Single person - can I eat for £60 a month?

tiredwithtwins

jackyann wrote: »

... and buy spices from asian food shops.

you can also get really cheap bottles of sauces from some asian food shops - a litre bottle of sweet chilli sauce at 50p can spice up anything from a roast chop to a chilli!

i went for a nose round a polish supermarket last month and they had huuuuuuge tins of tomatoes (about 1800g tin!) for about £1.35! i use one of those in a chilli now and it makes 10 portions. chuck in an onion, a couple of tins of baked beans (the cheapest tin is about 20p), about 100g of steak mince (so thats less than half a 250g packet so about £1) some reduced mushrooms (30p are my cheapest) add chilli powder and a generous glug of sweet chilli sauce - makes us 10 big portions for about 50p each. combined with your bm bread, or cheap pasta or rice and you have a freezer of nice meals.
think bigger to make your money stretch, especially if you dont mind repetitive meals.

spike7451

One rule I live by is before you buy something,especially things like the Iceland Bubble n Squeek mix I mentioned,is to look at it,weigh it in your hand & think "How many meals can I get out of it?"

Out,_Vile_Jelly

I live on my own and spend ~£20 per week in the supermarket, including toiletries, bin liners, washing up liquid etc. I think being a vegetarian makes a difference though.

Supermarket fruit and veg is often very pricey; if you can find a market or farm shop, stock up on whatever veg are on offer and make soup out of it.

I prefer having a fairly substantial breakfast, a hot lunch (soup, jacket spud, omelette) and then a smaller tea. Not sure if it's quantifiably cheaper than focussing on a big evening meal, but I'm sure it's better for digestion.

snowleopard61

I try to do this, pretty much, although the maths is complicated by having one daughter at university and sometimes home and the other living at home but eating elsewhere a lot of the time but not always (family meal at least once a week and sometimes her and me at other times).

Breakfast is porridge with raisins (usually half milk half water but just water if need be), a banana and a cup of tea, every day.

Lunch is usually sandwiches and fruit - fillings tinned sardines, Aldi's cream cheese, peanut butter, or if I'm at home, egg on toast. Or veg soup (homemade but it wouldn't have to be). I buy Aldi's very cheap wholemeal bread, though it isn't great, TBH.

Suppers vary a lot, but broccoli and pasta in cheese sauce is a good easy one, baked beans make a good curry or basic shepherd's pie, mushrooms in a creamy sauce are good on toast or in a baked potato. I do always have a pudding of some sort, but it's often as simple as tinned peaches (Aldi's are 59p for a very big tin that lasts three or four days).

PipneyJane

Plan_for_Chaos wrote: »

Wow - thanks for the all the suggestions and links. I should probably have added that I'm one of these akward types, I won't eat foreign meat (can't be sure of the ethical standard), caged hen eggs or any type of mince that isn't lean (the slightest bit of gristle puts me off). I think I read somewhere that lentils and rice make a complete protein source so I'm not worried about that, but I hadn't considered calcium, (does the milk in one of my 10+ cups of tea a day count?) I just had the five a day mantra in my head so I knew to sneak that in. Special thanks to spike for the meal plan, still feeling a little brusied following today's revelations so I just scribbled something down.

Thank you for the kind words everyone.

Sorry to hear about your bad news.

The real questions are: do you have storage to buy in bulk and do you have a freezer? It is still possible to buy "good" meat on a limited budget but you will need to shop for it periodically instead of weekly in order to afford it. I buy 99% of my meat from a specialist butcher so we always know where it comes from. DH and I put £20 aside each month for that. We only visit the butcher every 4 months or so and shop to restock our freezer. Once cooked, excess portions go back into the freezer for other meals.

On the flour front, I buy Atta flour from the supermarket when I can get it in a 10kg bag for less than £5. That's far cheaper than any other bread flour. (It's a fine wholemeal bread/strong flour used for chappattis.) I use it for everything: cakes, sauces, bread, scones, pastry.

ETA: Also, I'm again seeing 10kg bags of basmati rice for £10 on offer. Or £5 for 10kg of "broken" rice, which is more sticky but edible in a pinch. Like the flour above, you need to be able to store it in an airtight container because the bags are useless once opened.

