What is going on with food prices??

[londongirl12]

A 500g packet of mince in Aldi is now over £5!! What on earth is going on???

It's between £31-41.50 in Sainsbury's per kg. How much was fillet steak?

Yes Yorkshires were always served on their own with beautiful onion gravy then we had our sunday roast meal with meat from a roast which would be cold on Monday and made into Hash on Tuesday.
Our son would never bother with the roast when he went to his Grans, all he wanted was YPud and mash which made for a cheap lunch.

I rarely buy cereal but I definitely wouldn't pay my local Co-op prices. Between £4.15 and £4.30 for say Cocoa Pops, Crunchy nut cornflakes etc. There was one type on offer £3.00. I thought even that was expensive. It's crazy!; 😲

The trouble with “fill up on bread” in our house is that I’m gluten free, and GF bread is crazy money. You’re talking at best 20p a slice, and at worst more than twice that (worth it though for the naice stuff). A GF pitta is about 75p.

I have started adding more veg to plates, and also trying to find ways to stretch meat- so putting chickpeas in chicken curries for example. DS gets most of the meat, and I’ll eat more of the chickpeas.

Whats truly crazy is that I’m on a good salary, and some of weeks fucking GF bread feels like a luxury.

Don’t get me started on cereal! Luckily DS likes porridge oats and will accept nuts and squish of syrup as a topping….

Yeah but those are the sugary brand cereals. Tesco own brand malties, which are effectively shreddies, cst £1.14 for a big box. They also do multi grain hoops, rice crispies etc for 79p a box

https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/250181131?srsltid=AfmBOoqgYRztj6Oa_dLh9vx25uZSwkzwAVsodEzWMdwGdt629l-8Wiy3

It's the end of the month and honestly it's lucky I'm fat. It's been a really really tough month with vet visits and car repairs.

I've only just squeaked it without borrowing and so glad I froze a loaf earlier in the month. DS is on normal meals and I'm eating tinned shit from the back of the cupboard 🤣

Today I've had an egg sandwich, peanut butter on two slices toast and a tin of rice pudding with jam. I'm not hungry but I'm very happy September is finished.

We've gone down from beef meatballs to pork (I don't want either, it's just for ds) so he's getting much cheaper meat. He commented how much nicer the meatballs were 🤷🏼‍♂️😅

Next week I'm going to make myself a vat of lentil, vegetable, snippets of bacon casserole and freeze portions for me for the end of the month.

@Dogaredabomb

I am sure that this isn't authentic but "war food" in our family anyway is things like, corned beef hash, homity pie, farmhouse hash, mince/toad in the hole, stew and dumplings, kidney pudding, tinned fish on toast, bubble and squeak, cowboy pie etc.

They usually have dessert most days as well, crumble, cobbler, charlottes etc

Interestingly looking at the "war food" rationing cook books they all focus on similar things, lots of in season veg, decent amount of carbs and stretching the meat/.eggs/dairy as far as possible - reducing sugar and fat in baking too. I think going back to this would really help our purses and our waistlines, probably the planet too.

My frozen raspberries jumped up by 75p this week (Morrisons). I get that it's because they're not seasonal but it's still depressing 😭.

Bought 800g of mince at Waitrose on offer. It was 15% fat but I tipped it off. Seemed a bit of a bargain in the current climate.

Isn’t gluten free bread free on prescription if you have a gluten sensitive condition- might be worth looking into

No it's not free. If it was, it's only available for people with clinically diagnosed coeliac disease and I think there are even new restrictions around what they can get on a prescription. (and the price of the prescription may be more than the food in a supermarket.)

Yeah I have non coeliac gluten intolerance. The positive of this is that I’m not (or at least science doesn’t yet think) that I’m increasing cancer risk if I consume gluten, and I can cope with trace cross contamination. On the other hand, if I eat gluten - say if I ate half a slice of non GF bread- I would feel / be really q poorly. If I eat gluten over a period of time - as I did for my last tests- I look and feel like I am dying.

So whether or not it should be available on prescription for me - in an ideal world probably? But actual coeliacs sadly have huge problems getting access to the products they need, so I’m not going to whinge on my own account on that score! Just wish stuff was a bit cheaper!

