"Normal" people who cook from scratch everyday - tell me this gets cheaper

[Frequency]

By normal, I mean excluding those who can feed a small African village with one can of chickpeas, an egg, and a tomato. Normal people, who eat normal portions of normal foods.

We've canceled Hello Fresh to save money, so we've started meal planning with a recipe-building app instead, otherwise, we just cycle through the same 5/6 meals all the time.

One child is away this week. The remaining child has picked;

Cheesy broccoli pasta bake, Piri piri chicken wrap “fakeaway”, easy creamy chicken curry, penne arrabbiata with roasted peppers and pancetta, easy chicken jalfrezi curry.

£75 fecking quid.

It's not even a full shop. I'm not eating breakfast or lunch coz the price now just for evening meals is way too much. I've added a couple of yoghurts and crappy pizzas for the kids lunches and breakfasts and we already have cereal in.

I bought cat litter and cat food earlier or that would have been added too.

Admittedly, we had to buy a lot of spices because Hello Fresh used to send them in handy little packets and DD has used most of the ones we did have jazzing up her instant noodles. But, the spices only added around £10ish. That's still £65 without breakfasts or lunches.

Obviously, next week we won't need as many spices and should have some butter and oil left but still...

If this is the best we can do I am going to have to consider rehoming a child.

Be honest Marmduke: you didn’t even need all those spices did you? 😂

Thanks vegetables, Senua, Bjork

Quirky that would be a handy way to shop/eat for us too. 5/10 meals is about our rotation as well- but the local bulk offers where we are at the moment seem to be onions, potatoes, eggs. Think I need more freezer space and I’m going to put more effort into seeing what can be sourced a bit further away

@QuirkyCyanScroller not a single person has responded to my posts on looking beyond the supermarket … 🤷🏽‍♀️ (Maybe it is just a ‘funny foreigner’ thing?)

This was a recent thread that seems pertinent here:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/food_and_recipes/5017053-old-fashioned-vegetarian-food?reply=133347321

And there was another, can’t find right now, on varied sources of protein.

the op can’t drive, she might not have an Asian supermarket near by.
your incredibly fortunate to have the storage capacity for that. I’m not sure most houses have the secure (from pests) storage for it. It’s like Costco, I have a Costco card for work. Its pointless for most home stuff as I don’t have the room.

If your cooking for four, use meat for three and add an extra portion of veggies.

I always batch cook meals at the beginning of the week, but I eat different food to rest of family as I’m vegan and they are hideous 😂 il batch cook six portions and eat four during the week, stockpiling so some weeks I don’t even need to buy food for myself.

I also batch cook for the family dishes, so basically through the week we don’t cook, just thaw and heat which saves so much time after work. I make sauce portions, e.g arrabiata so they can just whack it on whatever slice of dead animal they have selected or eat it with pasta.

I also make sure there is one ‘grufty’ tea per week; cheese toasties, chips and mushy peas or beans on toast.

bulk buy things like dog food, laundry powder, bog roll. The dog eats our leftovers after dinner so often his food stretches out depending on how much leftovers.

I also grow all my own chillies, coriander, basil, rosemary etc which saves us an absolute fortune

for reference we have three adults, a 12.y.o and a large dog. I spend between $300-$350 per week on foods and household which is about equivalent to £150-£180 uk, but food is very expensive in oz. Comparably most people I know can’t believe we spend so little but it takes a LOT of planning and prepping!

Not entirely sure what your point is. We mostly eat foreign veggie food with a ton of spices and veggies sourced from the Asian supermarket, and it's very, very cheap/healthy, but I am not sure most British people want to eat what I eat ! Or that a 16-year-old can cook it easily. Changing your diet is quite tough. However, the OP appears to have no choice if she is skipping meals.

Veggie or low meat food is very flavoursome though, and not at all about eating lentils daily. There is a ton of Asian food- Indian, Malaysian, Chinese, Sri Lankan, Thai-that is not lentils but uses very little meat. Curries, stir fries, rice dishes. I buy spices, lentils, rice, dry staples in bulk. They do not go off.

if DH makes the odd chicken curry once in a whiel, he uses very little chicken and a ton of onion, tomatoes, and garlic. Yesterday for instance, we had palak paneer for dinner-super cheap and healthy- and the left over canned spinach will be used for a spinach and mushroom pulao for lunch ( easy to make)

An instapot might be a good idea for the future.

