£50 weekly food bill??? not in my house.

[6inchnipples]

Having read a few threads on the 'how much do you spend on food per week' topic and having read the 'i spend 40' 'i spend 50' chat i thought i'd really make an effort to try and get mine down a bit (currently spend about 80-90 average per week, 3 kids under 5 plus me and dp)

Just nipped to local co op whose prices are reasonable, do lots of good fruit offers.

I bought 2 packs of chicken breasts 2 for 7 quid offer, two 2l milks, a dozen yogs on special, clementines, strawbs,necterines, blueberries, melon, baked pots reduced to 48p and a loaf

Total 23 quid.

Pots , 1 pack chicken, blueberries, half the strawbs and half the melon gone already, eaten for dinner and pudding.... No way i could do it for 50 quid, not with freash fruit veg etc

HOw do you do it????

Where am i going wrong???

Saltire , i wonder if size relevant.

DP is 6 ft 8 and he can fair put it away. Its more what he snacks on than portion size tho.

dh face looked like this for about 5 mins yesterday, the couple in front of us spent £194 in tesco!!

1 item was a t-shirt though.

i think dh now appreciates, why i am strict with the shopping list! we spend that in a month including fish, washing powder, toilet roll, cleaning prducts, a few treats, but we get meat from the butchers.

I've got my food bill down quite a bit recently by eating a lot less meat and buying value stuff where it makes literally no difference. I have also been really restricting the amount of expensive fruit we buy and eating a lot more oranges, apples and whatever happens to be in the Sainsburys Basics range (currently strawberries at a pound a punnet). And I've been planning what we will eat.

We did a shop for £70ish this week and it's often been over £100 and sometimes as much as £140 in the past.

We will be eating:

Yesterday:

Lunch was pitta bread with raw celery, carrot, cucumber, houmous (Basics range, excellent value) and avocado (Basics range, perfectly nice just a bit small). Dinner was roast chicken with gravy, yorkshire puds, roast potatoes, broccoli

Today:

Made soup from the chicken carcass and a lot of veg and pearl barley/lentils, served with buttered toast and a dollop of cream swirled in.
Dinner will be pasta and sauce made with the meat from the chicken carcass, a couple of slices of leftover bacon, green lentils and lots of veg.

Monday:

Lunch will be leftover pasta and sauce.
Dinner will be toad in the hole and onion gravy plus veg.

Tuesday:

Lunch will be sandwiches with paté, marmite or egg mayo plus salad.
Dinner will be noodles with lots of veg and tofu plus some fish balls that came from the Chinese supermarket (so another £2 on top of the £70. Could use ham or any cold meat instead)

Wednesday:

Omelettes for lunch with a little ham or cheese inside plus salad (Sainsburys are currently doing a huge box of 18 free range eggs for £2.50).
Dinner will be some kind of risotto plus veg on the side.

Thursday:

Lunch will be sandwiches with marmite, ham or egg mayo plus salad. Or noodles if there are any left.
Dinner will be pasta with cream, cheese, bacon and broccoli. Also salad if there's any left.

Friday:

Lunch: either omelettes or sandwiches
Dinner will be chicken curry made with drumsticks and plenty of potatoes plus dal (costs pennies), salad, veg and rice.

On Saturday we will go shopping again.

Breakfasts are cereal, yoghurt, toast, fruit, porridge according to what we fancy. Sometimes beans on toast. Snacks are fruit, dried fruit, toast, breadsticks etc.

I'm not an expert at saving money by any means and these meals are obviously only what we happen to like eating but it's been a revelation to me how little meat I really need to buy in order to still have tasty meals (I really like meat). I expect if you were happy to eat vegetarian a lot of the time you could make enormous savings. It's not the most luxurious menu in the world but it will do us just fine.

And I bought nice ham, nice cheese and nice meat not really really cheap stuff.

@ Sunburntats - Thank you!

