Dreaded food shop family of 6 🤦‍♀️

bouicca21

I don’t think £950 is all that bad for 6, though I’m also thinking that the two littlies can’t eat much, so is it really £950 for 4 and a bit?  Then the other half of my brain kicks in and says that bill will only get higher as the boys get older. If you think they eat a lot now just wait until they’re teenagers!

Lots of good advice so far.  I smiled at the Sunday joint suggestion - that’s just what my mum used to do.  Joint on Sunday, leftovers stretched with added veg and turned into a stew on Monday, scraps for sandwiches thereafter.

As well as hm bread, how about other starter type bits and pieces. I make soup more or less all year round.  Hummus is dead easy to make and it isn’t a lot of faff to make it with dried chick peas rather than canned ones. More pulse based meals - lentil/veg curry, black bean burgers etc. There are lots of really tasty veggie recipes out there. Breakfast bars are another easy one.  

Uniscots97

You mentioned the dinners but what about breakfast and lunches? Are you buying boxes of branded cereals? Is cleaning items included in your budget? I echo buying a chicken and using it for many meals 

Floss

Uniscots97 said:

...I echo buying a chicken and using it for many meals 

You would struggle to get more than 3 meals for a family of 6 from 1 chicken.

cjdew

Check out OLIO, free food that is best before and use by. Collect and freeze or batch cook ready to use. 

Endless amounts of bread and at times fruit/veg bags depending on your location. 

Wychwood

It is very difficult with everything being so expensive but cutting back on the right things helps so much.
Cut biscuits, chocolate bar etc.  Make things like flapjacks so much cheaper and oats are filling. Buy the veg boxes from Too Good To Go and make soups, veg and pasta, veg Chilli etc
Every Sunday i do a huge box of salad which is used as snacks during the week.  Saves time and money when you need to feed quickly too.  Definitely home made pizzas.   No takeaways far too expensive. Overnight oats as previously mentioned can always add a bit of frozen fruit or honey.  Lots of really good money saving ideas around but got to work at it.  Consider using Trolley App to see where's cheapest.   Just because it's a 'bargain shop' doesn't mean it's cheaper.  Might even be worth trying to do only two shops a month.  Good meal planning in advance, batch cooking etc.  Good luck

Midlander123

I'm quite surprised you spend so much! We are a family of 6, (12, 9, 5, 4) so I know a little different as they are all in school, all day. We spend around £60 a week. Never more than £300 a month. 

We don't drink alcohol 
We don't actually buy fizzy pop - we have three different flavours of squash made up in jugs in the fridge. 
We have a meat mart locally so spend £20 (included in the £60 per week) on 5 packs of meat per week. We don't use more than 450g of mince per serving, we pack it out with lentils or frozen mixed veg. Same with curries we never just have chicken curry it may have mushrooms, onions, peppers, carrots etc in too. 
We buy Carrots, onions, cabbage, cauliflower etc lose usually around £15 on veg. Including a 10kg sack of potatoes 
We buy supermarket own bread x2 (90p in asda), pasta (1kg 82p), rice (2kgs £1 in asda)
We buy big packs of snacks - for example £1 Asda share packs 
Fruit we buy whatever is in the weekly offer for example this week aldi have 79p for apples, oranges and pineapples 
We buy colliers cheese from farmfoods 1.79 (I think)

We no longer buy ice lolly's, we buy the 21 pack of ice cream cones for £1.20 and a big tub of ice cream 1.85 in asda or the carte a dor on special in farmfoods for £1.39. We dont buy deserts, we bake something each week. A traybake - brownies, old school sprinkle cake, flapjacks that kinda thing)

Uniscots97

Floss said:

Uniscots97 said:

...I echo buying a chicken and using it for many meals 

You would struggle to get more than 3 meals for a family of 6 from 1 chicken.

You could make a chicken and vegetable pie and a risotto and soup with the rest. 

Floss

Uniscots97 said:

Floss said:

Uniscots97 said:

...I echo buying a chicken and using it for many meals 

You would struggle to get more than 3 meals for a family of 6 from 1 chicken.

You could make a chicken and vegetable pie and a risotto and soup with the rest. 

Which is 3 meals....

-taff

I doublt there'd be much meat left from a chicken, no matter how large between six people. There' certainly wouldn't be enough left for a pie, no matter how well padded out, probably enough for a risotto with scraps and definitely chicken soup or broth to make some other type of soup.

I could stretch it to four or five meals between me and the OH, but that's jsut two of us..

Three meals with a chicken is actually 18 meals....I doubt you could more than that out of one chciken...

thriftwizard

Re chickens - when catering for 6+, I generally buy a really big one from the butchers; supermarket ones are nowhere near big enough. Failing that, two smaller chickens... I'll also simmer the carcasses and any tiny scraps, along with onions, garlic, herbs, seaweed flakes, bendy fridge-bottom veg like carrots & celery, up for a stock which usually then becomes a soup - mostly chicken noodle, sometimes c0ck-a-leekie, or chicken & mixed beans - for lunches going forward, or frozen for future reference if it's not soup weather. (BTW, butcher's chickens usually still have a bag of giblets inside - good for paté, if liked, but heaven for dogs or cats.)
It's always worth saving (i.e. freezing) even a small amount of scraps for pies or stir-fry. We had an unexpected influx of new potatoes on Monday; one of my potato-growing buckets was showing distinct signs of early blight (soil-borne disease, luckily not catching for the other buckets tucked under the apple tree) so I hauled the contents out despite the fact they hadn't flowered yet, so I wasn't expecting any significant tubers. Knock me down with a feather, the bucket was stuffed full! Easily enough for a meal for 3 plus a huge potato salad which will be adorning lunches all week - OH is still WFH, as do I & DD2. So I grabbed a couple of bags of frozen beef leftovers (bourguignon & stew IIRC) which, defrosted, mixed & reheated, did the spuds - our first new potatoes of the season - justice. Basically a free meal!