"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.

Yes, it does get cheaper. Do some research on feeding a family on a budget, menu planning, bulk cooking and freezing are key. Hello fresh is horrifically expensive to feed a family.

@Laurmolonlabe

Because the cherrypick app suggests very expensive ingredients whereas hello fresh need to make a profit so formulate recipes to fit a price point. Also Sainsburys is very expensive! 98p for a can of chopped tomatoes, twice the price of Lidl

Where do you buy your ingredients? Spaghetti @ Aldi 28p, 1 onion, 1 pk cheapest bacon, 1 egg, whole milk. Prefry bacon, chop into small pieces, boil spaghetti, put aside, lightly fry onions in unwashed bacon pan, chuck in bacon, spaghetti, whisk about 250/350ml milk and the egg together, pour over spaghetti, mix together and cook until milk/egg has formed a creamy sauce. Take off heat, add salt/pepper, fake Carbonara done. Feeds 4ppl for less than a fiver, everyone likes it and very filling. Look for ‘family meals on a budget’, you’ll find loads that really aren’t hard to cook. When you make sausage/mash/peas, make double amount of mash and use it for a cottage pie topping next day to save time. Tell kiddo you’re skint, so no more picking food that needs 15 different fresh herbs & spices but they’ll get surprise dinners instead🙂 You’ll get there, it just takes a bit of experimenting.

Ok, there are only 2 of us, so much easier. Easter day, leg of lamb 2 adult children. Lamb cost £14 from Lidl. We had it as a roast with veg, carrots and parsnips 15p per pack pluse spuds and brocolli, and a yorkshire pud. Chopped up what was left abd made a chile with tins of beans and tomatoes. Served with rice and sourdough bread for the next 2 nights, and we have one portion left in the freezer. Buy a large pack of chicken, breast or thighs. Make a large slow cooked casserole . Casserole and veg on day 1, curry day 2, moroccan chicken with cous cous on day 3. A joint of gammon is £4.00 in Aldi, or a larger one about £7. Riast on day 1, ham, egg and chips day 2, sandwiches with leftovers. We also make a large pan of veg chili which will last 2 or 3 meals and is pretty cheap. We serve with rice and some green veg to keep it healthy. Take control of your menus and stop your kids choosing. Now and again let them, but you cintrol the budget, so you control most of the meals.

When money is an issue one should consider what the best value healthy foods are and try incorporating them in meals rather than working backwards from the meals you want. Spuds, onions, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, salad, pork joints, chicken breast (the cheapest chicken meat), frozen peas/corn, dried pulses, oats. And as plenty of others have said there is nothing wrong with eggs/beans/cheese on toast or a baked potato multiple times each week.

The 28p spaghetti isn't great. I'd get the next pasta up from that unless you aren't fussed.

I know a lot of advice is that it's cheaper to plan meals and buy accordingly, but I never found that as useful as finding out when supermarkets/ markets reduce items and shopping 'yellow ticket', or buying what's cheaper at any given time (in season, on special offer/ loss leaders) and exchanging ingredients in recipes. The same with making sure I have basics in- herbs, spices, tinned tomatoes, rice, couscous, quinoa, pasta, some tinned beans, tomato puree- so I can jazz up what I buy and make something tasty and nutritious. A great tip for buying herbs and spices (and some pulses) affordably is to look in the 'international foods' section of supermarkets, where you can find larger packs of common items much cheaper than brand-name jars. Aldi and Lidl also sell jars of basics more cheaply.

Beans and pulses are your friends for increasing protein content; a little planning and cooking your dried beans/ lentils yourself is cheaper and adds bulk. You can make gorgeous soups and casseroles very cheaply this way, using whatever you happen to find at a good price that day. Bulk up with cheaper veggies like onions and potatoes. Lentils as a base work really well to thicken sauces.

There are often offers on meat, e.g. 3 for £10, that would reduce the overall bill that you can use/ freeze. We have a local waste reduction initiative that collects supermarkets' 'leftovers' and re-distributes them, you may have something like that local to you? Veg boxes in warmer months?

If you are recipe-followers, perhaps looking on Pinterest for recipes using what you have found 'cheap' would be more affordable than buying to fit recipes. That's where ingredient substitution can be helpful too. Flexibility is king when eating fresh but affordably. It's also more sustainable.

Hope some of this helps 😃

Hmm, I didn’t have a problem with it, it’s not as good as the dearer ones, but when money’s tight and the rest of the ingredients disguise the flavour anyway, it does the job 🙂

Also, look in the yellow sticker fridge when you're in the supermarket. I buy up meat. etc. for the freezer and as soon as I get in, and freeze it in batches. Saves a lot, too.

If you buy sauces ready made such as bolognaise look on the www. You can make those sauces for pence by compare.

For example, the two main ingredients in bolognaise sauce are tinned tomatoes and tomato puree. Though the recipe will say, "Put wine in." I don't as i don't drink

£75??? Are you shopping in Harrods??

I can feed myself & two adult teens, real food, and work around food allergies, so no cheap fillers like pasta, pastry, or bread, for £40-60 a week from Aldi.

@MarvellousMonsters is that 3 meals a day including cleaning stuff, loo rolls, bin bags etc? Because I'm spending that for one person...

