How can we eat healthily on £20 a week?

LilacPixie

can you not just do some pasta with a sauce made from tinned toms, onion, peppers and garlic?? fling in a few herbs and even a tin of drained tuna.

blackberries could beput in a crumble with some apples

Bethankim

Hiya,

i really should come in here more, get stuck upt t'other end.
they key bit from your post is your not a keen cook, so starting with recipe ideas that you will enjoy doing or keeping it simple and not boring will help you lots.
i did my weekly shop for three of us this week for £14 but i have lots of staples in this week so only needed a little bit.

planning meals as others have said is really key, and making up a batch works well. to avoid nipping back and spending more i

buy more milk and bread than i need for a couple of days and freeze it so i have enough for the week. (stops the nipping back bit)
I dont let myself get tempted by a reduced thing unless i really know i will use it.

try cooking a few veggie meals - asda do a brilliant veggie burger mix for 73p even my i only like meat teenager loves them.
i make the pack into veggie meat balls, if careful i can get 20 out of a pack.
make a quick and easy tomato sauce - 1 tin cheap tomatoes, onion,pepper and what ever vegetable looks like it needs using up. add in some herbs and i add a bit of chilli to. liquidise the sauce, makes it much thicker, fry off the balls and add tot he sauce. i use, rice or pasta to go with it. whole meal costs about £1. and can do 1 meal and 1 left over for the freezer

If you havent got a store cupbard check out the store cupboard threads, will help you loads.

if you have a market near by then its always great for fruit and veg if not buy loose where you can unless you have time to par boil and freeze excess veg. I used to buy bags of everything and always ended up with mouldy carrots. now i buy only what i know i will use.

good luck

Queen-Bee_2

LilacPixie wrote: »

can you not just do some pasta with a sauce made from tinned toms, onion, peppers and garlic?? fling in a few herbs and even a tin of drained tuna.

blackberries could beput in a crumble with some apples

I ended up making a lovely meal from my store cupboard - without having to buy anything else as I'd feared!

First up, I made a vegetarian soup with butter beans, onion, frozen spinnach (that really needed to be eaten up anyway - had been in there for ages), canned chopped tomatoes, lentils, veggie stock, cinnamon and tumeric. I had my misgivings as to how it was going to turn out whilst cooking it, but it was lovely. I served it in bowls with home made bread, a dollop of youghurt in the middle and some snipped up chives sprinkles on top.

Pudding was... got it in one LP - blackberry and apple crumble! All home grown. I'd run out of butter but the crumble topping did fine with Mr S's light sunflower spread....

Ziggymole

My tip for keeping within a tight budget is to look for large cuts of meat (which are cheaper per kilo than small cuts) that you can make into several meals.

I remember with horror hubby being on the dole and buying a large frozen turkey each week. It was roasted for day one, then eaten cold for days two and three, stir fried for day four and reduced to soup for day five. I still can't eat turkey to this day but ......................

We do the same sort of thing now with the large pork shoulder joints. Also explore some vegetarian recipes they can work out very cheap if you stick to seasonal veg.

As per the other posts - planning, freezing and utilising bargains.

Ziggy

tinks_77_2

Thanks LP, I used your idea for the potatoes...I got a large bag for just over £1 and yesterday I par roasted into 2 portions each of chips & roast potatoes, cooled & frozen. oh & 2 large portions of roast potatoes with our dinner too :j. Still have half a bag left so going to do see if I can squeeze some mash, chips & slices for the freezer.

Ziggymole - Thanks for the tip, I'll have a look at the larger cuts of meat so I can stretch it out for a few meals.

DD's away for most of this week so only need to buy fruit this week but will try to go shopping in the evening to check out the reductions for the freezer.

rosieben

might be worth looking at the 50p a day till christmas, healthily for ideas and recipes (the link takes you to part 2, but there is a link to the original thread also)

Edited to add - there's also the £20 to feed a family of 4 for a month thread which might be useful

Queen-Bee_2

Hi Tinks - how is your budgeting going? I know what you meant when you posted about nearly being up to budget but not having bought much fruit, cos the same occurred to me last week after my big shop. Ditto with salad - this is one of my great loves, but I can't justify spending £1.50 on a bag of rocket these days!!! This week, I am going to visit a market at around closing time and see what bargains I can pick up. I'm also on the look out for wild blackberry bushes as they're in season at the moment, freeze well and make super crumbles!

One thing which has surprised me is how far I'v managed to stretch 6x boneless chicken thighs, which I bought last week. People have commented that a full chicken would be better value (I am sure it would be, but I've got to gird my loins first to debone/chop it up whilst it's still raw!), but the 6x thighs have gone into soups (3x - making at least four meals), a stir-fry (1x) and a curry (1x) - the remaining one I've frozen. Not bad for about £3.50!
QB

frugallily

Queen Bee- B and M is a general cheap store where you can find a lot of bargains.( Not only food. )Food is often very near it's sell by date but this doesn't matter for cans etc.. not like a use before date. ..they seem to have taken over a lot of the old Woolworth's sites. Worth a look if you see one.

MissMoneypenny

Queen-Bee wrote: »

Ditto with salad - this is one of my great loves, but I can't justify spending £1.50 on a bag of rocket these days!!!

Wild rocket is so easy and cheap to grow from seed. Just sprinkle a few seeds in a pot of compost, lightly cover with fine compost and then watch it grow -not forgetting to water of course. You can get several pickings of young leaves from each plant. Stagger your planting, to get a continual supply of wild rocket. The slugs and snails don't seem to like rocket, so it is safe just leaving the pot on the ground.

Salad leaves, little gem lettuces and spinach are easy to grow too. I bought a cheap grow bag (£1.19 from Lidl) and planted a third of it up with lettuce and spinach seeds. A few weeks later I planted another third up and so on. Once you have finished the first third of the growbag, you can plant it again. Then you can just pick the baby leaves for a really cheap, fresh salad and the leaves grow again. I got about 5 pickings per plant. As slugs like these, I got a wooden coffee table (growbag shape) from freecycle and put my grow bag on that. The feet of the coffee table then had salt sprinkled around them to stop the slugs climbing up. 98p for the spinach seeds and £1 for the mixed salad leaves seeds.

I also picked up a packet of garden fleece from a 99p shop and used this to cover the growbag to stop too many flys getting on the leaves. You can water through the fleece. The flys don't seem to like rocket.

It may be a bit late for salads for this year. Cougettes are another easy and cheap veg to grow. Get over to the greenfinger forums for any help.

donny-gal

What about Aldi, 2 little gem lettuces 29p, 6 tomatoes 29p, cucumbers, celery, and avacado too.

Aldi, Lidl, and Netto all have a reduced fruit & veg offers each week, sign up for their weekly or twice weekly newsletters and then decide which one has what you want that week. Don't go late in the day though, as due to the price it can run out. That way though we know it is fresh each day.
DG