GF prescriptions depend on area, I am diagnosed with Coeliac, can't get them in London.

I keep getting a topic on Reddit suggested which is a rate my weekly shop thing. People post their shop and the price. Good god our food is cheap in relation to a lot of posts . The other countries cannot believe it.

I have really been paying attention to leftovers the last week - everything is either getting chopped up and put into something else or frozen for another meal, where as I previously would have scraped the last bit of pasta and sauce into the bin this week its been blended into soup.

Some people may think this is gross:
DD3 is a picky eater and can often leave a plate barely touched - I used to throw this right into the bin but it is so wasteful especially if it has hardly been touched - so I keep it, separate out parts generally into meat/protein, veggies and carby bits freeze it and then just chuck it into whatever else we are making in the week (unless it can be kept as its entirety for another lunch) I am sick of the waste and surely chucking away nearly a full plate - even a child's portion - of dinner 3+ a week is going to add up!

My aunt just gave me an enormous bag of apples, mixed cookers and eaters from her garden - so I have those to use up for snacks and desserts if people (ds ususally) are feeling snacky

I'm another one who thinks war food will see a revival

If you have sausage, mash, carrots and gravy, then jam sponge pud and custard for dessert, you're not hungry for a while!

We have started doing “war food” a bag of sours, dome carrots, some broccoli. Then some protein/rice and pasta will last you a good while. The food bill on our house has gone right down because we are more conscious about food. It’s the protein that costs - I’m vegan and a block of tofu and a pack off vegan sausages wit some beans and lentils will last all week

Yes I'm doing war food too 🤣

I'm digging in the back of the cupboard to avoid going to the shop for another day.

Yeah, it’s getting ridiculous lately. I noticed the same thing, prices keep going up almost every week. I checked United Kingdom and Poland: Price Comparison of Products and Goods the other day out of curiosity, and the difference was shocking.

Also a child of the 70s. I was a rake as were my siblings. There were no snacks. Three meals a day and a pudding. Everything cooked from scatch. Breakfast was toast, Weetabix or porridge. Lunch a snadwich with potted crab spread, jam, cheese and onion or beans on toast - Saturday bacon or sausage sandwiches.

We ate well homemade pies, casseroles, crumbles stewed apples and custard etc. A roast on a Sunday. No takeaways. We had bottles of squash, water or milk to drink and no takeaway coffees etc EVER!

The most useful way to eek out mince in my experience is grated carrot, and red lentils. Both add nutrients (and a substantial amount of fibre, which helps us feel fuller and for longer) and disappear into the mince. Obviously adding any and all veg can help stretch mince - onions and celery are two other veg that go well and you can just add more of them to make the mince go further.

I remember a thread on money saving expert years ago where the poster was living on 50p a day. One day she totally forgot to add the mince to the shepherds pie dish, and realised before serving. Curious if her family of 4 would notice, it was only her daughter who commented "There's not much meat in here mummy" but all cleared their plates. She decided "not much" meant she got away with it😆

I cooked mince with gravy granules, carrots, red lentils, onions and swede in it a few months ago, Froze leftovers in portions, and I've recently had the last one on a jacket potato - I've been rationing them because it was surprisingly delicious!

I would like some suggestions for a glut of apples please! They are currently keeping quite well in the cold garage, but it's not immune to mice in there and I'd quite like to not risk the whole lot. Obviously apple pie and crumble, and I daresay I'll probably make apple scrap vinegar again with any peelings. What else could I do with them?

I've taken to having a (whole) tin of red kidney beans, chickpeas or any other bean or lentils as my protein source for a few meals a week. I have a big appetite! At around 50p a meal it's the cheapest source of protein by far.

Not a vegan, but even just downswitching from tofu (i bloody love tofu) one or two meals means I can afford a more expensive meat occasionally. Or my absolute weakness, smoked taifun tofu, but jeez is that expensive these days!!

Stewed apples (you can freeze them) to use as a topping on cereal?

Baked apples in the slow cooker are nice too and if you don’t have a slow cooker, you can do them in the oven while doing a stew.

There are various recipes online for both.