Aibu to ask what you eat when you are broke?

[NCsobroke]

I don’t mean feed your family for £10, I mean dinners like baked potato and beans that cost a couple of quid. None of us are v picky and no dietary issues.

The kids mostly eat a v healthy balanced diet, lots of whole foods and tons of fruit and veg, maybe frozen pizza on a Saturday, don’t really have takeaways often etc. I hate the thought of them living off cheap freezer food not enough fruit snd veg.

Also needs to include lunches as we don’t qualify for FSM despite being on UC as husband works FT.

We are so broke. We usually receive universal credit which we live off as DH wages all go on bills and rent. We won’t receive any at all this month and can’t do anything about it.

2 adults, 2 children. £110 to last for the next 3 weeks (plus toiletries and cleaning stuff and petrol for DH 2 hour commute )

Small tip try and buy the veg bits at the supermarket individually. I was at a big ish Sainsbury this week and picked up pack of two sweet pots and noticed they were £1.20!!! Extortion. So I weighed one and it was 30p! So I worked out really I could make one do for what I needed and saved 90p. Really made me think.

Frozen stir fry veg is good to add to soups to stretch them out and add goodness. Or stir fry with dry noodles you can boil are 90p in Tesco.

I sometimes buy the value pizza and add a pepper which I'll do in the over.

Homemade soup. Onion, plus carrot and/or celery if you have any, chopped & fried until soft. Some garlic makes it more flavoursome - powder, jarred, fresh, from a tube, frozen, whatever. Then just add whatever vegetables you have that are cheap, need using, or you think would taste good. For example, diced potatoes, swede, courgette, aubergine, peas, green beans, broccoli, cauliflower, spinach, salad peppers. I usually add a tin of tomatoes if I can, or a good squirt of puree. You could use canned beans for added protein, or lentils. Add some herbs etc - Italian herbs are noce in this.
If you want, you can add some meat mince at the stage of browning the onion - can be quite cheap fatty mince. This will also increase the protein.
Add something for carbs. Pasta, beans/lentils will help with this too, or you could add rice if you're going to finish it all in one sitting. Or, you could make dumplings. Or just serve with bread. If you make sure there's fat, protein, fibre & carbs in soup, it's pretty filling.

Seconding the idea of pasta bake. We usually just undercook some pasta, make a sauce with whatever vegetables are in the fridge that need using up (or use a jar of a tomatoey value pasta sauce), add some cooked, chopped sausages & mix it all up, then bake for a bit. Or fully cook the pasta & just mix it all through.
Similar with a tuna pasta bake. Condensed (or normal) mushroom soup, some sweetcorn, tin of tuna, some pasta, bit of cheese on top, oven/grill. This is one of DH & DD's favourites.
You can do a "pizza" pasta bake if you can buy some ham, mushrooms, any other pizza toppings you might eat.
You can add cheese to the top of any pasta bake. I would usually add breadcrumbs too, if there's the end slice of a loaf available. Better than wasting it. I put it under the cheese or it can burn under the grill.

I'm vegan (I haven't always been) but for years one of my favourite dishes has been rice & lentils. It's literally just some onion, fried in oil, then approximately equal volumes of rice & red lentils added & cooked in stock. You can add chopped carrots & celery with the onion if you have them, dried herbs or spices, tinned tomatoes or puree, coconut cream etc. If you're really skint it's just oil, onion, rice & lentils. It's good with curry as the rice complement to something, you can make it more soupy if you want & eat with bread. I got the original recipe from a vegetarian student cookbook over 20 years ago.

I'm sorry OP, I know exactly how you feel. I used to feed our family for a similar amount per head. It's so stressful.

