To think it’s impossible to food shop cheaply if you want to cook recipes from scratch

[onetwoshoe]

There’s a few recipes I want to try from my cookbook but all of them command different, infrequently used ingredients which I’m not sure I can justify when spices and herbs are now over £1 dried, more if fresh.

Another example is that I’d like to try making my own naan bread but shop-bought is cheaper, goes further and lasts longer. I’d love to make hummus homemade but again, cheaper to buy it from a shop than the initial outlay of all the ingredients separately.

AIBU to think it’s impossible to cook nice, different meals from scratch for two adults every night on a food shop of less than £100 a week?

We do have the odd night of jacket potato and beans or similar to bring the cost down but I just think most times ingredients are very costly right now.

We are 2 adults and I hardly ever spend £100 a week on food (and our shop includes things like cleaning products and toilet roll).

We cook pretty much from scratch. This week we will have:

Sausage, pepper and potato tray bake

Spicy smoked mackerel fried rice

Chicken and broccoli cous cous

Mushroom and pancetta pasta

Smoked haddock fishcakes and fried potatoes with salad. (A cheat as the fishcakes are ready made)

We make liberal use of the yellow sticker aisle and bulk thing out with pulses and carbs.

I’ve got areas like that near me in the south east, a good chunk are money laundering.

however,

cooking and nutrition got scrapped off the national curriculum. Mine do have cooking lessons, but I’ve worked with plenty who didn’t.
if your living off a very limited budget. You’ve £50 to feed the kids and £20 on the gas and electric for the week. As you’ve not been taught you don’t have the confidence or knowledge, skills or kitchen gadgets - nor the funds to waste if the kids don’t eat the meal, or it goes wrong

Wouldn't you be able to use some of these ingredients for the next curry you make, though? It will be economical in the long run, depending on your diet and how often you eat curries.

For instance, I don't cook British food, so if I bought the ingredients for a one-off pie, and a pie dish, I would likely find it very expensive because we don't eat pies regularly. But my pressure cooker has saved me a lot in energy costs over the years because I use it daily.

If you buy spices you will use them again and again. Just looking at my spice rack it has say 20 items on it and I buy garlic chilli and ginger each month and freeze them (garlic and ginger ground first). I am ethnically Indian and by spices from my local specialist Indian shop. Look for TRS or Rajah. If u batch cook it can save a lot of time and it is true curry improves with age.

I probably have about 50 or more spices built up over the year. They fit in two shelves. This is how people across the world cook, including the poorest. They build up a store of spices and ingredients as and when they can afford to buy.

I did not get the impression that the OP is skint, so I don't know why people are digressing into discussions of the very underprivileged.

If you buy a pot of supermarket growing basil, you can divide it into 6 plants and pot them up. My FIL showed me about 2 years ago- I have never bought anymore basil. I just keep splitting the original 6 as I start to use them up. Same with other herbs.

I know what you mean and agree generally but I make my own hummus all the time - yes you have to buy a jar of tahini, but you get a lot of portions of hummus out of it. If you want to make hummus that will go further than one tin of chickpeas, try a roasted carrot hummus recipe. Carrots are pretty cheap.

downshiftology.com/recipes/roasted-carrot-hummus/

That ^^ I will miss out or sub ingredients
I think if you want to cover vast types of cuisine it gets expensive
If you always cook Thai food you find the same ingredients are repeated

I mostly cook off one website and find a lot of the ingredients are reused. Or I'll buy an ingredient for a dish and then google what to do with leftover X or see if I can freeze it etc

This Instagram is great for leftover ideas

https://www.instagram.com/ellypear?igsh=MWFzeHNhY3VjdWxjOQ==

Yes, YANBU.

I had a shock the first time i got ingredients together for a recipe.

We are limited to buying from one of the more expensive supermarkets, and we have very limited freezer and cupboard space, so can’t batch cook or buy ingredients in bulk.

I would say I'm ordinary. Min wage job, single, 40, live alone in an city that's been described on here as "vile" (it's just a standard NW city) with health issues that cause fatigue

Takeaway once a month. I get the odd McDonald's or coffee
Cook from scratch without jars and mostly batch cook. So today I roasted some veg and added some leftover bacon for lunches and will be having it with pesto grains and some roast chicken

Also had some strawberries looking a bit old so I've added some sugar in a tub and shaken them to make a syrup type thing for with porridge tomorrow

But I enjoy cooking. I don't have the money to shop at Waitrose or buy ingredients that get used once

These threads always do. People are like ‘but you might not have a freezer!’ or ‘Poor people can’t afford the electricity!’ when the OP clearly isn’t in that category.

The bottom line is: the vast majority of people can still cook pretty cheaply and quickly from scratch.

Disagree, yes herbs are £1 a jar but don't buy lots the same week. Tahini is £2.50 or so vs hummus at £1 a tub however you can get 10-20 batches! Canned chickpeas can be had for 3 for £1. Frozen garlic is cheap.

I scratch cook 90% of our food and spend around £80 on food for 3 adults. I don't make naan I admit but I do make chapattis twice a week or so, so cheap

Naan bread can be made with self raising flour and greek yoghurt. (+ salt and ideally butter for brushing on afterwards).

Spices and stuff it's reasonably easy to build up a stock of, which makes trying new recipes reasonably easy - if you're keen to keep prices down try to stick to a cuisine a month or so. (Mexican will mean you buy cumin, oregano, paprika, chilli powder, then Indian will mean you buy tumeric, coriander, ginger, chinese will be 5 spice, rice wine vinegar, soy sauce). Don't choose loads of varied new recipes all at once. I'd also recommend visiting a market or 'foreign supermarket' to buy much larger packets of herbs and spices for cheaper.

If you're in a position where you know you like houmous and want to make it, then you're probably buying tahini, chickpeas, maybe some garlic or lemon. Look for other recipes which use those ingredients too, tahini goes well with chicken. Then you've got the jar, you've tried a few new things, next time you don't need the 'extras' and you're good to start building up a supply cupboard.

Google substitutes

My Mum, now 93, always cooked from scratch back in the 70s. She once filled the freezer up with pre prepared meals and left me 16 and my sister 14 and brother 8 to fend for ourselves for a few weeks. A completely brilliant summer.

Mums Mum always cookedf from scratch and she lived to 90 and Mum is always going about her Gran, who lived to 94. So there it is. Cooking for,m scratch
= longeivity

With school meals, the cost is not just the food ingredients - it's staff time. It is faster (and therefore cheaper) to stick a ready prepared pizza in the oven than is to make and shape dough, simmer sauce, grate cheese, chop veg and assemble it all. Also, if they have to meet specific nutritional levels ready prepared.foods have the info printed on the box. So.you don't need to employ a nutritionist to calculate it.

I'm baffled why the OP thinks bought naan 'goes further'.