Eat for £12 a week?

samtux

What a great idea, instead of buying red wine where it is used in one night buy white wine with soda which will last several nights.. and better calorie wise as well as I think that is what Joan Collins has to keep her figure!! I am converted!

gillian62

I have been finding it harder and harder to keep to a strict budget in weekly shop. For the past 5 weeks I have had a maximum budget of £75 for family of 5/4 (my eldest son moved out at beginning of month).

I have been going though the freezer and store cupboards, and fortunately had recently bought some large washing powder & soft rinse packs so that hasn't been a problem.

I have bought lots of basic food items - crisps, biscuits, fruit, noodles, rice, pots etc.

Unfortunately I haven't had an oven for the past 4 weeks so that hasn't helped matters, as I haven't been able to bake or cook the meals I usually would in the oven.

The dogs have gone onto basic food, and the cats too.

I have paid out £6.50 for chicken pellets but that has given me 1/2 doz eggs per day so that is well worth it - I could use these better if oven was working!

We hardly buy any branded items now, unless they are on excellent promotion.

thornelius_2

My budget is £68 a week for 4, 2 adults and 2 kids, I have been making a meal plan for the week ahead and buying food on-line so I'm not tempted to add extra things but my god I am sooo hanging out for a take away! lol. It would also be nice to not have to cook for once :-) It's also getting harder to choose what to have with out repeating what we have had the previous weeks.

[Deleted User]

Just read this thread all the way through, some nasty remarks there, anyway I have been spending around £400 a month on food , toiletries etc, this is for 2 adults , 1 teenage boy, and a small dog, I to like to be healthy, but need to half this as this is ridiculous, I work from home, but am determined to do everything from scratch and see if I can half my bill, we do eat an awful lot of fruit and veg, and I am not changing that, I made a pizza tonight, and have made some assorted iced cakes, to keep in for snacks, so thats a start. Some great tips here, lets stop all the !!!!!ing and try to help each other, there are all times we need to cut back and save:beer:

tigerfeet2006

fairyface wrote: »

Just read this thread all the way through, some nasty remarks there, anyway I have been spending around £400 a month on food , toiletries etc, this is for 2 adults , 1 teenage boy, and a small dog, I to like to be healthy, but need to half this as this is ridiculous, I work from home, but am determined to do everything from scratch and see if I can half my bill, we do eat an awful lot of fruit and veg, and I am not changing that, I made a pizza tonight, and have made some assorted iced cakes, to keep in for snacks, so thats a start. Some great tips here, lets stop all the !!!!!ing and try to help each other, there are all times we need to cut back and save:beer:

fairyface, this is a very old thread started in 2006 and resurected in 2010 and has just been resurected again. So the people you are complaining about are long gone

thornelius_2

For a really old thread how realistic is £12 a week these days?! How cheaply do other people do it?

tigerfeet2006

Well as I said earlier, I am aiming for £100 a week which is around £14ish a DAY for a family of 5 and that is breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, cleaning materials and toiletries. So just a tadge under £20 a person per week. I am aiming to bring it down over the months to around £75-80 a week. It will help when the allotment starts providing us with veg.

Derivative

I manage sub £20 without really trying, £12 sounds doable.
The main aim is, look at nutrition.

Find the cheapest possible way of getting everything you need. So, for protein you can go for tuna, has all the essential amino acids. Cheapest cheese you can find has a decent amount of fat (I don't go for processed, but you can usually get good deals). Value peanuts are nutritious too. Vegetables, cut out the exotic stuff. Cheapest pasta (if you don't want to bulk buy, tesco has 28p spaghetti, 500g).

It's actually opened my eyes a bit as I didn't know I liked various cheap foods before trying them.

You get the idea. It's really about treating food as something that is required to live, as a business expense.

I've managed 8 weeks so far without an oven, only a microwave and kettle! I do sometimes splash out and get ready made chicken though. If you can find cheap chicken and have an oven, sorted.

immie

Oh dear I just stayed up all night reading the thread :-D
I haven't posted here before so sorry if i make loads of mistakes!
I thought i'd share how I do it, as someone who's somewhat lazy and 'never have the time' to cook!

When I started uni in 2008 I had no idea the cost of food would rise and rise! My friends who started in 2007 always raved on about the times of 11p beans and 5p noodles but by this time it was like 31p beans etc (outrage!)
Anyway when I was really strapped for cash I easily spent under £7 a week on food but it was a tad unhealthy lol (some not so much)
'roast' dinner everyday for packed lunch, roast potatoes, frozen brocoli, frozen carrots, peas, tesco value sausage, put into a fancy lunch box and reheated at uni (could also do banger and mash)

or Shepherds pie made on a sunday, decanted in recycled plastic trays from readymeals, made from lamb mince from packet, was £1.40 or so at the time from asda, add value onions and other cheap veg, potatoes, again this will make enough for a week's worth of lunches

Supermarket own brand noodles, cooked with diced Spam and frozen vegetables, one tin of Spam lasts ages, maybe 10 meals!

or make one big pasta dish on a sunday, with value tinned chopped tomatoes, value cheese, could make one week's worth of dinner/lunch

So the general deal was to spend less than 3.50 on ingredients for one 'meal', decant into 5 portions, eat the left overs from decanting on the day of cooking, so you've got saturday left but spend less than 3.00 and you'd still be under £10

I usually had loads left over, like i'll have 8 portions of shepherds pie so sometimes gave it to fellow students who were more than grateful!

People always used to ask where i got my lunch from, i always put it in a white box with divided sections and a clear lid and it looked kinda posh lol

sorry i'm rambling a bit now

Unfortunately I don't do the cooked lunches thing anymore due to lazyness, and more money coming in, but inspired by OS board on here, I decided to test how far a 400g of mince could go, pork, £2 from sainsbury's

and it did me for 3 dishes, which were split into 4 portions each, so 12 meals!

The first thing I made was a chinese dish called Braised Aubergines, (google for a recipe and cut out all the obscure or expensive ingredients, i used gravy granules instead of soy sauce haha)
it tasted just like they serve it in Chinese restaurants, and cost £1 in aubergines from the market plus 1/3 pack of mince, served with rice (bought in bulk from asian supermarket)

Second thing was a standard bolognaise made with homemade pasta sauce (cost £2 to make 2l and used say 500ml for this, so 50p) , plus 1/3 of the pack of mince, served with pasta (bought in bulk)

Then still had some left over and made braised aubergine again, 1/3 pack of

For all of above I did a little trick to 'double' the amount of meat, (maybe even triple i cant remember!) I marinating the meat with cornflower, seasoning, a little oil, and added finely chopped mushrooms, to bulk it out, into the same mixture and mix it with a spoon until it's all one paste, and leave it for few minutes, and when you cook it it doesn't separate and is virtually indistinguinshable, it makes the meat taste more succulent too! (and as the meat cooks it thickens the sauce too!)

So pack of mince £2, aubergines £2, mushrooms from market stall 50p, pasta sauce 50p, onion, chillis, a bulb of garlic, various seasoning, pasta, rice, cost me under £6 for 12 meals :-D (and they were big portions too :-))

Aubergines may not be everyone's cup of tea, but the cornflour+mushroom bulking out thing should work in most dishes where there's sauce, i used cheap market mushrooms which didn't have a strong taste or deep colour or anything, when cooked it just looked like specks of garlic :-D

immie

*marinated with cornflour not 'cornflower', sorry!