I'm only on page 1 of this thread, I will continue, but wanted to say: GENIUS!

I have never thought of cooking the thighs/drumsticks and then using them! I always sighed at how cheap they were, but DD and I can't be doing with bones or fat, so the thoughts of trying to get the meat off always put me off, so many thanks for your tip!

Oh, I meant to say that the £70 includes a £12 delivery from Abel and Cole so it could definitely be done more cheaply.

i have just taken a large box of chicken thighs out of the freezer (on offer for £2) i intend on putting the cooked chicken tomorow night on top of a plain cheese and tomato pizza that i bought (2 for £1) about a month ago, with a load of chopped peppers, red onions and a bit more grated cheese. Thats tea sorted for the 3 of us for less than £4!
Got some frozen fruit and actually i bought a large tub of devon custard about a month ago and didnt use it all up so i froze half of it in one of my plastic containers, i will defrost that and have it poured over the half defrosted fruit for pudding tomorow night.

Going shopping tomorow night, so i am off to formulate my list now....DO NOT intend on spending any more than £20.
We are trying to empty the freezer to defrost it, so i am using up everything in it so hardly need any shopping at the mo.

Have to say that it is a faff with the drummers and thighs stripping the meat off, but its something you have to do if you want to save cash by not shelling out 5-6 quid on chicken for the week, and you get wuite allot too.

I have the BBQ stuff which is delish on pizza.

I buy the drumstick and thighs and make a casserole - cook slowly or in the slow cooker and the meat litterally falls of the bone - you dont need to do anything with them

A tin of tomatoes and some curry paste - near the end drop a little plain yogurt in adn you have a curry of sorts.

Ivykate i have litterally JUST got my slow cooker out, am going to slow cook my thighs tomorrow ready for tea time and pizza!
Just sling them in then go to work...fab fab fab!

@IVykaty - But what about the skin?

Excellent thread! Love it! Gives me ideas and makes me feel normal (ish). We currently spend £60-70 a week all inclusive. So beer/wine, nappies (DS only uses at night though), laundry products etc. If I have a cheap shopping week I tend to top up on stuff we use all the time (washing powder toiletries, loo roll, etc). This is for me DH and DS who is just turned 3 (and has the appetite of a 17yr old). This amount is just about affordable for us and includes treats.
FAQinglovely your DSs sound like my brother and I when we were younger. We had huge appetites and were frequently 'grazing' as my Mum puts it, topping up our meals.

i marinade the drumsticks and thighs and serve them with spicey wedges and corn on the cob. kids love it.

That sounds yummy misdee. I reckon my DS would be a fan.

I recently decided to see actually how much we spent on everything eaten or drunk by me, dp and 2 pre schoolers.
Over 10 weeks it averaged £37 a week. I included all shopping, regardless of where it was from.
We eat well, plenty fruit and veg, but only what is seasonal and certainly not melons or blueberry type things any more.
We live in a small town with local market and 'discount' shops, so I suppose its easier for me to shop cheaply than those who don't have netto lidl aldi quality save etc all within 3 miles or a good market.
I use a breadmaker everyday, don't buy any 'branded' products. I menu plan plain interesting food and I stock up when I see proper bargains, not bogofs of expensive things. For example our discount shop currently has Rachels Organic butter with an end of June sell by date for £1..
The butcher grows his own beef and lambs 5 miles away, its all delicious top quality. Sat I spent £4 and got 1lb mince and a huge cumberland sausage. That will do us 3 meals as meatballs and cheap-but-filling toad in the hole.
My main tip to anyone wanting to cut down expenditure is not to go use Sainsbury Tesco etc but shop around and get to know which products are cheapest where.

Yes I know it means we visit different shops and takes an hour or so a week extra, but its well worth it when you think I save £5k per year compared to what my friend spends in Sainsbury's each week. I am self employed and would rather spend an extra hour or two a week shopping around than work an extra umpteen hours a week only to give all the £££ straight to mr sainsbury.
Oh and we don't drink so I suppose that could help our cheap shopping budget

Oh and always home baking. a couple of quid a week and we have a supply of rock buns or cakes for anyone fancying a sweet snack.

just made microwave golden syrup sponge pudding LOVELY, DELICIOUS ,YUMMY!!

