menu planning and shopping and.. losing hope!

newlywed

I agree with the chicken comments. I used to buy 4 chicken breasts for about £5 to make one meal for four of us. I swapped to turkey which is cheaper and with a sauce you never notice any difference.

But last weekend I did my first ever roast chicken (which fed 4) then took off the leftover meat (made sandwiches for 1 for lunch, risotto for 2 for tea) and boiled up the rest of the chicken to make proper chicken noodle soup - which was much more filling than just noodles!! All that for a £3 chicken and some veg.

And ... I was surprised how easy roast chicken is ... dunno why I never tried it before!!

cupid_s

Regarding chicken breasts. If anyone has a makro card my mom recently got me 5kg of fresh chicken breasts for £15 from there. She tells me at the moment they have 3kg for £10.

tijuanatime

Some quick suggestions, based on your shopping list:

1. Buy your pizzas at Aldi: they're excellent quality and a lot cheaper
2. Likewise instant coffee
3. Ham £1.50. Think about buying a gammon joint from a butcher(a 1kg joint would be about a pound more)and cook it yourself. Slice it for sandwiches and you'll get at least one more meal out of it.
4. Natural yoghurt. Large tub from Aldi - 39p

DawnW

Things like yorkshire puds, pizzas, quiches, potato wedges and soup, even lollies for the kids, are loads cheaper (and nicer) if you make your own, and most really don't take much longer to prepare than the bought versions. Also, a big sack of potatoes from a market or a farm shop will keep well at this time of the year (in an unheated room or the shed), and save loads of money - to make your own oven potato wedges, roast potatoes, filled jacket spuds, mash, I am sure people have lots of other suggestions. You can get a big 25 kg sack for £5-6 or even less, and you don't get many little supermarket bags for that.

It all takes a bit of time, which isn't always ideal if you work full time (I do, so speaking from experience), but either you put in the time or the money, I guess, and if you really want to get those bills down ...

newlywed

I work full time too and find that if I make anything with mince I pad it out with lots of extra veg and then make half the sauce into a meal for the freezer. Eg if I make lasagne, I'll use half the meat sauce and make a shepherds pie. Or if I do bolognaise, then I do the same. It means I get at least one day in the week when I can just defrost and chuck in the oven. Plus lots of veg in it already so don't always need to do extra veg to go with it (sometimes just some bread rolls).

kethry

wow. ok.... thanks for all these replies...

i'm gonna try to take all the points one by one. Some assumptions have been made that i think need to be cleared up - mostly my own fault for not being clearer, i think, about what i was buying with the money, or why i was buying certain items. I realise i come across as being defensive.. i apologise in advance for that (feeling that i was a bit "told off", maybe, in some of the posts), i do realise that i asked for people's thoughts and i can't complain just cos i wasn't clear enough in my OP!!!

First of all, something that several people seem to think, that i'm buying all these puds - nope, i'm not! (my own fault, i should have made that clear.) all of them are handmade, the spotted !!!!!! is a "cheap micro sponge" as someone put it, the custard is birds eye, and the reason we have a pud is to try to cut down the amount that we eat for the main meal. microsponge, as someone pointed out, costs pennies, maybe 25p tops for both of us, whereas main meal costs more. We tend not to eat lunch so we eat correspondingly larger evening meals.

Pizza: i've experimented with this, buying different versions and making my own. To be brutally honest, Asda's frozen pizza (the sweet chillichicken, pepperoni versions) are £3 for 3 - i buy one extra. that's 4 large ish pizzas for 4.25, which do us for 2 meals - 1 pizza each. They're our treat of the week. Even if i made my own, i could *not* get it cheaper - not with the toppings, which we happen to particularly like, and again, to be honest, these are better than my own. And finally, having pizza on saturday night is a break for me - every other night i cook, often from scratch, along with all the associated washing up, and i'm disabled (no, i don't work full time (or otherwise), for the lady who asked).

The drinks situation: squash is aldi's own blackcurrant and apple. Its the only kid that OH drinks, and we both drink it. We're both at home 24/7. Lemonade: i have a drink in the evening that is the squash mixed with lemonade, maybe 1 or 2 glasses a night of either that or the orangeade. Trust me, it goes quickly. Also: Asda's orangeade, is on 3 bottles for 90p offer, so i buy that and then buy maybe 2 bottles of lemonade, but i budget for a third if i need it. Coffee: we were using machine coffee because it cost less than instant but that was when we were drinking a lot more coffee. I've cut down to 1 mug a day so i have now suggested to OH that we switch to instant during the week, and reserve machine coffee for weekends - that 81p bag from tescos should last for a month that way, which is relatively little for a treat. thats why coffee is on there twice.