Anchor butter is far more expensive than Asda!
Anchor is £2 for 200g
Asda is £1.69 for 250g

Those differences can add up over time.

Have only read your posts OP, so will probably be duplicating other people's responses.

Your 'meal planning' just seems to be the creation of shopping lists. If you want to save money, you have to move away from each meal being separate, and moving to a week's meals being interlinked.

Both these books (Save With Jamie by Jamie Oliver, and Economy Gastronomy by Allegra McEvedy) work on the principle of a 'mothership' meal involving a big (expensive!) brisket, lamb/pork joint, side of salmon that provides a Sunday roast-like meal, with the leftovers - and the mothership is sized such that there will be leftovers - spun into several different meals over the rest of the week.

Jamie's books always have an accompanying TV series, in this case 'Money Saving Meals'. It's currently showing on the Food Network channel (Freeview channel 43). Maybe record it for ideas?

I've seen both books in charity shops (bought the Jamie one for £2.95 in one) or you can get them second hand from eBay, Abebooks, Alibris, World of Books.

Cooking from scratch can be quite expensive when you first start, but when you have the proper staple foods in the cupboards it actually becomes quite cheap and easy, herbs, spices, butter, flours, pastas etc.

Slow cooker so you can buy cheaper cuts of meat and it still comes out awesome! We have 2/3 days a week where we eat leftovers of jacket potato's.

Get yourself to Aldi/Lidl and even places like B&M for basic ingredients as it's loads cheaper.. get the bus down and uber back if you need to, or ask a friend/family member if you can go shopping at the same time as them.

Always look for bargains and freeze them, I've bought pizzas for 10p before, morrisons mark their meat down towards the end of the day by up to 90%, most shops start marking stuff down ready for tea time, it doesn't matter what it is as you can buy it and freeze it till you're ready to make it. Coscto is a good shout for meat, I buy a massive pack of chicken breast from there for about £9 and parcel them up and freeze them when I get home, once you've got basic ingredients you can buy meat and veg and basically make anything!

It's well worth doing and if you double and treble the recipes, you can batch cook and freeze so it's even less effort.

That old fashioned veggie recipes thread looks great Gruelle and I’d love to see the prote

*protein thread if you find it!

can also recommend the Fresh India book for ideas of delicious things to do with cheaper-in-the-UK veg

Think it was probably this one:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/weight_loss_chat/4975287-what-protein-do-you-eat-when-how-i-need-inspiration?reply=131887814

Those are quite nice meals. It would be cheaper to do some days with jacket potatoes & beans. I think something like a large portion of curry or bolognese would work out cheaper & you freeze left overs for following week.

Once you have stocked up on herbs you won't need to keep buying.

But yes food seems to be getting really expensive now. What used to be around £120 seems to be more like £180. Portions shrinking too.

Meera Sodha is a great cook and I recommend her, if you are UK based and can eat seasonal veg where you are or you live rurally in the UK

Thanks for the thread Gruelle

I don't think your shop is a lot! I think people expect to eat for too little money these days.

In 1993 I was a student and shared with two other girls. We cooked every night and shopped at Asda- so cheapish place and budget type meals- cheapest bread, milk, and things like pasta, roast chicken, sausages and chips, basic curry sauces etc. Our shopping was about £12 each- so just under £40 to feed 3 for a week. Therefore your £75 to feed a family 30 years later is reasonable taking inflation into account.

I spend more than that to feed my family now because we don't live like students any more for me, DH and adult DD. I shop at Ocado and spend around £150 a week- but that includes 2 bottles of wine at about £10/£12 each, all cleaning products, items for packed lunch for 3 of us, snacks, and I like to buy organic veg and free range versions of meat where I can. I meal plan and cook things like Roast dinner on a Sunday (a joint of meat or a decent chicken costs £10 alone, different pasta dishes, salmon and veg, chicken chow mien, thai curry, spaghetti bolognese, chilli, shepherds pie, casseroles, haddock and chips, sausage and bean bake, pork chops, spicy fried rice etc.

As others have said: Larger quantities of staples from Asian or Polish type shops if you are in a City. I buy beans and lentils.
Chicken whole and roasted, Ham hock and turkey leg joints like drumsticks are all good value.
If you are cutting down on good food or heating then you should not be wasting money on a pet. The family must be priority.

