Please help me plan my weekly food shop, max £110 family of 5.

[GoneSeaFishing]

We have a 4 month cash flow issue and worked out I have £110 a week to spend on groceries, including toiletries and cleaning products. Please chuck your cheap filling meal ideas at me, two adults and three kids 12-17 years old, I’m prepared to skip breakfast, lunch and half my dinner portion (could do with losing a stone anyway) but not prepared to ask anyone else to join me. I have £20 in Asda rewards that I am going to use on top of the £110 this week to get basic toilet rolls, dishwasher tablets, laundry powder, all purpose cleaner, shampoo, conditioner, deodorant and bar soap to last the month.

Lentils are always a good shout. Can batch cook too.

pulses and beans go a long way, are versatile, cheap and healthy.

Is there anything you need to exclude? (eg no pasta, or won't eat lentils etc)

I’ve managed to get our shop down from £70/80 a week to £40 or under a week for 2 adults and a toddler so it is definitely doable 🤗

Luckily we aren’t fussy and no allergies

I’d focus on batch cooking with lots of lentils, tinned piles/beans, cheapest rice and pasta. Are you able to shop often at the best time for reduced products/yellow sticker?

Breakfasts: homemade pancakes or toast or own brand cereal

Lunch: jacket potatoes for those wfh, soup eg one made with lentils (I do a ridiculously cheap one which is basically red lentils, stock, tin of toms, garlic, ginger and maybe a random carrot), lunchboxes for the kids

Dinner: bolognese, chilli, sausage and mash, dahl, loaded jacket potatoes, pasta with homemade sauce or even just garlic, oil, Parmesan and chilli, egg friend rice, cheap cuts of meat such as pork belly cooked in Chinese soy type flavours

I find Polish supermarkets to be often cheaper than the budget chains like Lidl and Aldi. Good for cupboard stuff like coffee and pasta. Whole chickens from Lidl are probably one of the cheapest meats if you factor in that you can chuck a carcass in a slow cooker with some stock and vegetables and make a broth.

You're going to eat half a dinner per day? That doesn't sound like it will end well.

We've just started meal planning, also a family of 5 but much younger children, so unfortunately a lot of money goes on formula, nappies, toddler snacks etc. Do you need to do lunches included in that? Ours get fed at school/nursery for some of the week which probably helps.

I think having not too much meat, wrapped snacks, brands, alcohol should mean you'll manage the budget ok?

Can you get a Blue Light Card? It gives you 10% of your shop in Asda rewards each time you shop.

https://www.bluelightcard.co.uk/

Where do you shop? I normally spend £130 for 2a 2c of primary age (not inc cleaning products or toiletries) so it could be a bit tight but not unreasonable. Check out the reduced stuff on your supermarket. 2 weeks ago I got 10 trays of chicken breast that were reduced to £3.24 for a 1kg tray (from £6.50) and just chucked them in the freezer and defrost as needed, you can do this with all meats. Join the olio app, to get a few things to top up your shopping, specially fruit and veg that are quite pricey (salad bags, cut up fruit etc). I think the key is cooking with what you have rather than buying to cook a specific recipe. Make lots of pasta dishes for dinner, with some protein (chicken, pork, bacon). Some soups for lunch ( lentil, chicken and veg) with a roll...cheap breakfast (own brand cereal and toast). No branded snacks (we tend to spend on crisps and biscuits/bars etc) and this will be the first thing I would cut if budgeting, I would much rather spend £4 in ingredients for a full meal, than 2 packs of crisps..

If you have some get some recipe books out and do a proper meal plan. I love pinch of nom and it's saving me a fortune each week as I find many of the recipes are using the same ingredients.

Next buy stuff like a pack of chocolate digestives instead of separate chocolate bars, fruit buy apples and oranges instead of berries, big bag of oats is cheaper than small packs of cereals which last a couple of.days (can add toppings).

Finally I have started doing dinner earlier where possible and it means the kids come home and rather than raiding the cupboards they have their dinner and bit of fruit after.

I know you were asking about recipes but these help me if I have a budget month or two.

Asian vegetarian food. Dahls, curries, bean dishes, stirfries,fried rice. Protein from lentils and eggs or paneer/tofu.

This is very doable. You don't need to skip meals. You just need to reduce meat.

I think this is doable, and you don't have to skip meals to do it.

Cutting out meat is a good start, or at least reducing it significantly. You can do a lot of filling and cheap pasta dishes which contain little or no meat. Beans and lentils are filling too if your family like them. Homemade soup is cheap to make.

Breakfast - porridge is cheap and can be pimped up relatively easily with a few fruit, syrup, peanut butter, normal butter etc

In a similar position here OP, only with a smaller family. What works well is to base each evening meal around a filling and inexpensive carb - so baked spuds one night, pasta the next, rice the next and so on. Then add favourite veg/salad and then finally add the more expensive bits - instead of cheese and meat being a filling they are a topping, chopped up bacon goes a long way sprinkled on things, as does strong cheese (you don't need as much to get the taste). If your family will eat fish it is relatively inexpensive - especially fresh - and good nutritionally.

We have given up take-away for the foreseeable, but instead we have treat night once a week where one of us gets to choose their favourite thing (in turns) so we're not feeling too deprived, and as I can usually guess in advance what it's going to be, I can make the rest of the budget fit round it.

