Eat Well For Less? BBC1

[LovelyFriend]

They are looking at a family food spend.

Family of 5 is spending well over national average - about £220pw.

THey are being slated for buying "expensive" sliced cheese. I'm a pretty savy shopper and I will buy sliced cheese and grated cheese after working out that they usually DON'T cost more per kilo to buy than a block.

Also apparently Greg Wallace is going to argue that margarine is not an unhealthy choice compared to butter! WTF? Apparently as it has less sat fat it is "healthier".

Watching with interest.

I think they should do more recipes and less cheaper brands - that pizza looked horrible, they could've made one much nicer

Next weeks looks interesting...

Agree sooper, more recipes and instruction how to cook them and shopping smarter would be better instead of an insistence on non brands.

Yea I was really surprised they didn't show her how to make homemade pizza or get the kids to help .

I guess the pizza was supposed to be a quick after swimming meal but there are loads of things that don't take very long to sort out.

I'm surprised at the lack of recipes too. Especially given that batch cooking and freezing can save loads (we definitely cut out food bill by a lot when we started defrosting curry we'd made earlier rather than getting take away).

I actually thought they were a nice family and kids

Tho amazed they spend £700 on pizza

And saving over £3.5k a year is wow

Part of me would like to do this Taste test - I like Pepsi max - Heinz ketchup - tho drink tap water (but one of my families I work for (nanny) will only drink bottled water and has to be a names brand - not sains own etc) I keep telling them that water is water - just as the little boy said

Not knowing his muesli was funny

they could just add extra toppings to the pizza,still quick but with more flavour and easy to change

All shopbought pizza tastes grim anyway.
I'd much rather have a take away / restaurant pizza once every 2 months or so than buy that shite

I thought they seemed lovely, but rather not interested in food or cookery.

I agree that rather on focus on the one thing mum didn't like, fish, they could have done a home made tomato sauce or a chicken/beef meal from scratch.

Those 2 little children were absolutely adorable.
I felt the Mum didn't want to cook as she didn't want to mess up her pristine kitchen (I've no evidence for that, just a feeling).
The house was immaculate.
And, children need to try new foods as often as possible - though, I had a young nephew who lived on just garden peas and bread and butter for several years, so, not always easy to get them to try different things.
My nephew suffered no harm from his garden pea sandwich addiction and is now a strapping 6 foot handsome hunk!

Winged I was on the phone to my mum earlier who said the same thing about her not wanting to mess up her kitchen!

The house seemed devoid of any personality. Nothing but a table and chairs. Nothing on the counter tops. I did notice this and wondered if Mum had problems with mess of cooking etc.

Agree that the kids were adorable. The people featured last week who spent around £230 PW on food. I couldn't help wondering what kind of money did the H earn to be able to spend that!!

They've sold the house and are looking for a new one so I figured that they had probably packed a lot of stuff already. That said I have friends with a house like that. They do cook though, they are just OCD.

Just watching the latest episode. Crikey, I thought we were stuck in a rut with our meals!

Mind you, I actually went to the supermarket today (usually do it all online) and I could really see how easy it would be to spend a huge amount more than what you expect. I was unprepared, tired and stressed, and ended up with goodness knows what in my trolley.

I've just watched that 'same meals every week' episode.

I have to confess we share some of their flaws.

We are both good cooks actually but have got into the habit of having easy meals and not looking at the prices on the shelves!

We all have different likes and dislikes so usually all eat seperate meals which is more expensive.

We also won't buy anything with artificial sweeteners which rules out lots of value branded foods.

This programme is pretty patronising though.

Similarly, Lightbulbon I got into the habit of buying Birds Eye fish fingers because cheaper ones had food colouring in the breadcrumbs which made DS1 hyper. I don't know if that's still the case - he's 23 now & buys his own.

I guess it's easy to fall into a rut with meals if you've had problems finding meals that all the family are happy to eat, especially if you've got picky eaters.

