£10 a week food budget

cherrypies

Hiya, good luck with this, just to add.. at the moment Tesco are selling a medium sized bag of wholewheat pasta for 22p. There is a £1 off Sacla pesto and sauces coupon on the coupon thread and Tesco will take 2 of these against a purchase of one jar of pesto. Total spend 21p for about 5 meals worth of pasta pesto. Hope this helps! I'd advise going to Tesco first thing in the morning if you want to get the pasta, it sells out fast.

Kirri

beautifylife wrote: »

At the moment I am forgaing, apples, blackberries, even crab apples. It's free and wild even better than organic. I also use wild edibles nettles (soups, stews), danelions (salads and smoothies).
Look around your area and see what you can find. Ask neighbours if they have any fruit trees etc. You can even go to the library and get books on it, educate yourself. I know it's a learning curve but worth it. You'll start to view food in a different way.

Re your above para, can I ask what you use crab apples in? I was out walking with a friend the other weekend and we went past a house offering free crab apples bagged up by the gate but both of us didn't know what could be done with them!

TeenyBash

Hello again! I'm just working through some more of your replies. Thank you so much for all your help. Going to be checking that can of free soup out!

So here's how things have worked out:

Week starting Mon 5th Sept

£0.47 1 loaf white bread
£4.00 1 tin hot dogs, 1 onion, 1 bottle squash, 1 can coke, 2pt milk
£5.85 6 bread muffins, 2 bell peppers, 1 loaf brown bread, 1 can drink, 1 can tomatoes, butter, 1kg pasta, orange juice, 1 tin baked beans
£3.74 2pt milk, 1kg carrots, 4 loo roll, 6 eggs

Total Spent This Week £14.06

Obviously more than £10. Spread across a couple of weeks, or a month it will likely work out less than £10 a week, but not for that actual week. Bit of a problem when you literally only have £10 for that week. I've scraped together pennies for the extra spend.

I used 500g of the 1kg bag of pasta, with 1 red bell pepper, 1 tin tomatoes and made 4 portions of pasta. The 6 muffins were reduced to 20p, so I've frozen them. Taking 1 out a day to make lunch with 1 egg. Going to be eating lots of carrots sticks!

I could of not bought the 2 cans of fizzy :-/ I was feeling really down. I could of bought a bag of apples with that. Oh well!

As it stands I have food and meals for 5 more days with what I've spent. So for £14.06 I've got food/toiletries for 1 week 5 days. I'm getting minimum 3 fruit/veg a day (banana, orange juice, carrot sticks), which is probably better than people that spend £50 a week!

Kirri

You could try and start building up a store cupboard of basic dried foods ie lentils, split peas and other pulses as they are cheap, filling and fairly nutritious and versatile, just seen a nice Dhal in the River Cottage book that would be quite tasty! Do you have any spices etc in?

TeenyBash

Hi Kirri,

I generally do have the basics in, but I've been so low on cash I've gone through them all. I will have some more money at the end of next week, so I will get some stuff in.

Ahh! Dhal! I'd completely forgot about that. I have some lentils in still. I've got spices in, parsley, cumin, coriander, chilli, veg stock etc.

rogerblack

TeenyBash wrote: »

£0.47 1 loaf white bread
£4.00 1 tin hot dogs, 1 onion, 1 bottle squash, 1 can coke, 2pt milk
£5.85 6 bread muffins, 2 bell peppers, 1 loaf brown bread, 1 can drink, 1 can tomatoes, butter, 1kg pasta, orange juice, 1 tin baked beans
£3.74 2pt milk, 1kg carrots, 4 loo roll, 6 eggs

Total Spent This Week £14.06

I'm currently living off ~60/mo, from tesco, ordered online once a monthish.
I could drop this to 40, but I'd be eating rather less fruit, and more carrots.

