How do you keep your food bill low if you can't eat carbs

[EveryDayImHustling]

I'm diabetic so can't eat bread, rice, pasta, potatoes, sugar etc

I have €100 per week to feed 2 adults and 2 dogs.

For the dogs each week I buy:
6 500g bags of porridge (Can't find a bulk supplier, not even amazon) - these have gone up to €1 a bag
4 1kg bags of mixed veg - 99c/€1/1.20 in some places
2x 2kg chickens - €6-7 each
24 eggs (we eat these too) - €4.25

Prices can change from week to week, recently the eggs jumped from 3.70 to 4.25.

We won't be putting the dogs on cheap biscuit so their food is non negotiable.

That leaves €71.75 for breakfast, lunches and dinners that need to be low carb. Anything else needed has to come out of that too, toiletries, cleaning products etc, except petrol. All other bills are accounted for, this is just the living money for each week.

What would your menu be?

I like to cook big batches and eat that for a few days, so soups, stews, curries, a lasagne etc.

That sounds like a ridiculously tiny amount of food

I'm also watching my carb intake and one of my favourite repeat meals is bolognaise sauce (mince, onions, celery, grated carrot, garlic, dried herbs, tomato etc) served on lightly braised strips of savoy cabbage instead of spaghetti.

Chicken casserole in slow cooker. Bulk up with lentils

Chilli again bulk up with lentils and diced carrots

Turkey mince burgers with diced veg

There are loads of recipes in the low carb bootcamp threads. My favourite is a quiche made with ground almond base - I don't think it's cheap exactly but it is very filling and has lots of portions.
I tend to buy frozen cauliflower rice and use that instead of carbs with chilli or in a shepherds pie. Or stuffed peppers instead of spaghetti with a bolognese. I buy the 'wonky' veg if I need to keep the cost down and often I can't tell the difference between the wonky veg and the expensive stuff.
Eggs are good on a budget - loads of omelettes with a few bits of bacon, mushrooms etc.

We saved a lot of money when both of us went on 5:2. You could
Do this and low carb

There are some fantastic books if you want to research first, give the dog a bone by Dr Ian Billingshurst is great, he's got two others too.

I tried them on rice and they lost lots of weight really quickly, they weren't getting anything nutritional from it, so put then back on porridge.

My dogs I mean. I feed naturally like this too.

You can make paneer quite easily which is great for bulking out curries, lovely fried in spices and put in tortilla/lettuce wraps and various other dishes.

I’m in Europe, OP, and keeping my HbA1c out of the danger zone just with diet and exercise. I include carbs such as oats, brown rice, etc, but try to have them early in the day and/or ensure I am active after eating them. Stews and mince dishes bulked out with lentils and veg. Low fat skyr with nuts and seeds and defrosted berries for breakfast. Look for good deals on meat and freeze all you can! That’s how I have been managing costs.

Have you got any space to grow a couple of courgette plants? They are one of our low-carb staples and very easy to grow.

Just thought of another thing I do which is to use very strongly flavoured meats like pancetta or chorizo as you can use less of them which saves money. So I might make an omelette with a small amount of chorizo mixed in with chillis, spinach, spring onions, mushrooms.

There are fabulous low carb threads on mn going back 10+, 15 years!

@EveryDayImHustling Go and check out the recipe threads in the Low Carb Bootcamp topic - they might inspire you.

I cook low carb meals 99% of the time (not diabetic, just a lifestyle/health/weight choice), and I'm very aware of the increasing cost of food.

Here's a selection of meals we've had recently:

• chilli: 20% fat mince (much cheaper than lean mince) with onion, garlic and chillies, one tin of Aldi tomatoes (28p), mushrooms and kidney beans (technically the beans makes the carbs a bit higher, so sometimes I leave these out and put extra mushrooms in). I serve this with yoghurt, grated mature cheddar and sliced jalapeños (from a jar)
• roast pork - a joint of pork from Sainsbury's cost £7.60 and was enough to feed four of us, with some left over, served with celeriac mash and red cabbage
• baked salmon fillets with egg-fried cauliflower 'rice'
• halloumi and roast vegetables (onion, peppers, cauliflower, cherry tomatoes) topped with green pesto

None of those protein sources was expensive - the pork cost the most but also went the furthest.