"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.

Mum and DH would look at me like I was mad if I served them a jacket spud for their main meal. DH is a manual worker and takes a pack up with him and looks forward to a hot meal at night and a jacket potato wouldnt fit the bill

Well it would be quite odd to serve a jacket potato cold tbh. But if you had it hot with something like chilli, cheese, sour cream and salad how on earth is it not a hot, dinner worthy meal? He wouldn't think cottage pie with baked beans was odd or insufficient and that's the same food just cooked differently.

I don't understand it when people say X is lunch not dinner or that food has to be hot or cold at certain times of day. Neither has any bearing on how filling or nutritious the food is, yet a lot of people on here seem to have very fixed ideas about what can be served when.

You can do the same with sweet potatoes too. Delicious with hormone.

Houmous!🤣

Though sadly lots of food does have hormone these days.

I have eaten jacket potatoes in Australia and Australian recipe websites are full of them. For example.
https://www.taste.com.au/recipes/baked-jacket-potatoes/f7f45471-ed48-4cc7-b07b-d1de5a161403

An old classic! This baked potato has crisp, golden skin, and is light and fluffy on the inside. Our mid-week recipe staring Aussie Made and Grown ingredients is great for any occasion.

https://australianmade.com.au/products/recipes/loaded-baked-potatoes/

https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/jacket-potato-whipped-feta-sumac

these are really good for a change.

We do jacket potatoes with tuna and cram cheese mashed into the cavity, topped with cheddar and rebaked. But always with a salad on the side as otherwise we all just eat too much and feel uncomfortable!

Same as he doesn't like a fry for dinner

We aren't all the same, he likes what he considers proper meals - meat, potatoes and 3 veg or a big bowl of stew, a roast - as does mum. He will take spag bol, she wont, he will take a curry, and neither consider a jacket potato a meal.

Now Im weird, Ill eat shepherds pie, but I wont eat mince and potatoes. The exact same ingredients - go figure :)

I think it might be a regional thing. Where I am from breakfast is a small meal and can be hot or cold, lunch (or dinner as we call it) is small and may also be hot or cold (sarnie, salad, pie and peas, jacket etc). Dinner aka tea is a large meal and must have protein, veg and carbs and hot.

Traditionally it would be some kind of meat, veg and potato dish served with gravy but I don't cook like that. DD2 loves a traditional northern meal. My mum's cooking put me off most northern food for life. The mere thought of eating panacalty makes me feel ill. Ditto mince, mash, and peas but I do like shepherd's pie.

Why not post what you bought? Otherwise it’s guessing.

Also, planning meals based on ingredients is useful. Also cuts make a huge difference. Unless you’re focused on lower fat or boneless….

I think you will find she did list what she brought in one of the follow on posts

If you cook an extra large whole chicken with some extra thighs you have a roast meal then lots of chicken you can do things with: risotto, fajitas, pasta in various forms with sauce, Indian and Thai curries. (I also sometimes cook it in a pressure cooker so I have lovely stock as well).
A big piece of gammon or a meat joint can work well too.. Someone else suggested whole salmon which was a good idea.

Don’t feed chicken bones to animals - they splinter and can get caught in the throat.

The initial outlay for things like spices, nutritional yeast, 1kg bags of walnuts, cashews etc

I have always cooked healthy, home-made food from scratch. I've never bought a kilo of walnuts or cashews and I've never bought nutritional yeast. No wonder people are put off the idea of cooking from scratch! You don't need this stuff to produce decent meals.

OP, buy spices from your local Asian store. I've sometimes picked up really cheap fruit and veg from there, too.

Have you looked at ‘Cardiff’s mum’s’ Recipes? She has loads of ‘5 dinners for £25’ based on an Aldi shop for x2 adults and x2 kids.

We were hard up when I was growing up and my mum used to make a delicious meal: leeks in a creamy white sauce (plenty of leeks) with a tin of corned beef cut into small cubes and heated through it a few minutes prior to serving. Plenty of white pepper in the sauce. Served with floury boiled potatoes that my dad had grown. (He'd probably also grown the leeks). Sounds unlikely but it was very tasty and a real highlight of the winter weeks. If I ate meat now I might even try to make it again.

@Abeona , you don't need them but you can use them and buying in bulk is cheaper. I would buy them if vegan.
Greengrocers are often cheaper for fruit and veg, and if you buy loose you can buy what you need not a pack/bag.

DD’s Canadian bf didnt seem to know what a jacket potato was and when she asked for one produced something he called a twice baked potato which to me was a fancy jacket potato where the insides had been scraped out, mushed up with filling and baked again.

He said in Canada it’s a “tailgate” dinner rather than a meal people have at home, so they’d eat it in a carpark before a sports game….i may have misunderstood this last point

My husband and I take turns at cooking and we cook from scratch 90% of the time.

I would suggest doubling up on ingredients so you have leftovers to freeze or refrigerate for the next few days. We quite often eat leftovers for lunch.

In regards to herbs and spices, we only ever buy dried because we don't have the time to grown our own (we are both in quite demanding jobs) and dried last much longer than fresh so is much more cost efficient.

I was brought up cooking from scratch and being cost effective (things like; bulk cooking, how to make meals cheaper, portioning your own chicken etc) but my husband was not. To be honest we do what we can at the weekend to get ahead and then we might have meals in mind, but most of the time we just cook with what we have in the fridge or cupboard.

We also get a veg box delivered from oddbox which includes recipes and they have a recipe generator on their website.

I think you’re going well! I spend this per week for 2 as a minimum. Extra for 2 cats.

@KirstenBlest But no one mentioned vegan food. The OP is a carnivore.

I'm not sure it helps people who don't have the confidence to make their own chilli or shepherd's pie to start talking about bulk-buying walnuts or red rice or nutritional yeast. They need to start by making cheap but nutritious basics using familiar ingredients and then move on to more adventurous things.

I always cook from scratch, not capable to feed a village though 😊 I watch what I buy even if it's on special offer. Never anything pre-cut like cubed chicken, can do that myself. Leftovers are frozen and worked up in a new meal. Just the 2 of us but often grandchild here, also often guests invited for dinner, so an average of 3 persons every day? I spend about £70 a week on food, mostly at Lidl and my Morocco grocer. That's including olive oil, herbs&spices, bread. No pets here but I know they cost you an arm and a leg.

£100 a week is a typical cost for a family food shop I would say

Even having to do the storecupboard from scratch I don't see how the ingredients for those meals come to £75, but I have always cooked from scratch, so I can't really judge. Maybe you could try Simply cook-they provide all the spices flavourings and recipes you provide the main ingredients-cooking absolutely from scratch from a standing stop is tough-ease yourself in ,or you'll lose heart.

@Abeona , true and OP wanted to reduce the food bill. Walnuts are not within my budget.
I bulk buy lentils but the ones that we like and that cook quite quickly. Mung beans or green/brown lentils seem best liked here.

I would ditch Hello Fresh it’s a gimmick, it gives the impression it’s easier, cheaper and all in a box etc BUT in reality is much more expensive! For a company to make profit it has to have a margin added so the meals you have planned out would be easily half the price of HF if you bought what you needed from the supermarket