberries and apples for the last month, all 100% free and no food miles either :)

I notice at this time of year in rural areas you also get signs for people selling eggs, home grown tomatoes & greens etc much cheaper than supermarkets.

People rave about the infinite chicken but there are other cheap meats too - a big pack of pork shoulder steaks can be frozen in separate portions and goes a long way, mince is cheap and if you chat to butchers/fishmongers there are often cheaper cuts we aren't aware of that you can get for a song & chuck in a casserole.

Oh and you can use pudding rice instead of risotto rice, it's way cheaper. Get offcut bacon bits from the butcher, and make a risotto with those, an onion, and whatever root veg etc is cheapest!

I'm not above asking on local groups for swaps etc. DH put pots of herbs in the garden a couple of years ago and they spread like weeds, we now have huge patches of thyme/rosemary/sage/chives that I would happily let any of my neighbours have a crack at, and lots of people have more fruit on trees than they can be bothered to pick & will let people take some!

comefromaway there's still room for fresh fruit and veg within that budget, also frozen veg is very good quality and cost effective. Things like fresh carrots, broccoli and cabbage are very cheap. Most supermarkets are following Aldi's lead and doing offers on 5 or 6 varieties of fruit/veg each week. Tesco and Morrisons even give fruit away to kids if they are in the shop with their parents.

@Comefromaway I eat cheese sandwiches regularly for lunch. Of course cheese lasts a week in the fridge, normally a good few weeks. My lunch contains protein, fat, fruit and carbs. Your DDs lunch with the inclusion of salad and sweetcorn is slightly healthier. But there won't be much in it in terms of how healthy it is. When I was young yoghurt was seen as a dessert because of the sugar.
Of course your DDs lunches are more interesting and tastier. But I was making the point that eating how most people ate 40 years ago is much cheaper. And people then ate more healthy as they ate far less sugar than people do today - including me.