Will make it again defo!!

WOW. Some fab threads here but I have to go back to one at the beginning:

8 meals out of 2 chicken breasts? How the hell do you manage that. My 1 year old eats just about a breast himself.

I have to say I think it is unacceptable in this day and age not to buy fresh fruit and veg, you just need to know where to look.

Aldi have plums, melons, cherrys, peaches and 7 kiwis for 49p.

Use your local market, the stall holder will get to know you and ask for the bruised stuff.

Grow your own in pots.

New potatoes are only 99p in most supermarkets at the moment.

You need to plan, keep a look out in neto, aldi and lidl.

My two boys complain if they dont get carrots etc, but it is cheeper to make from scratch and not buy conveinace stuff.

Also use your local butcher too, I buy hardly any meat, I bulk mince out with peppers, courgets, onions or any other veg we have avalable.

Also we dont have canned drinks of pop, we have council pop!!!

what bruised stuff that goes off quicker - and I've found in general market stuff goes off quicker anyhow?

We are "lucky" enough to have an Aldi in town - but I've never seen any of these fabulous deals on fruit and veg in there.

99p worth of new potatoes will last my family precisely 1 meal. I'd rather spend more on a bigger bag of standard potatoes.

No neto, no lidl.

My choices of local butcher are

1st - (closest) hideously expensive.

2nd - very cheap, but it's cheap meat as well - it takes no better than cheap supermarket meat, and in some cases worse than the "standard" supermarket meat!.

I can kill cacti (no seriously I can!) I even managed to kill DS1's sunflower last year .

FJ - shopping around is fab - and I do try when I can - but with no car it's not easy

We have an aldi nearby and I have looked at their fruit and throught.....rank. It just looks as if it is about to go off.

inscotland, i htink it was my post you are tlaking about.

my dds could easily eat a chicken breast each (they are 4 and 2), but the fact is, they don't need to. The dds meals make up 4 of the 8 meals I was talking about, but since they eat as much as me (although god knows where dd2 puts it all, as she is tiny )

If I am trying to stretch stuff out, then I would make a curry, or chicken ina tomato sauce, etc.
for a curry, i'd add in a couple of courgettes, a pepper, a couple of sweet potatoes and a tin of lentils, just as a start - and then it is easy to stretch the meat out.

I buy almost exclusively organic food, and have food intolerances to cater for (dairy and gluten) so have to buy substitutes that don't come cheap (goat's milk, rice milk, gf bread/pasta) and at the moment I am spending about £350/month on food, so about £90/week. Of that, at least £20 is the price difference between gf/df products and "normal" ones (eg, the dds get through a litre of rice milk a day - that costs £2.50 ish)

I also have to buy stupidly expensive toiletries as dd1 reacts to so many chemicals, so wihtout the food/chemical issue, our spend would be down around the £60/week

I have to say that Aldi fruit is very "hit and miss" - it doesn't seem to have any dates on it. Now I understand that dates aren't always a "good" thing; but surely it is harder for the staff to rotate the stock properly unless they know which box of cherry tomatoes/kiwis are about to go off.

On occasion we do really well, e.g. as others have said 7 kiwis for 49p. That's fab if all of them (or even 6) are edible, but on occasion several will have gone off. Cherry tomatoes are also rather unreliable from there.

Thankfully we aren't currently on such a tight budget for food, but even so I class raspberries etc as a real luxury. Also faq makes a good point in that some smaller/snacky meals aren't necessarily a bargain. In our house we then end up raiding the chocolate tin etc.

so I am unnaceptable to not have fruit and veg each day
thanks for that

Thanks Silverfrog. Good tips!