"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.

My weekly meal plan goes something like:

Meat dish such as a roast

Leftovers dish - even better if something like shepherds pie which can be bulked out with veg/lentils. Or risotto from chicken carcass and remaining scraps.

Egg/cheese based dish

Veggie dish based on beans/lentils X2

Lazy day - oven pizza

One day of inventing stuff out of remaining contents of fridge + pasta/rice

Growing herbs saves money and doesn't take a lot of time. Growing veg is a pain in the arse and rarely saves money (unless it takes over your life like my parents who ran 3 allotments and it was their sole hobby)

Before you posted your Asda list, I added what I would spend on those meals into the tesco app and the total came to £45.

But I didn’t put garlic bread, pizza, gougons, wedges, yogurts, cleaning supplies etc. And only included cumin and turmeric as basic curry spices, so it is not a completely fair comparison.

broccoli and cheese pasta bake: £7.71 (cheddar cheese being £4.00 but will have left overs)

Peri-peri chicken wraps: £6.93

Chicken curry x2: £14.70

Tomato, pepper and lardon pasta: £14.44
(because of 5.75 on olive oil and 2.10 on Parmesan)

Which shows the tomato pasta meal (which is possible to do much cheaper!!!) was the kicker and having oil and cheese on hand would make the biggest difference.

We have a chest freezer aka the dog's freezer which has now been confiscated from him as he's been demoted to dry food instead of raw.

I could grow some tomatoes. I could fit a largish pot on the kitchen windowsill or put them out the front and make up some batches of passata to freeze.

Which shows the tomato pasta meal (which is possible to do much cheaper!!!) was the kicker and having oil and cheese on hand would make the biggest difference.

We usually do have cheese but the fridge freezer broke. We did eat what we had (which was mostly fridge pasta with leftover veg and cheese and passata) so that could be adding to the cost as well.

Everything we'd usually have in the fridge has either been eaten or given to the dog except the garlic which DD planted in a pot on the windowsill.

Agree about bagged spices, they are very cheap. I buy madras curry powder, garam masala, turmeric, cumin, chilli flakes, paprika. I don't buy jars of paste or sauce.

Instead of a tiny pack of chicken strips you can buy a kilo of thigh fillets and just cut some up. Freeze the rest.

I have a huge chest freezer and buy all my meat etc from Aldi - Tesco is vastly overpriced now.
I bag chicken breasts etc into packs of two. I buy veg when discounted and freeze. So onions - I buy a huge bag and dry them out cut and dice and freeze.

I also look for veg when it is cheap - huge bag of carrots at 19 p blanch and freeze

at least two meals each week at hearty home cooked soup soup with home made bread and huge omelette with veg.

The chest freezer has changed my life. Everything is home cooked and a can of tomatoes goes in everything - I bulk buy herbs or grow them fresh in the summer. Everything gets used. So masses of cooking apples on my tree in the summer / I make 20-30 apple crumbles - and we do them rest of the year. Often food is given away on our local community larder place eg glut of bananas - I freeze time and then we use in smoothies.
we even freeze eggs!!

Ps everyone says amazing home soup can I have a recipe - there is none. It is whatever we have in the fridge or left over.

We make our own smoothies too in the morning with our own yogurt. blueberries, strawberries, apples, homemade Greek yogurt, chia seeds, flaxseed powder and green matcha powder and blizzard and go - the children gulp it down!!

It’s not cheap. I cheat and get hello fresh though!

Yes don't over water, but don't dry out, (a good trick is to put a good layer of straw down in the pot before adding soil and compost...this keeps moister in without the roots getting water logged) give plenty of space, don't use soil that's previously had blighted tomatoes or grown potatoes, ensure good ventilation around the plant, so don't be tempted to over plant and if you use a grow back keep the plants tall and thin, don't let them bush out.
Although home grown tastes much nicer I'm never convinced it's cheaper, and it's defo not cheaper if you were to include your labour costs! This year has been so wet, cold and grey, that I haven't planted anything yet, so if I want to grow my own, I might have to invest in some plug plants, but that definitely costs more than buying punnets at the shop!

I tend only to buy one, max two meats in any given weekly shop - if your DD likes Indian food can she perhaps lean into that and explore some veggie recipes (Meera Sodha does a brilliant dal)? A little bacon chopped up goes a long way, too, as does some yoghurt stirred into a sauce at the end (full fat so it doesn't curdle). I use yoghurt rather than cream in curries as I wouldn't use the other half of a pot of cream. Agree with others that this does get easier once you build up a store of stuff. Definitely put in a box of eggs and have an egg on toast or something for lunch, even if someone has to give up their garlic mayo - that's the kind of thing you should be economising on, not your own ability to eat.