I have a few suggestions, I've just dug out our meal plan from when I did it:

-lentil dal with rice and maybe some cheap salad bits like cucumber/tomatoes. You can make double using dried red lentils and the cheapest rice for hardly anything and have it for lunch

-black eyed bean stew (I think it's from rose Elliot's bean book and you can probably find it online, it uses plenty of cheap veg) with mashed potatoes or pasta or rice

-stir fried veg with noodles and black beans instead of meat (if you use basics spaghetti instead of noodles you can save yourself a lot of money)

-pasta bake with vegetables

-at the end of the week, make soup out of any leftover vegetables, stock, red lentils and a ton of cheap tomatoes. That way you don't waste anything and it covers several lunches if you make a big batch. I used to put any leftover vegetables, even if it was salad leaves or broccoli stalks (which are very nutritious) and it always turned out tasty

-jacket potato with beans

For lunches I used to go to the local coop at the time they were trying to sell their food reduced before throwing it out and buy a nice loaf of bread for hardly anything. Then lunches were really basic- a cheese sandwich, some soup if I had some, carrot sticks (carrots are so cheap), an apple, a couple of the cheapest biscuits I could find in Aldi. I'm sure it wasn't the healthiest but everyone seemed perfectly fine and didn't go hungry, which was the main thing.

I'd shop at Aldi. It's so much cheaper for basics. When I shopped, I got all the ingredients I knew I needed for the meal plan, totted up the total on my phone as I went round, then worked out what was left. The remainder I then spent on as much extra fruit and veg as I could get- carrots, apples, and those big bags of cheap peppers are quite good value. Tinned fruit and beans are also cheap and won't go off.

Good luck op, I hope that helps! Sorry it's all a bit bean-heavy 😆

if you have youngsters in the house, especially boys who are always hungry, a generous serving of custard with some kind of pudding or stewed fruit or sliced banana rounds off a meal and makes it more substantial. Perhaps not for people avoiding stodge and watching their figures. Cost is low.

Longlife milk can be very cheap, and although it has a slight cooked taste, this will not matter in custard, rice pudding, hot milky drinks

And you can keep a stack in the store cupboard.

I keep tins of dried milk in for making custard cocoa or anything you cook that needs milk

I would contact the local food bank for a start to get extra supplies. Also join Olio the good sharing app. Good luck OP. X

Use some cheap own brand pasta (55p) cover with a tomato sauce made from:
Passata 35p
Onion 20p
Frozen peppers 85p

Rice with Dahl
Make dahl from red lentils (1kg is about £2), onion, garlic, garam masala and tomato

Frittata:
Eggs, boiled potato, garlic, cheese

Use frozen vegetables which last longer than fresh

Check Asda reduced section at 3-4pm. They knock down cooked chicken chunks to 70-80p a pack. At 9pm they knock down the huge French bread sticks to 10p each. Chat with check out staff re when they knock down the other fresh stuff like oasteues & cake. ( It can vary). Own brand Murali is really filling for breakfast . Loaded baked potatoes: my 3 nearby corner shops cheese is 1.29 a packet or £1 each for two(lots of Polish or UK kinds to choose from) whereas supermarkets by me are all 1.89 each.

Pasta will probably be your friend here. Our skint meal is something like pasta with a cheesy sauce. Then we see what we’ve got in so it could be something like chorizo, some sausages, some chicken. If you don’t have those things, just go to the supermarket and buy whatever they’ve got in the yellow sticker aisle to add to the pot. A big pot of pasta could do several meals.

The cheapest thing to make that I know of is roti and daal. A bag of white or brown flour and dried lentils (plus stockcubes) should cover you for at least a week, maybe more if you buy in bulk.

Look up the slimming eats website, all free healthy recipes and they all taste SO good. Not in any way affiliated but it saved me earlier this year with my weight creeping up after lockdowns and being fed up with the same 4 meals on rotation

Lots of pasta and rice. Pasta and rice stretches out very well. I usually include lots of frozen veg. Also add frozen fish or some cheap mince or chopped up bits of cooking bacon when I can afford to buy meat. Some weeks I don’t eat much at all so that the kids can eat enough. It’s horrible and everything is getting more expensive but no increase in wages or benefits. There are so so many in these positions too.

Ditch the meat.
Lunches make a big vat of veggie soup, with whatever veg is on super 6 at aldi, easy, super healthy and freezes well. Pasta and sauce (make your own with tinned tomatoes, garlic, onion and herbs), big sack of potatoes, cut up for wedges, peel and cut for chips, mash or baked. Veggie curry with chick peas. Jack Monroe is good.

rainbowplantlife.com/vegan-red-lentil-curry/

The lentil curry above is delicious. You can skip the coconut milk and use peanut butter instead (I did).

