To say think a roast dinner can be a cheap meal?

[HuffyPuffyStuffy]

I grew up eating roast dinners, always on a Sunday and often midweek too. I don't always cook a roast on a Sunday now but we always have a least one roast dinner a week. I mentioned to a newish friend earlier that I was cooking a roast today and she was teasing me about being "posh" and that she only has a roast on special occasions a roast costs so much!
I tried to say that a roast can be a cheap meal and she thought I was lying when I said that today's meal for four (2 adults and 2 teens) would cost under £6.00 and that we would have leftover meat for tomorrow. Obviously, a big joint of sirloin beef or a new season leg of lamb would be expensive but I couldn't get her to accept that a roast dinner could be cheap! I was so miffed I costed it out .........

1.5 kg joint of pork shoulder (Aldi) £4.21
Potatoes - roasted (Wonky Morrisons) 25p
Parsnips - roasted (Aldi) 20p
Carrots - boiled (Aldi) 15p
swede - boiled (Aldi) 20p
frozen peas (Morrisons) 30p
Stuffing made from leftover bread, half an onion and herbs from garden. 15p
Gravy - made from meat juice, plain flour, veg water.......10p

£5.56 for the roast

I didn't use my oven today. Meat was roasted in the slow cooker, potatoes and parsnips cooked in an air fryer and the veg cooked in my pressure cooker.

If you did a roast today how much did it cost?

You can have a cheap roast if you don't give a shit about animal welfare. It should not be the norm to pay bottom dollar for meat, particularly pork. It's shit for the pig and it's shit for the farmers. I'd rather have a vegetarian roast, god knows there are enough alternatives out there. It is perfectly possible to feed your family without buying animals that have had a miserable, short life in terrible conditions and/or shafting the farmers that rear them. Billions of people around the world cannot afford to eat meat every day. I hate this idea that high welfare meat is only for the wealthy middle classes - it's not, you just have to care about it.

Marmite Thanks for replying; I really appreciate that. As I said, I don't want to target you personally. It's not so much the animal's way of death that I'm concerned with, though I take your father's word for it that it's traumatic.
It's rather the appalling quality of life and suffering that cheap meat production causes. I don't eat meat - I don't particularly like it - but I can understand friends who eat meat from (eg) UK upland flocks or herds where lambs and calves have a natural life grazing out in the open. (However, to be in a village - I've lived there for decades - where mother sheep have just had their lambs taken away to the slaughterhouse is really distressing for 48 hours; the mothers call and call for their offspring;) . In the same way, I don't have welfare issues where deer spend their lives free-range and are shot and die instantly.

I know this sounds ridiculously elitist: 'let them eat venison!'. But in the old days - perhaps when your father was a young man - most animals, even if destined for slaughter, had a reasonable quality of life before being killed. Modern intensive farming has made things much worse.

[quote Marmite27]@fairylightsandwaxmelts

I prefer roast potatoes, but I stupidly got sunburned on our walk this afternoon and couldn’t be bothered with the faff of parboiling / heating the oil etc as I just wanted to sit down, they were lucky they got fed tbh [/quote]
fair enough!

I was too lazy to cook and we got ours delivered today!

One of my favorite meals, healthy and relatively cheap. Even with good meat.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/a4365588-to-think-that-a-roast-dinner-isnt-necessarily-an-expensive-meal-to-cook?

@HuffyPuffyStuffy is the same OP as the previous thread and I claim my five pounds.

What an unbelievably weird topic to recycle. Perhaps the OP is forgetful and therefore thinks all of her friendships are 'newish'.

Today we had gammon, pigs in blankets, Yorkshires, roasties, new potatoes, broccoli, peas, sweetcorn, broad beans, roasted parsnips and carrots. Gravy too.

My roast dinners are always different and always at least five veg.

@HuffyPuffyStuffy

Your roast sounds like mine, and delicious. Ignore the snobs

[quote ThanksItHasPockets]@HuffyPuffyStuffy is the same OP as the previous thread and I claim my five pounds.

What an unbelievably weird topic to recycle. Perhaps the OP is forgetful and therefore thinks all of her friendships are 'newish'.[/quote]
🤣

Though my money is on parallel lives

@LetHimHaveIt

God knows I've a horror of the Mumsnet 'massive salad' and virtuous eaters in general, but I'm stunned by the number of people who seem to think OP's isn't a proper roast because it's got loads of veg.

And there's nowt wrong with packet stuffing. Love a bit of Paxo in balls. Goes properly crunchy. Can't abide stuffing that clings to the roof of your mouth.

Four veg isn't loads.

@boobot1

And a roast dinner MUST be beef, or its just a pretend roast!

