Back to 1950s cuisine to cope with COL

[Bleachedjeans]

I started a similar thread a while ago and I wonder if the responses are the same. I now make Sunday roasts with chicken followed by a meal of leftover chicken , veg etc on Monday. Homemade meat pie, egg and chips, stews, salads made with basics: lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber. Cut down massively on ‘fancy’ veg, herbs, spices. I’m really missing steak, asparagus etc. even my favourite ratatouille seems expensive these days and not the budget meal it used to be. I’m a keen cook but I’m now cooking like my grandma!
Still trying to maintain standards: no UPF, crappy pizzas, nuggets.
Anyone else?
Not really AIBU but I like AIBU 😊

This is extremely wasteful!

I have a herb box on my window sill. I had a basil plant that lasted a good 7 months.
You can get rosemary in many places, the park opposite my house had a huge bush and I would grab a sprig when I did lamb before I moved.
Frozen herbs are really good too as you can buy in bulk.

The brown meat has much more flavour than the breast.

Which is why chicken thighs used to be cheap (alas no more - same with lamb shanks).

We all have a certain amount of money we consider reasonable to spend on food and if you are a good cook you don’t have to forgo steak, “fancy” vegetables etc you just make them go further. I waste nothing (edible) and never have done consequently my weekly foot bill for 2 is between £40 and £50, the amount many people spend on a takeaway yet we eat 5 star food. Tricks like combining lamb with chickpeas is a simple hack, making meals serve 4 so we have leftovers etc.

last week we had: shepherds pie and veg (2 days), steak Caesar salad, mushroom and lemon pasta (vegetarian), homemade pizza with peppers, courgette , palma ham and mozzarella , rice dal and aubergine pickle (vegan), duck with red cabbage and potatoes dauphinois - hardly roughing it but my bill was £34.29 when I excluded the loo rolls, dishwasher tablets and pack of ibroprofen.

Exactly - there are four of us and we eat all the chicken meat

Stick with in season veg always anyway - don’t agree with importing when we have so much delicious food grown in our own country.
Have always meal planned and cooked/prepared so leftovers would be used another day - I hate food waste so much. Think it stems from childhood in the 80’s with a single mum & no money, plus the famine in Ethiopia so being far more aware of others real struggles to access nutritional foods - I’ve always been mindful ever since.

My meal plan is

Sunday - roast, meat costs somewhere between £6 and £20, all of the other elements are really negligible, a few potatoes, couple of carrots, broccoli or cabbage and whatever else we fancy. Often works out around £2 a head.
Monday - leftovers. Tomorrow is ham, egg, chips and beans as we had gammon today. I’ll make some homemade chips with some potatoes from the bag I used today.
Tuesday - curry / stir fry / stew - if I’ve done a big joint I’ll use the meat from Sunday, otherwise it will be chicken thighs.
Wednesday - jacket potatoes and home made chilli. I make a massive batch in the pressure cooker with lots of different beans and carrots / onions / celery and two big packs of mince. It lasts four weeks for four people, five if I do the portions!
Thursday - pasta and a sauce, sometimes home made, sometimes a healthy jar. Sometimes just tinned tomatoes, garlic and herbs.
Friday - something easy, frozen bits or omelette, beans and toast, eggs and soldiers
Saturday - random. Often something a little elevated.

it makes my life easy and I don’t need to buy tonnes of meat.

We've had some ups and downs but they are definitely more flavoursome than supermarket stuff. I probably saved £300 this year in tomatoes alone (not to mention green tomato chutney at the end of the season which is a firm favourite as a Christmas gift and freezing any surplus crop for sauces).
I am getting an allotment site in spring. So excited!

Sorry but I’m laughing out loud at this one…

Oh, dear…, 🤣

I voted you’re unreasonable but only because the types of foods you seem to be ignoring a whole wealth of international foods in favour of meat pies and basic salads. You could do wonderful curries and tagines with veggies and legumes. Buy your spices from specialist convenience stores and they work out much cheaper than supermarket options. Homemade pizzas are not a substandard option either. Plenty of recipes available online for budget options

How many tomatoes do you get through in a year?

I have a great recipe for red onion, tomato and chilli chutney.

£2 now. Shocking.

I live off them. Love the challenge.

It depends where you buy it from.

I just priced up the most expensive possible ratatouille ingredients from Ocado and it came to £15.25.

The cheapest beef stew ingredients from Tesco (beef, a casserole pack of veg, potatoes and a casserole mix sachet) came to £8.22 - most of that was the beef, as you’d expect.

But to make it make sense you'd need to either price the cheapest ratatouille ingredients vs the cheapest stew ingredients, or the most expensive version of each. Otherwise the comparison doesn't work (I feel this is a very obvious point!)

I think that’s how a lot of us eat anyway. Almost no food gets thrown away in this house, and it’s rare that I buy a ready made meal. Horrible things.

Your question was how would it ever be cheaper.

I love pulses but DS2 isn’t a fan. He will eat a chicken and chickpea korma, or bolognaise with red lentils. Any other ideas how I can get him to like them more as he is a real little meat head

I am unreasonably excited about getting a kitchen scraps recycling collection in the next few weeks (we had it for years where we lived previously). It’s the only thing we can’t currently recycle.

We literally started wars over spices centuries before the 1950s and millions died in the process of that (and of producing sugar).

Don't forego flavour in the pursuit of authenticity. It's not.

FYI if you’re anaemic the thighs (which I prefer) have more iron in them than the breast

MN is hilarious for the amount of lifestyle points scoring that goes on. TBH I'm amazed by all these meal plans - that's way more formal than anything I do. I guess I enjoy improvising.

I can appreciate this. We have definitely changed our meat consumption. I tend to buy whatever I can yellow stickered and make do.

I recently got 2 boxes of beef for £4, made a steak pie plus veg for about £6 for 4.
Using much more sausage meat than mince now in ragus and if you like mince you can do half pork half beef which is much cheaper.
If we have a chicken curry the kids actually prefer the sauce and rice and naan etc so I tend to only need 2 large fillets to feed us all and make.more of the accompaniments.

OP your food is perfectly normal; nothing 1950s about it. Unless you’re adding rissoles to the menu.

Yeah, along the same lines you could fly to Italy and buy the tomatoes there, vs Iceland frozen beef. So yes, there are many ways we can make aubergine cost more than beef. My mistake obviously