Yes please make the DC give up their garlic mayo and peri peri sauces and tiny jars of turmeric which are totally uneconomical, so you can at least have egg on toast for lunch.
Dahls are a brilliant, healthy and cheap spicy option for your spice loving DD, once you lay in the spices and if you buy from an Asian store.There are many, many varieties.

Stop eating so much chicken. Go veggie or vegan every other day. Better for you, for the planet for your wallet - and for the chickens, one of the most abused creatures on earth.

We earn ok, and we still have jacket potatoes, basic pasta dish, or a 'get whatever from freezer /cupboard' (generally the night with lots of activities on, so eggs or beans on toast, tinned soup, etc) at least twice a week.

I generally try not to mix it up - maybe teriyaki salmon which is £15-20 for 5 of us vs JP's which are £5 for 5 of us.

Variety is everything. Kids love the 'cobbled together' type 'picky' (fridge scraping) teas!

The garlic mayo was for the Nando's fakeaway I think. Tbf, we do usually make our own garlic mayo with regular mayo and roasted garlic but like I said the fridge broke so we have no mayo at all atm. It seemed easier just to buy garlic mayo since we don't need regular mayo for anything this week.

Yogurt in curries is a good call. I like yogurt and muesli so that could have gone towards a breakfast/lunch for me.

DD2 is doing all the cooking on her own this week as DD1 is away and I've picked up some shifts in my old job for extra money while I'm waiting to start my new job. She needs a recipe and clear instructions to follow. She doesn't usually do any cooking beyond gourmet pot noodles or the odd air-fryer meal of chicken nuggets and chips.

The extra shifts are in a shop and the owner does let me take home anything that is going off eg ham, milk, and pre-packed sarnies so I am sure I will have some form of lunch most of the days from that.

@Clutterbugsmum I'd like masterclass please 🙏🏼😉

As a basic rule, every time a staple ingredient goes through a process or a middle man or extra packaging the price increases, sometimes even doubles as VAT is added to non essentials.
So bone-in chicken thighs are cheaper than boneless (more waste obvs) and chicken nuggets are the worst value of all.
Individual servings of yoghurt? Such bad value. Buy 1kg plain Greek yoghurt and add jam if you like, plain yoghurt is a staple for flatbreads, cake and curry. You can make jam in the microwave 60/40 fruit to sugar.
Olive oil is so expensive I’ve switched to rapeseed whenever possible.
We eat bread, pulses, porridge for breakfast. Meal plan on a Monday.
Tonight it was garlic mushrooms with a little bacon and spicy fried potatoes, a carrot each, fruit and homemade apple cake.<€10? for three.

I compare my scratch cooking to restaurant prices, not TV dinner prices. Traditional Easter lunch was €30 in ingredients for 4 (plus fuel, plus my time). It would have been that per person in a restaurant.

I’ve used Hello Fresh but only when they were offering HUGE reductions. I’d reduce the amount of meat in the official recipe and use that to make something else…

We factor at least one "fridge harvest", one leftovers and one jacket potato meal a week. So only cook fresh 3 nights - and then we batch to leave something in the freezer or for leftovers..

Try some Chana dal into your meal routine 1.99 for a big bag of 500g very tasty curry also mung beans curry with rice meal for 4 under £10

I'm a carnivorous skinflint and my freezer is my friend. @Frequency, you've now got TWO freezers so you're already winning!

I buy whole chickens, not overpriced pieces. I buy family-sized joints (I live alone) of anything that's on offer, and 750g packs of mince. I also use value packs of frozen fish, and tinned fish. I never use pre-made sauces. Before I got my pension, I was too broke all the time to splash out on large food items. As soon as I could, my food shop went down by 30% and quality increased.

Your recipe app sounds brilliant! How about doing two or three of those a week, then having freezer food on the other days? Sometimes I just slice up my cooked joints and freeze them in portions, other times I tart them up with sauces and sides before freezing. It's really nice to have good, ready-cooked food on tap 🤗

Oh, and I mainly use frozen veg because it works out cheaper & easier.

All the people saying eat less meat and more legumes and pulses are definitely right.

Meat is expensive. Beans and lentils pretty cheap, especially if you have the organisational skills to buy dried beans and presoak.

