help me out with my food bill

I find it hard to save money on food but cheap meals I've found are:

Homemade pizza - try not to put too much cheese on it.
sausages and mash
tuna cakes and wedges and salad
chicken fajitas (make the wraps from a recipe on the recipe board)
greek lamb meatballs, hummus and salad
shephards pie
chilli beans and rice (can make it with mince also)
pasta - tomato base sauce with ham, or ham and cream base
vege curry
chicken and vege soup (can get a frozen chicken from LIDL for about £1.70), serve with bread/bagette
turkey/chicken risotto
When turkey fillets are cheap I make turkey schnitzel and salad.
Shop at LIDL, ALDI or Netto as much as possible.

Mince is cheap at Netto at £1 a bag.
Try to use potatos, rice and pasta where possible in dishes.

For cleaning I only use value washing powder, bicarb, vinegar and thick bleach (sparingly). Wash the dishcloths to reuse and a metal scourer.

I shop at both Tesco and Asdas. To be brutally honest I only shop at tesco for the clubcard vouchers and points otherwise I'd shop at Asdas. From what I see they have good quality products and the prices are cheaper than Tescos too. I can't think of one product at Asda's that I'd label as more 'rubbish' than Tescos. Tesco have done a great job of marketing themselves as good quality and good prices...but their prices aren't so great and the quality is the same as elsewhere.

However, it does depend on what you shop for. We walk by all the pre-made meals and stick to the fresh meat, fish and fruit & veg. Anything we want we make ourselves from scratch. Quite often these meals will be pre-made at the weekend and then frozen to save time later.

As far as short-date items...you'll find many people on these boards will go to the supermarket and will look for these items because they are often reduced in price. They will then stick them in the freezer and will eat as and when needed. Have done this myself and haven't had a problem. My sister use to work at a supermarket and quickly found out that 'best before dates' are mostly rubbish. You have to use your own common sense, eg, beef mince that looks ok, but has 1 day left will be fine for example.

From the look of your meals above it looks as if you should start by taking a quick look through the recipe index to get some ideas of things you can make yourself that don't involve chips or take aways.

Eg, when you have spag bol do you use a pre-made sauce....or do you make the sauce yourself? We have spag bol regularly and make the sauce ourselves. Simple really.....just a base of value chopped tomatoes, onion if we have any, a bit of stock and anything else that we fancy at the time. Generally for the 2 of us the meal costs around £1.25 per person. But the quantity we make is huge and OH eats loads....so could feed 3 people easily.

What do you think of the value and own brand products? Out of curiosity....are they cheap rubbish to you, or something decent that you can make something with?

Recent meals include spag bol, pie & mash, rice / pasta with various cuts of meat, jacket potatoes, casserole.

A price book is quite a good idea.
List all the food you buy regularly and then list the price for each at Tesco, Asda, Lidl etc. You'll soon spot the bargains. You can use the online service to get the prices or use old receipts.

We eat a lot of pasta - with or without meat which is usually quite cheap - for example 1/2 lb good sausages skinned and crumbled and fried - then add tomatoes onions garlic etc. This amount of sausages done this way will feed 4 comfortably whereas if they were just grilled ds1 and dh would riot at the small amount.

Things like Spanish omelette are good for using leftovers - we had a particularly fine one for lunch today that cleared out loads of stuff from the fridge.

You could have a look at my new meal planner which costs me £43 per month for a family of 3

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?p=2340412&posted=1#post2340412