Help get us started please!

Crisp_£_note

:mad: I have realised that half my money goes on shopping every week and with just the 2 of us, 2 dogs and an aquarium of tropicat fish this is not only shocking :eek: its embaracing!

Things have got to change. I need to cut down from £80 a week to a maximum of £25.

Have just acquired a steamer, breadmaker and slow cooker from Freecycle.

Hubby will not eat fruit or most veg. His limit is potatoes, a spoonfull of peas and carrots and tomatoes that come as a soup or in a sauce. No amount of hiding or disguising will work unless I reuse 'acceptable' packaging

I am trying to lose weight for health and figure reasons :j

I have some basic cooking skills and can follow simple step by step recipie books but often opt for the WW readymeal options. :rolleyes:

Dogs will eat almost anything!

Can anyone help me make the swich less painfull and reduce the cost please?

Many thanks

beautiful_ravens

I buy my dog (a collie) big bags of food from a local farm store - so far one bag has lasted all of january, and theres still half left so that'll be around 2 months (so, around 1 month for 2 dogs?) it was £7.99 - she also gets a small amount of leftovers, which saves a few cups of dogfood aswell.

If you disguise veg (onion, carrot, celery, sweetcorn etc) by stick blending, no one need ever know WHAT it is - make it look like ragu by adding a tin of tomatoes, water & some herbs and putting in a ragu jar!!

Make fruit into smoothies - again, it is unrecognisable.

I only have marg/butter with marmite....jam, lemon curd, mayo sarnies, honey, fish paste, pickle etc are all 'no butter' sarnies for me great for not eating fat/buying less.

Crisp_£_note

What size bags and brand is the dog food? We have a Lurcher X Collie and a Greyhound X Saluki, both non working just pets!

Already do the no spread bit with 'moist' fillings in sarnies and jacket spuds etc.

Smoothies, I like them but hubby wont eat them, he knows thier hidden ingreidints!

What's 'stick blending' ?

Thank you

SunnyGirl

Hi! A stick blender is one of the small blenders that you put in the pan & stir it around until everything is blended. They're great & so quick to use - no faffing about pouring stuff into a food processor :T Tesco have a Value Hand Blender for about £5 or so, mine has lasted me 4yrs now & it gets used 6 or 7 times a week.

Re dog food - I have a Labrador & a Beagle, who gets 4-5 hours of walks a day and we feed them both Wagg dry dog food from Asda. Its £9.50 for 18kg and they love it, look good on it & it doesn't make them lose or gain weight at all. Well worth the money in my opinion. They also get some leftovers on the rare occasion that there are any Hope this helps.

Mellika

OK, for starters:

1. Start menu planning, have a list when shopping and stick to it
2. Do the cupboard challenge
3. And try the downshift challenge
4. And the grocery challenge

Some ideas:
- Have a small portion of homemade vegetable soup with every meal (might not work with OH... but is good for weight loss and it fills you up so you end up eating less)
- Buy things bogoff/reduced/bulk and freeze half
- Make your own bread! YumYum!
- Reuse leftovers in pies/sandwiches. There's a recent thread on plate pies which gave me loads of ideas.
- When I was younger in my country there was a popular diet which most teen girls followed some time or another. One of the tips was to always have soup before a meal, and about 1 hour before that, eat a hard boiled sweet. It makes you less hungry!

Not much, but HTH

emjay123

Hi I am in the same boat ( or was 3 weeks ago)., I can recommend baking your own bread i think it costs me 40p a loaf but the shop bought loaf cost £1.29.
I have been bulking out mince dishes with red lentals,. so 3 weeks ago a pack of mince would do 1 meal for 2 adults and 1 small child it now does us 3 meals with extra veg and everyone like it better.,
The rubber chicken thread is great loads of ways to make a chicken do extra meals from leftovers.
I have stoped buying cakes and biscuits and am now make my own with the help of my little boy ( 4ys old) there cheeper , better for you and it give me some quality time with my son.,
I have downshifted a brand in most things some to value and some to own brand which knocked about £20 off my bill.
Not using 20 different cleaners anymore just white vinergar or stardrops.,
Also washing powder i only use half and the clothes come out the same, all these years i have been using 2 tablets and i only needed 1 ( who say we need 2 or even 3! the manefactors and why so we buy more, so simple but i never thought about it!)
I just wanted to let you know what a great help and inspiration this board has been to me, i am not there yet but with the suport of the others on here i am sure i will soon.
A GREAT BIG THANKYOU TO ALL THE OS WHO POST THERE TIPS, STORYS AND RESIPES.
so sorry for bad spelling i am dyslexic!
Good luck with getting your weekly bill down

N9eav

Crisp_£_note wrote: »

What size bags and brand is the dog food? We have a Lurcher X Collie and a Greyhound X Saluki, both non working just pets!