DS1 will only eat the fish fingers that are shaped like fish. I can't imagine they actually taste all that different, and while I've not checked prices, I bet they're not the cheapest fish finger option.

Just watching this on catch up. Completely emphasise with the 7 cheese family's panic over cheese rationing.

One pack of cheese . Just counted 9 different types in our fridge and that's below average. We don't waste anything, don't spend a lot and aren't brand snobs. Most of our shopping comes from Aldi.

At the minute in our fridge, we have a block of extra mature cheddar, parmesan, a tub of Philadelphia cheese and a multipack of different cheddar sticks.

I'm trying to think of ways we can be more frugal and I want to include more cheap meals like jacket potatoes, beans on toast etc. But it very quickly got to thinking right, we'll have jackets on Mondays, etc. But if we have things like 'pasta night' I guess at least there's plenty of variety within that, as I do a lot of different sauces/bakes etc... I don't know, I need to find a balance between predictable enough to make for easy planning/shopping, and varied enough to stop us getting bored. ATM we are totally chaotic!

I think if you could come up with a 3 week cycle with a maximum of 2 repeats it would be fine - especially if you could alter some of the standards slightly so they seemed a bit different - it's easy to get stuck in a rut. My main problem is fussy eaters especially DS1 who doesn't really eat potatoes so we tend to have a lot of pasta/rice/noodles or he has them and we have potatoes

Some standards for us:

Mince in gravy - sometimes as Cottage Pie, Sometimes with savoury scones on the top, sometimes with yorkshire puddings, sometimes just with Mash or boiled potatoes on the side.

Mince as Bolognaise or chilli or pasta bake

Burgers

Meatballs, either done with pasta or served with Ikea gravy etc

Lamb steaks - sometimes done spicy or sliced in wraps or just grilled with veg/mushrooms etc

A roast of some description with the left overs used as a stir fry or a stew

Gammon steaks - with fresh pineapple or egg

Pork Chops again either with spices or plain grilled

Rice dishes such as Chicken Jambalaya or special fried rice type with leftover bits or risotto.

Pasta with tomato type sauce, sometimes with sausage or chorizo or something mixed in or carbonara or as macaroni cheese

Chicken/Steak Pie, made with left overs

Fish cakes or Fish and chips or Fish fingers

Omelettes

Chicken drumsticks with spicy coating (usually with noodles)

Curry

Pizza

Toad in the hole

Fajitas

Salad with prawns and home made spicy wedges

If it's a poor week, then corned beef, beans and chips

and loads more that I am struggling to think of - obvs we have veg/side dishes/salad too:)

That's basically things that everyone will eat - sometimes DH and I will have something more unusual that the teens wont eat and they have something else.

It's not that hard to have a bit of variety and predictability at the same time. i.e. you could have Pasta every week but with different types of pasta and different sauces. Mince every week but sometimes as chili, sometimes with yorkshires etc.

fuzzpig, what I've been thinking of doing is making a list of meals, even grouping them together by type perhaps (so, for instance, you buy leeks for something, you need to also have another meal that week that involves leeks). Like a meal database even.

I think it'd be a bit of work putting it together but once it's done it'd then be easy to meal plan before you go shopping.

I also try not to assign meals to certain days - so I might make a list and say these are the meals we will have this week, but it makes you feel like you have a bit more freedom in choosing from the "menu" each day.

Thank you both, those are both great suggestions. I do actually like cooking and the DCs aren't too fussy (well, DS is a bit picky, but eats enough that it's not a massive problem) but my brain doesn't work too well when I'm ill so it turns to chaos pretty quickly and I end up spending too much on convenience food.

I did stock the freezer with lots of lovely stuff after a marathon week of batch cooking, which is great, but I need to plan for defrosting and using it too - otherwise it just stays in there!

Fish and chips in a bowl?!

Yer having a giraffe...