With beans which take soaking and long- cooking , etc, you can soak loads, batch cook and freeze them.

Make sure you have spices and herbs to do them in different ways - Indian shops and supermarkets can have enormous bags of spices really cheaply.

When you are budgeting, treats become much more important, buy brownie and cookie mixes for the kids to make from Lidl/Aldi. The ceremony about it feels much more like a treat than buying them ready made.

that’s our weekly budget, so I’ll give you some ideas if what I do.

I would make a chilli (bulk out with peppers), serve with rice, cheese and salad.
save some for the next day and use it in tortilla wraps to make enchiladas (top the rolled up wrapped with passata and herbs and cheese)
Jacket potatoes for one meal with cheese and beans- cheap and filling)
cook a roast chicken, bulk out veg and make it last 2 days, 2nd day has more veg than chicken).

so that’s 5 days of dinner time meals.

don’t spend loads on cleaning products, washing up liquid can clean most things and it’s cheap to buy.

Good idea about potatoes- remember that spuds contain vitamin C but pasta isn’t so nutritious.

Buy meat frozen and diced/prepared rather than fresh - eg, a kilo of frozen mince. You can make a huge bolognaise sauce and freeze half.

@FatLinda1946 if that’s a joke sorry I don’t get it.

Not I’m walking distance of any supermarket to get reduced stuff in the evening. We have gone down to one car to save money, dh needs it for work his shifts at 3pm-4am. What ever we have at night he has the following evening at work for dinner, he also takes lunch as does 13 hour shifts in a manual job, I can’t ask him to eat less.

I shop at Asda have 6 months left on my delivery pass so hopefully I can manage to stick with them.

I forgot to add we have a lot of allergies which makes it a struggle with our budget, but I make a sponge traybake at the start of the week which last for a few days, depending how hungry the teenagers are.

without allergies, I would go to a cheap shop like farm foods/heron for a couple of cheap meals- I noticed a deal In our heron for 2 medium pizzas, bag of chips and bottle of pepsi for £5, not great nutrition but not bad for a one off cheap meal that kids would find exciting.

Lentil and mince cottage pie

Veggie chilli with loads of canned beans, peppers, onions and rice (make a big vat of it for over 2 days)

Sausage casserole over 2 days (make 12 sausages do the 5 of you if possible, but if the kids are sporty/active etc, maybe buy 18) But chop each sausage into 5 or 6 pieces. Add loads of veg to it, chopped tomatoes, chopped some spuds to go into he casserole too. Add canned beans to it to pad it out more. Serve with bread.

Chickpea and spinach curry with rice

Mackerel pasta...buy 2/3 cans of mackerel, add it to a pan of peppers, onions, any other assorted veg. Buy a jar of sundried tomatoes
and add these too, along with chopped tomatoes. Serve with spaghetti.

For lunch sandwiches, don't buy sliced chicken for instance. Buy a whole raw chicken, cook it up and shred it (much cheaper)

Porridge for breakfast. Buy frozen berries to add to it.

Also, download the olio app to see if anyone is giving away food in your area.

It would be reasonably easy for me to do our weekly shop for 110 quid in aldi and buy plenty of meat and fish, without looking for "cheap" meals. Not sure about the prices in asda tho, so the above recipes are what I'd cook if I was trying to shave money off my aldi shop.

That's plenty without skipping meals buy everything the same but the non branded versions

You don't need to starve yourself at all. Firstly, your budget isn't tiny and also if you make yourself ill it won't help anyone.

Look at how you can use ingredients for more than one thing. Say you make a large pot of basic tomato sauce (tinned tomatoes, garlic, onions, mixed herbs, maybe tomato puree). On the first day, you could use that as a base for lentil lasagne (add cooked lentils, cannelini beans, frozen peppers and chopped carrots to the tomato sauce, then you just need to make a basic white sauce with nutmeg, layer with lasagne sheets and top with cheese). Serve with salad or vegetables.

On another day, you can add cooked, chopped bacon to the sauce and mix into whatever pasta you have. I would also split some baguettes and top with the sauce, cheese and pepperoni and freeze wrapped in foil. My teenagers love French bread pizzas and we always have a store of them in the freezer- they cook quickly from frozen and are brilliant when you really CBA.

Adding some chilli or other ingredients can vary the sauce enough to stop boredom/mutiny. But it works with other things too. If we have chicken curry, we find it's cheaper to buy thighs than whole chickens, but wither way, you can use leftover curry on jacket potatoes or use bought pastry sheets to make curry pies.

I found that not buying ready made snacks really reduced my grocery bill. Crisps and biscuits were the worst. Now we have homemade oat biscuits sometimes, or I make pancakes or scones, but we don't buy any.

Doesn't sound crazy. Family of five here too and with careful planning/shopping I can d it for £110 albeit because I have stock cupboard ingredients.
So, this is how we roll....
Breakfasts: either oats/branflakes/toast with jam/marmite. Or smoothies with frozen berries. Or eggs.
Lunches: soups/sandwiches/piece of fruit/eggs/ yoghurt/crisps
Afternoon: piece of cake (homemade)
Evenings: macaroni cheese/jacket spuds and maackeral/ daaal and rice/ fish cakes and stir fry/ spaghetti with lemons and peas/ roast dinner/ stew/falafel and salad.

Just an example menu. All made from scratch as I have the time and inclination!

I have three teen boys and no one I going hungry.