Homemade bread always feels luxurious and is so cheap and delicious hot with butter for breakfast. I make the bread below but add about a cup of oats.

www.spendwithpennies.com/30-minute-dinner-rolls/

Porridge for breakfast, soak oats overnight with milk, sugar and cinnamon and it will be really creamy and delicious when you cook it in the morning.

I always keep pasta and tuna in my cupboard and frozen veg in my freezer for these exact moments. I make tuna, pasta and veg.

veg curry. £1.50 box of casserole veg from tesco

potato pie

potato goulash

potato curry (are you seeing a pattern here? I used to buy a sack of potatoes at a time!)

anything with lentils - lentil curry, lentil bolognese, lentil soup

pasta with tomato sauce (tinned tomatoes) topped with cheese. Chuck in any veg to hand if you like, but not essential!

When I was a poor starving student, I found that 4 (cheap) fish fingers between 2 slices of toast slathered in mayonnaise or salad cream would fill me up all day.

I also used to boil up rice and buy a cup of curry sauce from the chippy or Chinese restaurant and flavour it with that.

No name or Co-Op tinned soup and slices of buttered/margarined bread would probably do me 2 meals.

(Flavoured) noodles from the Chinese shop cost very little.

Pasta and (cheap) pesto

I used to be very broke as a single parent and I ate a pasta sauce with chopped tomatoes, cheese and courgette blended together, jacket potatoes with beans and cheese, tuna pasta salad, soups, omelettes, chicken with mashed sweet potatoes and veg, beans on toast, pasta and pesto, pasta and marmite, boiled/scrambled eggs on toast. I don't live in the U.K. now, so don't know if they still do it, but M&S used to do a deal where you could get 3/4 things for a tenner, like fish cakes, or certain meat etc, so I used to get those and have with sweet potato fries/mash/boiled potatoes and veg.

The olio app is worth having a look at, also see if there’s a community fridge local.

I’m in a small town and there’s one near to me. It’s not means-tested, so anyone can go and you don’t need to be concerned that people will judge you for going (you shouldn’t give a hoot anyway but you know what I mean).

I add lentils, grated cucumber/courgette/mushrooms to any mince dishes to bulk out. Our local home bargains has huge bags of potatoes for £1.50 7kg I think. So that’s handy for shepherds pies, stews etc. Homemade soups is nice and cheap also can be bulked with lentils etc.

Mixed bean chilli and rice
Lentil curry and soup
Tuna pasta bake with broccoli

Lots of good recipes posted. Before you do anything though make sure you’re shopping smart - cut our food bill in half or more by swapping from Sainsbury’s/Tesco to Aldi. Not just the food here but stuff like detergent, loo roll etc is siginificantly cheaper.
On top of that, check prices in local ethnic shops for rice and veg in bulk.
If you know anyone (well enough) who owns a restaurant or has a Costco card ask if you can check prices and get some basic on wholesale prices.

Tuna on rice with a bit of soya sauce
Sausage and bean casserole
Beans on toast
Pasta with mayo or tomato sauce
Chicken and noodles with soya sauce
Soup

We did have years of living hand to mouth when my youngest was a baby

This lady is amazing and recipes taste good too
cookingonabootstrap.com/
Apologies if she’s already been mentioned

Vegetable soup, made with carrots, potato, leek/onion, swede, just chop everything and cover with water with a couple of either chicken or vegetable stock cubes you can add some pearl barley or red lentils which thicken it up
Minestrone soup, carrots, celery, onion, tin of tomatoes stock cubes are a can of water and simmer then add some uncooked spaghetti that has been broken into tiny pieces a summer for another 10 mins.
I also make a pasta dish with just shell pasta and a tin of garden peas.
Fry 2_chopped garlic cloves and chilli flakes in some oil till they start to go golden, add 1 tsp paprika tin of peas (water and all) are the pasta shells(180grms) and half a gel stock pot, cover with boiling water summer till pasta is cooked. Plenty for 2 good portions.