Great 'Best credit crunch work lunch' Hunt: What to make or buy on the cheap.

madison-nyc

What a fabulous site! great bargins on there , i'm gonna have a good mooch now and put an order in :-)

A_little_stressed!!

Porrige, it comes in sachets and keeps you warm, £1.99 for 6 days. And somewhat healthy (not checked the sugar yet!!) - MICROWAVE

hallucenogenic_midas

Use microwave at work to reheat (if you are lucky enough to have one), otherwise heat up before work and take in flask.

and if you dont have a microwave you could make Gazpacho.

kingkano

mcallister1 wrote: »

typw things for £1. Most of the food is past its use by date but has no sell by date, or is slightly mishapen ( e.g. the cakes)
The postage is £5 for up to 28kg. There's loads of great moneysaving potential there.

DO you mean no used by date and past its sell by date? I thought its illegal to sell food past its USE by date. A best before date is usually fine to ignore. (sorry to be pedantic but there is a very distinct difference. You shouldn't really use food past its use by date, esp for children or the elderly)

Looks like a good site though :beer:

bassboy

Innocent the company behind the lovely smoothies have moved into the lunch market with these veg pots http://www.innocentdrinks.co.uk/things_we_make/vegpots/
Now at £3.49 a pot many people on here would probably cry this isn't a credit crunch find, however Waitrose are offering them with a 3rd off and I believe Tesco are going for a £1 off offer. I picked up a thai coconut curry pot in Waitrose last night and I am very much looking forward to my lunch today. I'm not a fan of Soup or Sandwiches and I find it very hard to make a lunch up at home. So I will retread this board to see other suggestions.

B

wheelel

DO you mean no used by date and past its sell by date? I thought its illegal to sell food past its USE by date. A best before date is usually fine to ignore. (sorry to be pedantic but there is a very distinct difference. You shouldn't really use food past its use by date, esp for children or the elderly)

From the website:

We specialise in selling short-dated or out-of-date "Best Before" dry food products as well as fully coded clearance stock. We do not however sell chilled or frozen "Use By" products.

marshmallow79

Once every two weeks I make two really big quiches out of supermarket economy stuff (even better if I can get it reduced!) and freeze one of them. I put in whatever veg, meat etc I can get cheaply (leek and bacon this week!:D). One of my quiches will last hubby just over a week for lunch so it goes a long way. The last batch I made I think cost around £1.50 to make one quiche because I managed to get most of the stuff for it reduced, including some really good quality eggs!:T

clarabella23

We all chipped in at work and invested in a George Foreman grill. I tend to buy a pack of breadckes and a pack of something quick and easy to cook and I get a fresh hot lunch every day! I do a lot of turkey steaks, etc-go to Heron and they're really cheap-but you can even do waffles and things like that in them! I also take stores own brand tins of spaghetti and have that with toast or crunpets-really quick and easy to do. Although only if you have a microwave obviously!

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ThinkingOfLinking

A_little_stressed!! wrote: »

Porrige, it comes in sachets and keeps you warm, £1.99 for 6 days. And somewhat healthy (not checked the sugar yet!!)

If you can be bothered to make it from scratch, it's even cheaper. Never heard of porridge in sachets, but a big box of branded (eg Scotts or Quaker) oats are under £2, so a non branded one would be even cheaper. You can add fruit, nuts, spices, honey, sugar, jam, all sorts.

rpb

The nice thing about those innocent Veg Pots is that they are not high in salt - many of the soups (and other meals) on sale in the shops have five or more TIMES the amount of salt, per calorie, compared to a recommended daily intake. [My rule of thumb is to check the sodium level, in mg (milligrams), against the calories (kcal) listed on the side of the packet - they should be about the same for a balanced diet, because the RDAs (for a bloke) are around 2600mg of sodium (6500mg salt) and 2500 kcals. So if a portion of your soup has 99 cals and 600mg sodium then you know it's really salty!]

I made some homemade Veg Pots a while back, and they turned out pretty well - I used several cans of beans, some canned chopped tomatoes, a couple of onions, some miscellaneous vege I had in the fridge, a fair wodge of Schwartz salt-free seasoning (herb/spice mix) for flavouring, plus a carefully-measured amount of salt. Boiled it all up (fried chopped onions first) like a really thick soup, and packaged up in empty innocent Veg Pot containers. I had some the next couple lunches and froze the rest for later. If I took one out of the freezer in the morning (or the night before and stored overnight in the fridge) then it was just about defrosted by lunch time. And they were pretty tasty, warming and filling!