Meeting your grocery challenge target

jazzyjustlaw

fazer6 wrote:

Galtiz that's exactly what I do. I made a £4 reduced leg of lamb last for 4 more meals after the sunday roast.

A £1.81 2kg reduced chicken also lasted for sandwiches for 2 for a week, curry, and a chicken and 2 sweetcorn pizzas.

Tescos have half price turkeys on offer at the moment. I went for the smallest which feeds 6-8 people but cost only £6.

Having four meals of the same ingredient a week is a bit boring. I know we are trying to save money but I think that is a bit too much.

tiff

Well it all depends on how much you want/need to cut costs and save money. I do the same as fazer or else I will freeze the meat in family size portions and defrost when needed.

crana999

I dont get bored having 4 meals based on the same ingredient, no way! I don't think that's "too far".

Queenie

jazzyjustlaw wrote:

Having four meals of the same ingredient a week is a bit boring. I know we are trying to save money but I think that is a bit too much.

Ah well, thinking it "a bit too much" is reflective of *modern* attitudes and not surprising.

However, this part of the Forum is about "Old Style" and that is precisely how my G/parents would run their household. Sunday roast would be as large a joint as they could possibly afford *because* it would be used for the meals for the week. So, after the roast (and depending on the type of meat) they would make meals such as:-

Shepards Pie, Cottage Pie, pasties, pies, soups (when it constituted a meal, not a snack or hot drink!); quiches, meat fritters, rissoles, hm sausages, salads (where meat was chopped small, not served as fat slices!) and a whole host of other meals besides. Cheese and eggs were considered meal too (omelettes, Ploughmans) Not in the least "boring".

The bones were used to make stock; the dripping was used to make pastry. The smallest scrap was used up. Of course toward the end of the week the meat content was getting smaller and smaller and Friday would be fish anyway (if they could afford it! Or could fish for it). It was also about fuel economy.

In our modern world, we have come to eat like "Kings" virtually each mealtime. But, in my father's youth, his "treat" would be a pigs trotter - try tempting a teen today with *that*!
A trip to the Fish n Chip shop in my mothers childhood wouldn't be a case of which fish .... she would get "Chitterlings" (intestines of young pigs, cleaned, stewed and frequently battered and fried).
In my own childhood, if my father/mother had a pork chop, we as kids would have sausages.

It's really all about "attitude". Now, I don't serve my children pigs trotters - difficult to get hold of these days anyway, but, I do make full use of any leftovers and think through the energy requirements too. My attitude is that we work because we need money to survive - however, we do *not* work to fill the bank accounts of greedy businessmen and advertisers. I enjoy the challenge of making meals interesting and palatable without throwing good money away needlessly.

moggins

Well said Queenie, my husband commented since I joined these boards that we have never eaten so well.

The other parts of the board are useful to me but I'm not in an uncontrolable spiral of debt, I just needed to find some ways to cut daily living costs so I could afford to stay at home with the children. Now I've switched power companies and sorted everything else out I virtually live in this section now

fazer6

I don't have it all in the same week. I'll have the roast on the sunday, during the week the meat is turned into something (not boring because it's different) and then the leftovers are frozen. When there are leftovers for any meal I plan it in my diary to eat it in 2 weeks time, or 2 and 4 if there's 2 portions. That doesn't get boring at all.

I love roast dinners, and don't see the point in paying £4 for a nicely packaged stuffed chicken joint when a whole chicken costs the same and gives you more meat. I need something to go in my sandwiches and resent how much shops charge for sliced meat, and don't trust what goes into some pre-packaged meat. If there's meat leftover and I'm cooking a pizza I'll just throw it on, and if I fancy a chicken curry then I'm not going to defrost more meat when there's some in the fridge.

I've got a big enough freezer that I can stock it up with pre-made meals and like the idea of saving time by cooking multiple dinners at once. Tonights chicken casserole was cooked 2 weeks ago but that's long enough ago that I'm not bored. Rotate things often enough and you can be money saving and have interesting food.

Galtizz

Bumped for all the newbies to the grocery challenges

tiff

A few more tips from other threads

grow your own herbs/fruit/veg - seeds are 29p at the moment in Lidls
try the discount stores like Aldi and Lidl you might be surprised at the quality and value for money
freeze small bits of leftover veg, when you have quite a bit make it into a soup or add to casseroles etc
make stale bread into breadcrumbs and freeze