Find out what times your local shops put out their reduced items and download togoodtogo and olio apps. I find these both help massively!

Where the hell are you shopping?

It costs me £148 to do a 2 week shop at ALDI and I’m feeding 4 adults (2 adult kids).

I never know what people mean by

“cooking from scratch.” Why don’t people just call it cooking? Unless
you are making a pre-packed microwave meal which I’m not sure you’d feed a family on as they are really expensive.

I make tuna, pasta broccoli bake, hunters chicken with rice & peas, spag Bol, lasagne, sometimes jacket pots for me and DH, meatballs with veg and pasta, various chicken dishes. A 10 pack of large chicken breasts is less than £12. That’s 1 large breast each (they are large) every other day (if I’m making chicken every other day), also do chicken, sweetcorn & beetroot in pita bread. Loads of stuff to make out of a 2 week shop

Please do share a typical weekly menu as we spent £100+ a week with just two adults and one baby! It does include stuff like toilet roll too though.

I think£75 for meals for a week for 3 sounds pretty normal. I’m not good at substations with lentils and chickpeas either. I shop in Lidl and Sainsbury’s usually. 3 meals a day for 3 people (daughter takes packed lunches).
Add in other household stuff like cleaners and the odd bottle of wine, £75 easily.

So you wouldn’t do a chicken breast per person? I always do 1 large (and I mean the biggest ones) chicken breast per person. If they’re the smaller ones, I’ll do two pp if it’s a meal that relies a lot on the meat. Not too bothered if it’s, say, chicken and prawn stir fry as there’s the second protein source to pad it out.

"Please do share a typical weekly menu as we spent £100+ a week with just two adults and one baby! It does include stuff like toilet roll too though."

@Willa8

I buy a small (free range) chicken or a chunk of pork which we have as a roast dinner on Sunday, (the pork joint I always cut in half and freeze one bit, so it feeds us for more than one week) and then use the rest for a meal like curry or stirfry, in the week. My generic food shop is lots of veg; broccoli, cauli, green beans, baby corn, mixed peppers, sometimes a pack of ready prepped stirfry veg, a couple of baking potatoes, a block of cheese, an iceberg lettuce & a cucumber, a pot of coleslaw. We will also often have fish (not the 'posh' ones, the wonky shaped salmon or white fish) or sausages. All our meals are at least half a plate of veg, with only a quarter of the plate as protein. We try to menu plan, and use leftovers as lunches, to avoid waste and reduce the 'what shall we have for tea?' stress each day.
SUN roast pork, roast spuds, lots of veg
MON veg curry (using some of the left over roast dinner veg)
TUES Crispy Chicken, chips & salad
WED chorizo stew ((tinned tomatoes, peppers, chorizo ring sliced)
THUR 'ramen' (stirfry veg, rice noodles, boiled egg, crispy fried shredded pork, broth)
FRI pulled pork burrito bowl

And so on.

Sounds lovely. Thank you for taking the time to share.

So £40-60 but doesn't include breakfast, lunches except leftovers, any snacks, tea, coffee, loo roll, washing up liquid, bin bags, condiments, jam/peanut butter, milk, butter, cordial/soft drinks.....

Absolutely no need for two per person.

@pinkstripeycat I call cooking from scratch as meaning I dont use jars and packets - obviously I use tommy K and the such like, but Id make a curry from scratch, make a pizza base, white sauces etc

I also limit the amount of ultra processed foods we eat ( always have done, its nothing new and trendy here)

So yep I peel spuds, chop onions, grate cheese, fillet fish etc . other people have differing ideas of what it is

Yes, I buy loo roll, cleaning stuff, we don't eat big breakfasts, sometimes fruit, yoghurt, stuff like that, at the weekend we might make waffles (I buy ground coffee from a local indi roasters)

We eat well, but we don't buy ready made foods, and don't eat huge portions of meat. Lunches tend to be leftovers or something quick like scrambled eggs.

That’s not the value sainsburys ones. Or even their normal ones. That’s the fancy ones.

Surely despite the cost it works out cheaper than HelloFresh? I recently got it on offer and it still worked out about £35-40 PER WEEK for just 3 meals to serve 4 people, and they didn't include enough veggies within the meal (eg one meal was basically pork mince in passage to served with rice and 1 avocado for 4 of us). I cancelled the trial period pretty quick as it was a rip off

The spices will last for multiple meals.

It should be bigger portions so you should hopefully have some leftover for the next days lunch for one or 1 of you.

I'll assume you'll have side dish served with the main such as salad or corn on the con etc, so you'll eat less of the main.

Well, maybe no need for you of course.

The small ones would be fine if just serving one to a 12 year old or something - I personally think anyway. I’m thinking of a meal of a chicken breast, some new potatoes and veg - so not loads of calories from the potatoes and veg, meaning a substantial chicken breast would be better. Like I said, if it’s a stir fry with lots of other stuff like prawns and a lot of veg, one small chicken breast is fine per person.

We both exercise a lot so have huge appetites, despite both being slim. My husband is over 6ft4 and despite eating seemingly all day long he never gains weight. I really don’t think one small chicken breast would be enough for him if cooking the meal I gave as an example above.

Maybe the small chicken breasts in our local shops really are quite small or maybe we’re too greedy…