Whattttt???? No way José, it's chicken or nothing 🤣

gogohm It's nothing at all to do with being snobbish. Why on earth would you think it is? It's about caring for living, feeling creatures.

I can't afford posh meat. And I don't care for meat anywhay, though that is NOT the point. Even if I liked meat, I would HATE to think that what I was eating caused really dreadful suffering. Because that is what most cheap meat relies on.

But it's just such a cheap (ha) and lazy thing to say that such welfare feelings are only the preserve of 'snobs'.

@florianfortescue

You can have a cheap roast if you don't give a shit about animal welfare. It should not be the norm to pay bottom dollar for meat, particularly pork. It's shit for the pig and it's shit for the farmers. I'd rather have a vegetarian roast, god knows there are enough alternatives out there. It is perfectly possible to feed your family without buying animals that have had a miserable, short life in terrible conditions and/or shafting the farmers that rear them. Billions of people around the world cannot afford to eat meat every day. I hate this idea that high welfare meat is only for the wealthy middle classes - it's not, you just have to care about it.

This. Cheap shit meat going into my body? No thanks.

We are fucking up our planet. The ability to save it begins with small decisions. Made by us, everyday. It’s not just the big Things like whether Putin will use nuclear weapons or not.

I want my kids to see more of this planet in their lifetime and so I’ve stopped buying cheap meat. I was a victim, too, of the 3 for £10 offers. Meat at every meal. Must recycle the Mumsnet chicken. I am a foodie and will roast lamb every Sunday, cheap joints available at Asda, special offer at Waitrose on certain days of the week. But an alarm bell has gone off good n proper in my head recently.

Yes, it’s possible to have a cheap roast. But if we carry on like this, there will be no planet for our kids to live on.

A chicken roast is our go-to when we have very little until next pay day.
Cheapest of everything, bubble and squeak and/ or soup with leftover veg depending how much you do. Can get another 2 meals out of kitchen. Chicken pie and broth for example.

I usually do a roast on Sunday, didn't today as we were at my mum's house. For 2 adults, 2 teens and a toddler with meat leftover for Monday it's about £10-£12.
I don't see it as an expensive meal.

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g

Amazing how a topic like this will bring out the food snobs. People in the UK generally don't eat enough vegetables, and there are plenty of families really struggling at the moment with rocketing fuel and food bills, so cheap veg is the only veg they can afford. Those who believe that only organic vegetables are safe and nutritious are creating needless anxiety in the people who can't afford to buy organic veg and can't grow their own. Cheap vegetables are absolutely fine. Frozen veg can also be excellent and a great convenience.

Quite. DH and would be happy to eat very little meat, if we were struggling. Can't say the same for the two autistic young men in the family, though. If we took the meat out of Ds2 's diet, he'd be existing on bread, cake, chips, peanut butter and fried egg for breakfast because that's in the rules. It's a huge struggle to keep any weight on him, as it is.

Animal welfare is important to me. The welfare of my children is more important.

And we are not in the US and do not routinely pump our livestock full of hormones.

@ThunderSnowDrop

Twins separated and brought up independent of one another but with symmetrical lives.

Clones!

And on our plates with our sparrow sized free range chicken, we had bog standard dirt cheap savoy cabbage. Nothing sad about it at all. It's bloody delicious.

PicAChew Am of course very sorry if members of your families have problems. But that's not the case with the vast majority. As the old saying goes: 'Hard cases make bad laws' - it's not the exceptions that matter, but the norms. The norm should surely be that we don't have to commit acts of horrible cruelty - as defined by the RSPCA, not me - to eat.

And for heaven's sake stop calling people who care about animal welfare snobbish. It's just not true and it devalues whatever else you have to say.

Nothing beats homemade stuffing. You need an egg and butter with the leftover bread, onion and dried sage though.

I mainly use paxo though, because it’s a faff making the breadcrumbs. Nowhere near as nice.

It's a cheap meal. Always been

Use a food mixer to make breadcrumbs. Or maybe freeze the bread and bash it while frozen. I wonder if that would work.

We make stuffing from scratch, cheap and no additives etc. I'd rather eat plain pasta than low welfare/foreigner meat. Cheapest we have is roast game which I get free from my bf when he has been shooting. Veg grown in garden, homemade stock. It's pence then.

Come on how many friends have criticised the cost of your dinner? Does anyone call a roast dinner posh?

Genuinely think I could tell my friends I was having lobster and fillet steak and they wouldn't call me out for spending too much on my dinner. Its just something you don't comment on. Now there's 2 newish friends criticising the cost of posters roasts (a fairly standard British Sunday meal). Who both mysteriously serve the same veg and grow their own herbs/make their own bread!