But more than the cost factor, if you look at research by Dan Buettner of Bluezones fame, the populations in the world enjoying the longest lives with the least chronic disease don't eat a great deal of meat, its all supplemented with lots of veg and beans. Likewise the Mediterranean diet, which is again based on trying to emulate long living healthy populations eat very little red meat, a little white meat, some seafood and a load of veg and wholemeal grains.

We would all be a lot healthier if we didn't expect that we would be served meat every single day.

I think if you’re new to cooking then you do tend to be a bit religious about following the quantities in recipes. As you get more confident then you learn to freestyle a little bit. I have a recipe for braised pork chops and sausages in cider that has celeriac in…. It’s by Hugh Fearnly Whittingstall. I make it when chops or sausages are on offer and I sometimes switch out the celeriac with whatever root veg I can get cheaply - parsnips etc. I buy the cheapest cider but could substitute for stock with a few apple slices to add the tartness. Bulk out the veg and I usually have enough for us the next day too. If we have fajitas I bulk out the chicken thighs with peppers and courgettes ( completely untraditional) then I make a spicy black bean side dish, a sweetcorn dish and add slices of avocado…. Really so a large proportion of the meal is not meat. The leftover beans I eat in the morning with eggs. I have lots of these kinds of examples.
I think you have to shop the offers and plan your meals from them rather than the other way around. Check out butchers to see if they have deals - mine has started mixed boxes of meat with mince, chops bacon etc and they throw in half a dozen eggs ( not literally obviously). He has a WhatsApp group for his customers to let them know the offers. Our local fruit and veg market will have various offers - sometimes I’ve come back with 2 big cauliflowers for a pound or a couple of aubergines and all of a sudden you’re reassessing the weekly menu.l to use them. My DH came home with a tray of field mushrooms at the end of the day ( I think he did a mushroom stroganoff and soup). It can be a fun way to cook.

This thread is stressing me out for some reason. I think £65 for a week is OK*. I don't want to (can't!) grow my own tomatoes or eat soup everyday 😥

*Obviously not if your income is too low

I think if you’re new to cooking then you do tend to be a bit religious about following the quantities in recipes.

Having looked closer, I think this is where I went wrong. I asked DD to pick recipes she thought she could cook on her own copy of the app and send me the shopping list.

I did substitute some of the ingredients e.g. chicken thigh instead of breast, a cheaper sweet chili sauce than the one on her list, etc but having now looked at the recipes there are more things I would have either left out completely or substituted for something else.

I wouldn't have picked up on the yogurt instead of cream, however, which is daft because I do use yogurt in curries, and if I'd been making a curry and realized I had no cream but did have yogurt or creme fraiche I'd have swapped it out rather than going out to the shop, so I'll need to keep an eye on that next week.

The old fridge deciding it wanted to identify as an oven probably added a tenner or so to the cost too because we would have had onions, garlic, cheese, and butter had that not happened.

Growing herbs is definitely on my list. We have some old plant pots and compost in the shed I can dig out and I have £20 worth of Honey points I can use on an Amazon voucher for seeds/plugs.

I'll have a look at yogurt makers because the oldest loves yogurts, even natural yogurt and we get a lot of berries from the garden in summer she could add to them.

We don't eat a lot of meat, which is lucky as it's just unaffordable right now.

Daal is super cheap and quick to make. Make a double portion so you can freeze one to pull out on a busy day. Tart it up with fresh coriander, chutney, yogurt (if you have them to hand).

Use up any sad vegetables by blitzing then into a tomato sauce that you can also freeze in portions - makes a quick pasta meal or pizza topping, or ingredient in a lasagne etc.

Sad veges can also be used in a frittata, which you can bulk up with potato. Basically just mix it up and bung in the oven.

We are a family of 4 and it costs us about £130 a week to cook from scratch. We mostly buy aldi own brand and the odd branded stuff from asda. I meal plan every week, batch cook on a Sunday and all meals are planned out on rotation every few weeks. We can't get it any lower. I think you are doing pretty well budget wise! It is just what it costs now (used to be average £80-£100 at most before everything went up)

I'm not used to budgeting to this extent, so I think there are a lot of things on this thread that are obvious to me now they've been pointed out but I didn't think of them before I did the shop (like checking the actual recipes for subs and not just shopping the list).

We weren't rich on my previous wage by any stretch of the imagination but we managed most months without having to worry about buying an extra carton of cream or some fresh rosemary (or Hello Fresh).

I'll have to sneak in meals like Daal, and paneer. If I tell them what they are eating they'll automatically not like it but if I just call it curry and serve them it, they will eat it (and hopefully like it)