The stuff in the freezer dates from before i tried to cut down, and even then, things like the quiche in there was reduced. The lollies are left from the summer, i don't buy them any more. Chicken: the reason i buy thighs/breasts is cos 1) the bones/gristle in thighs make me throw up.. so OH has thighs and i have breasts. 2) i don't buy a whole chicken because OH adores meat so it doesn't LAST long enough to do the rubber chicken with. At least with thighs i can put half the pack in the freezer and hide it from him. Spaghetti, someone asked why i was buying both pasta and spaghetti - the spaghetti goes in minestrone stew, that one pack lasts me a good couple of months. the Pasta, i buy small packs because i buy the wholemeal pasta (i'm trying to lose weight) and they don't sell the wholemeal pasta in those £1 bags.

Morrisons, Farm Foods, Sainsburys are all out of reach for me - i don't have a car, so have to get home either by bus or taxi, and while bus is free for me (i have a free bus pass) there is also the associated effort - is it *really* worth trudging across manchester just to get something that is 1p cheaper? In addition, if i buy something that requires a taxi to get home, i have to think about the cost of the taxi. That's why i shop at Asda and Tesco - they're fairly close to me. Iceland is reachable but i've found that every time i go in to get stuff, they haven't got what i want, so i've stopped going there. Markets, the fruit and veg in some cases is cheaper at Asda or Tesco (particularly stuff like potatoes and onions) and i've never seen big bags of potatoes sold.

Dog food: the 4.32 or however much i said is for 14 tins of dog food, which she gets 1 every night. that's using the cheap OL 3.60something packs of 12, and then i buy 2 extra tins for 35p each from somewhere. She also has complete meal which is permanently down and she can pick at that as and when she wants to. For that i buy a big bag from Aldi for just under £2, and it lasts her a month.

sammy: thanks for going through my list so comprehensively! I admit that a lot of that list was an estimate - especially things like the seeds, (which i use for breadmaking).. the cinnamon i get a big bag of the rajah's brand, which is cheaper/for more and tip it into a jar. that works out better for me as i use a lot of cinnamon (in breakfast almost every day).

I've noted some useful tips from the posts - so when i go to asda later hopefully i can put them into practise and bring the final bill down quite a lot, thank you for all those!!

I'll let you all know how i get on, anyways!!! thank you, everyone, for everything you've so patiently typed out!!!

keth
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newlywed

I would definitely think about making double and freezing a meal, as I know what you mean about having a night off from cooking from scratch. It can be quite tiring.

That way you have your own ready meal in the freezer for when you're fed up and don't feel like cooking. I do it now at least once every week so that I don't feel like I'm cooking all the time.

I also do the 4 minute noodles with prawns (if they're on offer) or meat and soy sauce, or else a stirfry if we're busy and don't have much time. Then I don't feel like I've spent half the evening cooking.

Just those little things have made a difference to me.

Edit: and I haven't yet found large sacks of potatoes in my area either yet!!!

whatatwit

My only comment is on the golden syrup.
I bought a 'value' jar 680g for 77p yesterday in Tesco.

Good luck with the bargain hunting.

whatatwit

Kethry, do you use a slow cooker?

I find it great for batch cooking, there's usually only 2 of us, as DD is a veggie.
We can have a good tea and there's plenty left for the freezer, I do have to hide it from OH though until I get it in the freezer.

kethry

whatatwit wrote:

Kethry, do you use a slow cooker?

I find it great for batch cooking, there's usually only 2 of us, as DD is a veggie.
We can have a good tea and there's plenty left for the freezer, I do have to hide it from OH though until I get it in the freezer.

nope to the slow cooker. i do have a pressure cooker though. I do batch cook.. the biggest problem is hiding it from OH. he's getting better though.. marginally. (there's still chilli and rice left from 2 nights ago in the fridge... or maybe that's just cos he's been poorly.) I'm so glad to hear i'm not the only one that has to hide stuff from OH.. he sais its my fault i cook so well!! LOL.

newlywed wrote:

I would definitely think about making double and freezing a meal, as I know what you mean about having a night off from cooking from scratch. It can be quite tiring.

That way you have your own ready meal in the freezer for when you're fed up and don't feel like cooking. I do it now at least once every week so that I don't feel like I'm cooking all the time.

I also do the 4 minute noodles with prawns (if they're on offer) or meat and soy sauce, or else a stirfry if we're busy and don't have much time. Then I don't feel like I've spent half the evening cooking.

i do stirfrys too... the problem for me is that while they may be quick to cook they are *not* quick to prepare, not the way i do it anyway (which is from scratch, cutting up slivers of garlic/ginger/chillis is time consuming)! the other problem is that asian food - you can forget about leftovers.. OH eats them till he's groaning and begging for me to shoot him and put him out of his misery. (and no i'm not kidding)!!

hmmm. you know, i quite fancy chinese now.. *goes to amend list*

thanks!!

keth
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