Although the upfront spend might be more than just buying a small quantity once a week, you may find it cheaper in the long run to visit an Asian supermarket/cash'n'carry like Wing Yip and stock up there on noodles, dried beans, spices, lentils, flour, rice, etc. That's where I really save money.

HTH.

Oscar_the_Pug

Has anyone mentioned rice pudding yet? Cheap as anything to make from scratch and plenty of calcium.

I use UHT skimmed milk (cheaper than fresh) and bung in the slow cooker, and it's very nice!

Brallaqueen

I'm trying to limit my food budget to £10 a week, which so far is going well by shopping at Aldi and not eating a lot of meat.

It helps if you have some meals already in the freezer and a storecupboard backing you up, but what I do is buy one big meat thing a week, batch cook and freeze.

So, week one I buy a whole chicken (portion and freeze excess), week two 1kg mince (portion and freeze excess, plus chicken meal) , week three a bag of salmon portions (one salmon meal, plus one chicken and one mince meal) , and week four is dedicated to cheap odd-bits like eggs and tinned stuff.

I find it means I always have something in the freezer and spreading it across four weeks helps keep the cost 9and the carrying) down

spike7451

Brallaqueen wrote: »

I'm trying to limit my food budget to £10 a week, which so far is going well by shopping at Aldi and not eating a lot of meat.

It helps if you have some meals already in the freezer and a storecupboard backing you up, but what I do is buy one big meat thing a week, batch cook and freeze.

So, week one I buy a whole chicken (portion and freeze excess), week two 1kg mince (portion and freeze excess, plus chicken meal) , week three a bag of salmon portions (one salmon meal, plus one chicken and one mince meal) , and week four is dedicated to cheap odd-bits like eggs and tinned stuff.

I find it means I always have something in the freezer and spreading it across four weeks helps keep the cost 9and the carrying) down

If the's a Sainsbury's near you,you'd be better off buying a bag of their frozen chicken portions,it's about £3.80 for a 2.5kg bag & you get a mix.I've just opened the bag I bought last week.in it was;
4 big thighs
10 drums
5 wings
The thighs you could bone off for curry or have one for a Sunday roast...

bitsandpieces

Sorry to hear about the bad news. Best not to eat the same thing every day if at all possible - aside from the boredom, you'd struggle to get all the nutrients you need from such a narrow range of foods. Can you vary things a bit? E.g. bake some different types of breads, make some different veg soups, have pasta or curry sometimes. Tinned fish can be pretty cheap, too, and doesn't raise the same ethical issues as cheap meat (some tinned fish will be fairly sustainable, some won't).

Red29

tiredwithtwins wrote: »

you can also get really cheap bottles of sauces from some asian food shops - a litre bottle of sweet chilli sauce at 50p can spice up anything from a roast chop to a chilli!

i went for a nose round a polish supermarket last month and they had huuuuuuge tins of tomatoes (about 1800g tin!) for about £1.35! i use one of those in a chilli now and it makes 10 portions. chuck in an onion, a couple of tins of baked beans (the cheapest tin is about 20p), about 100g of steak mince (so thats less than half a 250g packet so about £1) some reduced mushrooms (30p are my cheapest) add chilli powder and a generous glug of sweet chilli sauce - makes us 10 big portions for about 50p each. combined with your bm bread, or cheap pasta or rice and you have a freezer of nice meals.
think bigger to make your money stretch, especially if you dont mind repetitive meals.

Hi I'm Indian and really can't recommend strongly enough exploring your local asian shops. The best ones will be the ones in a predominantly asian area. Tinned foods such as tomatoes, chick peas, spices, flours, rice esp, veg, herbs, will all be cheaper and most of the time better quality. My parents laugh at the idea that people buy little sprigs opf coriander in a supermarket for nearly a pound. The local asian shop will prob offer three big fat bunches of healthy coriander for £1! The larger asian stores will also sell utensils bigger than supermarkets but cheaper. Indian people like big sizes and portions but won't pay over the odds for them!

Do you like indian food? If so try all the other different pulses not just lentils. I always make a big pot of curry then freeze portions dep upon if its meat, veg or pulse curry each portion will cost about £0.50 - £1.50.