Not entirely sure what your point is. We mostly eat foreign veggie food with a ton of spices and veggies sourced from the Asian supermarket, and it's very, very cheap/healthy, but I am not sure most British people want to eat what I eat ! Or that a 16-year-old can cook it easily. Changing your diet is quite tough. However, the OP appears to have no choice if she is skipping meals.

Foreign veggie food with a tonne of spices is probably exactly what my 16-year-old wants to eat. She loves spice but the only meat she will consider is either shaped like a nugget, chicken off the bone, or Richmond pork sausages. She's allergic to eggs and won't eat fish, lamb, beef, or pork which is not a Richmond sausage. I'll look up a few recipes and try them out next week.

I didn't have to skip meals as in there was money in the bank to buy more if I wanted to but I panicked when I saw the total and decided to just chuck in a few cheap freezer meals for the kids to share for lunch and I'd go without.

My panic was I wasn't expecting it to be this hard/require this much planning to cut down our budget. I could have re-looked at the shopping list and made more savings had I stopped to think but I didn't. I panicked and stropped instead .

My income has gone down a lot and I can't seem to bring my outgoings down to match which is annoying because we've lived off a lot less than we have now and I rarely skipped meals to manage it.

I assumed with the canceling of Hello Fresh we'd make our biggest saving on food shopping but it seems not unless we go back to eating jacket spuds (which are a lunch in my eyes) for dinner and a few meals of cheap freezer fillers here and there which I wasn't expecting to have to do. We used to waste a lot of money on shit, I just expected to stop buying the shit and we'd be fine and we might be, I might just be panicking for nothing but it doesn't feel like we are saving as much as we have lost.

For those worried about my not eating I have just picked up some yellow sticker sandwich fillers and some bread from the Spar when I went in for milk now the fridge is a fridge again and we can buy big cartons of milk. I have lunch for four days and I never ate breakfast anyway. It makes me queasy eating too early on a morning. I also grabbed a yellow sticker whole chicken for £3 that I can use next week in a couple of meals. DD will eat roast chicken if I pull it off the bone and throw it in a curry, so we can have a roast one day and curry the next day with it.

@CultOfRamen "for reference we have three adults, a 12.y.o and a large dog. I spend between $300-$350 per week on foods and household which is about equivalent to £150-£180 uk, but food is very expensive in oz. Comparably most people I know can’t believe we spend so little but it takes a LOT of planning and prepping"

My wee sister is in Perth and she was saying shes switched to the fresh delivery thingy ( cant mind what the name is ) as she says it stops the waste and there's usually left overs for someone's lunch because food has gone up so much there since Covid

Meal planning and prepping is really the best solution on keeping the costs down, it does take time and effort but worth it. I reverse meal plan, I see whats the best value and work around that. Im also not too fussed on the thinking that this has to be that, like if I find turkey mince at silly prices in the reduced section, thats what Im buying and it will be a bolognaise, it will be a keema curry, it will be meat balls :) Might taste different, but who cares? :) And Im also one that thinks do I really need scallions and shallots AND red onions when a net of brown onions will do all the dishes Ive planned

African village really…misses the point of the thread

I have no idea whether the OP was referencing a perception of ‘people who habitually don’t get much to eat’, or whether she has African heritage herself?

It was certainly clumsy; if the first possibility perhaps the OP didn’t realise there would be people of African heritage - who are accustomed to eating well - on MN? If the second - she needs to be clearer, to avoid causing (real, not theoretical) offence.

We shop at Aldi and don't eat meat (and have cut down on meat alternatives like Quorn). £45 for a weekly shop without top-ups.

Foreign veggie food with a tonne of spices is probably exactly what my 16-year-old wants to eat. She loves spice but the only meat she will consider is either shaped like a nugget, chicken off the bone, or Richmond pork sausages. She's allergic to eggs and won't eat fish, lamb, beef, or pork which is not a Richmond sausage. I'll look up a few recipes and try them out next week.

I'd hand the responsibility over to her.

16 and super fussy.

Her diet is unhealthy as all she will eat is processed meat (sausage) and chicken (some of which is mass produced as nuggets.)

How's this happened? Has she never eaten fish or other meat?

Give her a £tenner and tell her to cook her own main meals and she can use the veg you already have in the house.

Agree that was completely random and unnecessary.