Morning. The dog food refered to by Ravens is a dry complete dog food. There are several varieties like Dr Johns and Arkwrights. They are 15kg sacks and cost around £7.50 ish. Most farm or argricultural merchants stock them. We use it for our pyrenean and it's fine. It only says working dogs as that means they don't have to charge VAT.
Also most farm merchants sell potatoes by the sack. A 25k sack you can get for around £5 and if you keep it cool and dark will last a long time and far cheaper than buying little bags from the shops.

Try looking for the offers. EG. ASDA have RAGU sauce at 2 for £1. Etc, buy up several, although that might blow the weekly budget it will mean you have a months worth at 50p a jar....

beautiful_ravens

(thanks N9eav:))
RE the bags of dog food - in the farm shop theres loads to choose from ranging from £7.99 to £15+ - I buy the cheaper bags as my dog is non working. Just speak to the person in there (if you have a place like this) You need to be careful not to give super-high protein food if they are non-working, or theyll be too energetic! So you know, its Dr John silver: http://www.farmway.co.uk/pet-1/dog-3/dog-food-11/gilbertson-page-dr-john-1108-962_zoom.jpg . Its just dry pieces like bakers complete, not a 'muesli' type food.
And the same place sells potatoes and veg, and a range of other exciting local stuff fairly cheap too!

A stick blender - http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B00006IUZQ.16._SCLZZZZZZZ_SS260_.jpg

OberonSH

Hi Crisp - good to see you made your way over here! This forum rocks for getting those bills down.

I meal plan like a demon - I look at what's in the cupboards, and work out what I can make (BBC food website is ace for this - plug in ingredients and I'll pop up suitable recipes). I then note down what we're having each night, put the stuff I need to buy on a list. When I shop, I use the list, and nothing else. If it's not down, it doesn't get bought. I also recommend online shopping - no worry about Hubby sneaking stuff in...

Talking of sneaking in, my OH used to be absolutely terrible with veg - now he's a lot better, I blend the veggies into sauces, and do them in different ways. He wouldn't touch parsnips until I roasted them in place of chips. Now he's a parsnip-monster. I make my own biscuits & bread, and you can sneak a lot of stuff in there - a few bits of chopped veggies in the breadmaker lift up your boring sandwiches and fruit in cookies is a must!

You'll get there - just don;t try and take on too much at once to start. Pick one challenge at a time, or you'll overwhelm yourself. Good luck!

IsoChick

We use CSJ Food (http://www.csjk9.com/) for our dogs (2 Boxers). It's a working dog food, so no VAT. We buy in bulk (3 or 4 sacks at a time) and it's about £12 for a 15kg sack. The company has some local representatives who deliver free. We just ring up Brian (our local guy) and he drops some off for me and shoves an invoice through the door!

When I met my OH he would only eat carrots, leeks, potatoes and onions. He wouldn't eat eggs, rice, or cheese. We now have our own chickens for eggs and he has successfully eaten 2 vegetarian risottos in the last few weeks!

I just started cooking stuff and not telling him what was in it - e.g. red lentils and grated carrot to bulk out bolognese, using marinated, roasted peppers from a jar rather than fresh in pasta (then moving on to fresh!)

I also made sure that when I put veg in stuff, that there was nothing else to snack on, so if he didn't eat it, he went hungry. OH used to eat 3 or 4 slices of bread with every meal, now, he doesn't eat any. I also used to get little piles of vegetables that he had picked out on the side of the plate - not any more.

I found a little chopper machine was good - you can chuck onion and carrot in there, and it gets almost pulped - great for a casserole or mince/bolognese bake (you can also use celery, peppers etc this way).

Also, I found a couple of decent recipes on the web (from with UKTV Food or BBC Food) that were by a couple of his favourite chefs - Simon Rimmer and Gregg Wallace, so the other night, we had a Pork, Chorizo and Butter Bean Casserole - by Simon Rimmer. He would never have eaten butter beans previously, however he wolfed it down (it did make enough for 3 meals for 2 people!)

Some people have said that I'm treating him like a baby. Yup, I probably am, but he is 30 and it's not that he doesn't like veg, it's that he's never tried it. Funnily enough, when he does try it, he likes it.

Crisp_£_note

Thank you everyone.

I do put veg on his plate but it ends up in the dog bowl or on the floor for them to hoover up later!

If I cook him anything he thinks he isnt going to like he smothers it in BBQ or Brown sauce first and mashes it all together.

One of our dogs is allergic to beef and beef flavouring (it turns him agressive) and both dogs we try to stick to as low protein and additives as possible as we find these drive them hyperactive!

Will compile a list of storecupboard and fridge / freezer contents and post here soon. Let me warn you though theyre almost as empty as the food budget tin!

Thanks