Frugal meals

[Poppins17]

Hi all,

My colleague was telling me today has and electricity could go up as much as £500 a month….. the only place we can cut our spending is our food shopping which is already pretty low.

We meal plan, shop in Aldi, cook from scratch, buy yellow sticker foods where we find them, and have meat free days, but I’m wanting to build a library of the cheapest (but still healthy ish) meals and perhaps rota them every couple of weeks as we head into autumn / winter. I like to try and make enough for DH to take leftovers for work lunch the next day.

Last night I made lasagna and only bought mince and sheets fresh everything else I had in, and that made our tea last night, a portion for DH lunch today, a second portion each in the freezer and I’ve saved the sauce for DH to make himself a pasta lunch for tomorrow.

Tonight we are keeping it super simple with cheese and potato pie. I’ll add a sausage each from the freezer and a spoonful of beans (using the rest for tomorrow‘s meal), and we have some bread we can have with butter if we need to bulk it out.

I have a small air fryer and I’m hoping to upgrade that to a two drawer one for my birthday next month to try and minimise the amount we use our cooker. I’m happy to cook all meals from scratch including pasta / white sauces etc… so please let me know which meals you find most frugal… thank you!

Lots of great menu ideas but I have to agree the way to go is finding meals which do not use much energy to cook, so look for low cook meals. Or at the very least batch cook to save energy.

Thanks all.

We are currently eating out of the freezer to make way for batch cooked items.

We had frozen sausage, black pudding, hash browns and bread so have had a fry up, I just added bacon (10 pack and we used 4), beans (leftover from yesterday’s half a can) and mushrooms (only used small amount so rest left for risotto).

We have just ordered a too good to go bag from Harvester from the salad bar to pick up at 9pm. It was £2.99 so hopefully will be enough for two of us to have salad for lunch and maybe some left over for tomorrow‘s tea - I’ve took burgers out of the freezer, we have baps in there too which will take out tomorrow and have them with chips from air fryer. The Harvester is only a 5 minute drive from here.

I’m trying to think of ways to keep variety and have treats without eating out and keeping food costs as low as possible… haven’t tried to too good to go from Harvester so we’ll see what it’s like.

Would love to see what’s in the Too good to go bag! I love our Starbucks ones and keep being tempted by the salad bag!

Have a look at the feed your family for £20 a week book, she has some great recipes in there and some good ideas for basics like sauces, etc.

I had a look at war recipes recently.

Essentially what they were, were the cheapest and most plentiful ingredients, put together in the best way they could.

So nowadays that might mean, oats? carrots? potatoes. cheap biscuits. cheap pasta. spices. herbs. onions. you get the idea. sugar.

margarine, gravy
they had to make do and mend.

who knows. may be coming to all of us.

We had 3 boxes of salad, 3 bread rolls, 3 butters and 3 sauces for £2.99.

We were pleased with what we got - I will take one box of salad to work tomorrow and we will have the other two with our tea tomorrow. The rolls have gone in the freezer.

I was saying to DH earlier that it so much cheaper to cook in the winter as stews and soups can go a lot further as you can just add more veg, then trying to 'cook' in this heat.

I serve stews in large Yorkshire puddings. I make them in a 20cm cake tin.

As a kid we always had a slice of bread and butter with tea, to bulk it out.

Eggs are good too, so a frittata or a Spanish omelette.

pastry - my gran made a great mince rolypoly which I still make today, basically you can make a minced meat filling with a small pack of mince, onion and celery, carrot and spread on suet pastry, roll up like a Swiss roll and bake. Lovely with veggies and gravy.

quiches are also good

bean or veggie casseroles

TheOldLadyOfThreadneedleStreet · Today 22:07

Eggs are good too, so a frittata or a Spanish omelette. Yes this is affectionally known as dying veg omelette in our house.

Oh mince rolypoly sounds fabulous- do you have a recipe?

Pie.

you can put anything in a pie and it’s filling. I never have potatoes with it as the pastry provides the carbohydrates. Always make your own.

I fill it with wilting veg in a mushroom sauce or chicken scraps, small amount of minced beef or Quorn, eggs and bacon, cheese and potato, literally anything that is lame and limp or in minimal amounts in the fridge or freezer.

Beef chilli and good old fashioned mince are a huge success in our household and they're cheap and freeze well (arguably both taste even richer after a maturation period in freezer).

For chilli you can buy dry kidney beans and pre-boil them, or tinned (dry are more of a faff but lots cheaper). I use some tinned tomatoes plus tomato puree which is much cheaper and I also save up any soft tomatoes that the family haven't eaten in the freezer and chuck those in too. Buy the cheapest British beef mince which is at least 20% fat. We were, wrongly, told that fat is bad for us but actually it isn't, contains loads of flavour and it'll make a wonderfully rich chilli which really fills you up. Lots of onions, thyme, plenty chilli powder, plenty salt, loads and loads of garlic and give it a very long slow simmer. I use the induction hob as I make huge batches in a stock pot but a slow cooker would work OK for smaller quantities.