Suggestions from my favourites list.
Market value carrots 2Kg - 76p
Tesco value cooking bacon 500g - 1.00
The various half-price cheddars - there is a rotating offer on these - 3.99/800g (which goes a long way)

Tesco pitted green olives in brine 340g - 79p
Tesco wholefood stoned dates 500g - 1.34
Fudco popcorn - 500g 0.95
Gold plum superior dark soy sauce 650ml -1.29
Tesco market value pork chops 800g - 2.50
tesco value chicken portions 2kg - 3.00
Tesco no added sugar double strength apple/blackcurrant squash 1.5l -1.49
And they often - several times a year - have pork joints reduced to 2.99/Kg.

There are some really good value things in this list.
For example, my breakfast at the moment is 100ml of milk, 40g of porridge oats, 15g of dates.
Put in a small glass bowl (perhaps with a tiny pinch of salt) , and microwave for 2:30.
A delicious start to the day.

The squash is an acceptable (to me) drink, even fairly well diluted, and can swap out for the soda, while being much cheaper.

Rowan9

If you're watching money, buy whole fat milk and water it down a bit, even to half and half. Not great to drink but fine in tea, coffee and I have it half and half in weetabix if need be.
Really interesting thread!
W

Kirri

TeenyBash wrote: »

Hi Kirri,

I generally do have the basics in, but I've been so low on cash I've gone through them all. I will have some more money at the end of next week, so I will get some stuff in.

Ahh! Dhal! I'd completely forgot about that. I have some lentils in still. I've got spices in, parsley, cumin, coriander, chilli, veg stock etc.

At least you have some spices so the food need not be so bland, it's surprising how much food you can make from dried storecupboard things! I'm going to do the dhal later, just to eat with bread.

Do you do baking, could make some cheap 'treats'. It improves the living on a tight budget

Also as it looks like you are having to eat the same thing every night, if you can freeze the odd portion of bulk made meals at least you can rotate what you eat.

Do you have anywhere you could grow your own even on a small scale? This saves me £100's... and makes it easier to get more nutritious things to add to the basics.

Do you do survey sites? I use these to get the shopping vouchers as it's nice to have the odd extra £10 to spend and then use on something you might not want to pay out for.

Living_proof

What sort of facilities do you have to cook and store food? What sort of equipment do you have access to?

I have just chopped and de-fatted the Lidl bacon mis-shape pack which is £1.50. I got 9@ 3.5 ounce portions of lean raw ham and bacon which I will use to jazz up things like cauliflower cheese, pasta sauce, lentil soup, etc. This will feed two of us nine times as we eat a lot of vegetables and soup in autumn and winter plays a large part in the menu. You have to keep making different ones though to relieve the tedium.

Although you might be cash-poor you will be time-rich and now is the ideal time to experiment with low cost, healthy cuisine. I agree with lots of others here that making your own bread is a real money saver and you always eat fresh and know what's gone into it. You can add vegetables and lentils to the mix to add protein and keep waste down.

If you could find a friend, or make a new one, who is in a similar position to you then maybe you could buy a more varied selection of foods and share them out? I often wish for this and I do the grocery challenge more for a discipline than anything else, but it's become a hobby and a challenge over the months. You never know what's round the corner and I think we all have to assume that with inflation and the general economic woes, we will all be managing with less on a month by month basis, so we just have to fine-hone our skills in meeting this challenge.

Good luck to you. I know you will do it!

beautifylife

Hi Kirri, in terms of crab apples there are a few things: I think traditionally you make crabapple jelly, just google for recipes, however I used them in smoothies recently with other fruits and green veg and it worked well. The trick is not to use too many as they can be sour.

Also if you have a jucier you could just juice and mix with other sweeter fruits and have as a juice. I suppose you could use in pies just mix in more sugar or honey. When it's free you can afford to experiment!
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Re your above para, can I ask what you use crab apples in? I was out walking with a friend the other weekend and we went past a house offering free crab apples bagged up by the gate but both of us didn't know what could be done with them!