Serve with rice, as nachos with leftover tortillas (cut into triangles, brush with oil and bake for 5 mins), even chips. Add a bit of crumbled feta or even an egg if you want something a bit different.

You can make traditional mince the same way but without the beans/chilli/thyme and with extra chopped carrots and home made beef stock or a stock cube.

Beef mince in Aldi or Lidl is less than £2 per 500g pack and made into chilli gors a long way.

Another great thing for that fatty mince is burgers (and much healthier than shop bought). Whizz up a little bit of onion, garlic, some mixed herbs on the food processor, add 500g mince and plenty of salt (I use around a tsp) and whizz until it becomes a single well combined lump. Divide into 4-6 pieces depending on the size you'd like, form into rough burger shapes, and stack with little squares of greaseproof paper in between. Pop the stack into a freezer bag and freeze. £1.80 for 4 x 100% beef quarter pounders. They will release fat during cooking but it's worth it because they'll also be incredibly moist and tasty. Also great with lamb mince too but obviously not as cheap.

That’s the recipe I use but don’t have a stick blender. I mash it with the potato masher so it still has some lumps. I actually prefer it to completely smooth.

I'm going to get a slow cooker, really need to not use the oven for small items.
batch cook baked potatoes then freeze and microwave when needed.
Use tinned and frozen foods more, us e in-season fresh stuff so should be cheaper.
tip for hummus-use cheaper peanut butter rather than tahini, it works fine.
Eggs still good value- omelettes with whatever you have thrown in, scrambled in a salad wrap, egg fried rice etc.
Think I'm going to go back to an online shop too, I'm spending way more each trip, and "popping in " way too often.
loving the pork sausage instead of mince idea-I'll pinch that one.

keep things simple

make meals using a base of pasta shapes and rice - each once a week. So a pasta and pesto dish or tomato and anchovy style sauce with olives etc or what you have in the cupboards or rice based dish such as kedgeree.

casseroles that last two evening with rice or pasta or mash, adding lentils and beans to the casserole as it's finished to make it last a third evening. We don't have to have different meals every night and cooking in a slow cooker is cheap & easy.

Yes I follow her too - and have made a couple of her meals (using Lidl’s not aldi) and they’ve been great.

couple more meals that we make a lot are left over roast chicken soup (not the famous mumsnet chicken!!) but we have a roast chicken most Sundays, that night I strip the carcass and bung the bones all in the slow cooker on low with a load of water. I then fry an onion and add any veg I have lurking in the fridge or freezer, a broccoli stem (which I save in the freezer), a potato, carrots, parsnips etc whatever I have. Then add it to the stock and blitz it all up once the veg is cooked. That’s lunches sorted with some bread throughout the week.

in the summer I tend to do roasted veg with left over vegetables that I roast with herbs from the garden and use in my meal plans, it’s delicious in wraps, quesadillas, salads, couscous as a side etc.

for the autumn/winter I’m thinking a rolling meal plan based on different carbs with small amounts of protein and lots of seasonal and thus hopefully relatively inexpensive veg and fruit.

making scraps and peelings into stock and then into soup for lunches, and I need to start making my own bread again.

the dc also need packed lunches each day, so they’ll be veg and fruit based.

Great ideas already.

I'd add gnocchi to the list, either home made or shop bought. Lidl have a huge pack on their X-LARGE offers this week, and it's pretty decent. I'd say a packet of the Lidl gnocchi would cover easily 6 adult portions as gnocchi so filling. Given it only takes 2/3 minutes to cook and you could just stir some pesto or even basic tomato sauce (cheap to batch cook if you can) it's cheap on energy too.

We are virtually veggie too, bar occasionally a tin of tuna. That is much cheaper in general.

We bulk up casseroles, stews, bolognaise sauces with beans, lentils etc, lasts much longer.

And there's never not a tin of chickpeas in our house, tomorrow is chickpea and cauliflower curry, I buy rice in bulk if I can too. Cook extra rice and use the next day for salads etc.

Started getting chicken thighs on occasion in place of breast. Super tasty and only the one bone to navigate for people who don't like chicken on the bone. They are ~£2.50/Kg rather than ~£6/kg for breast.

@TheOldLadyOfThreadneedleStreet my Nan used a crumble with Stewed steak in it. That always went down well with mash and gravy!

I make a lot of ‘fried rice’ which, is basically rice, with whatever vegetables in a wok - just a tiny bit of oil, i add chicken and sometimes stir and egg through but you can leave those out. If im skint, its just some soy sauce added, if not, half a sachet or a glug of teriyaki/chowmein/hoisin/sweet and sour sauce.

i love this because i can chuck any meat or veg in depending what i have, often some leftover sweet potato etc and its super filling.

sometimes i will fry an egg to go directly on top and its always filling and delicious - eat it at least 3 times a week 😂

Do you batch cook the rice? Would it work if batched cooked?

meals with eggs are economical.

I love a Spanish tortilla though controversially I add garlic & sometimes chorizo. Can also add chilli. Serve with salad/veggies.

www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/real-spanish-omelette