Dreaded food shop family of 6 🤦‍♀️

tealady

If you buy rice or pasta get the wholewheat ones. Same with bread and cereal. It will make them feel fuller for longer.
Also how about making a home made rice pud? Plenty of carbs to keep them going. Throw in dried fruit like sultanas for added flavour.
Dont buy fizzy pop, if thirsty they can drink Council pop (tap water). Pop just doesn't satisfy hunger.
Turn takeaways into "fakeaways", batch cook and bulk out casseroles, chillies and curries with pulses.

torchie

In my view just under £1k per month is good - we are spending about £350 per month for just the two of us. We use everywhere from Iceland and Lidl to M&S depending what it is we are buying. We regularly take advantage of “reduced ticket” items …….. this morning in Tesco I managed to find some nice fish, two top of the range quiches, some duck breasts and a box of 12 eggs (one had been broken so it had been reduced by about 45%!!). We don’t have takeaways and don’t generally buy food “on the go”.  If we go out we always take a bottle of tap water - no expensive bottled water for us.

Impecunious69

Try YTube Food sites such as Spain on a Fork, Dimitriesrecipes, (Greek food) etc. Food on a fork has many egitarian pulse recipes such as Chickpea and Potato casserole. While it is vegetarian it is easy to add some cheaper end pork sausages cooked seperate to each portion. The original recipe, for 4 but increase portions for six is a very cheap meal. Cans of chickpeas around 50p per can, potatoes, onion,  and fried bread pulsed down. Add store cupboard herbs and spices and a meal can work out at well under a pound per portion.

Florafauna

I agree as the comment stuck out in its rudeness . I've never regularly cooked for a family of 6 but my friend did. She cooked big shepherd's pies, pasta bakes etc usually followed by a big crumble. Her kids ate like horses but this always filled them up. All the best to the OP,  I bet her house is full of noise and love 

PipneyJane

@onlywayisup2011 how’re you doing?  Have we been able to help you at all?  Please ignore that horribly rude poster.  99% of people on MSE are kind, helpful and friendly.

- Pip

Katiehound

PipneyJane said:

@onlywayisup2011 how’re you doing?  Have we been able to help you at all?  Please ignore that horribly rude poster.  99% of people on MSE are kind, helpful and friendly.

- Pip

The rude poster was dealt with! & post deleted.....

Nelliegrace

I am not going to hit you with ideas, that sounds much to violent and unfair when you have recognised a problem and you are trying to resolve it. 

We were a family of six in the years of austerity in the 50 and early 60s. I am the youngest, but I can remember my mother doing her shopping list, counting her coins, crossing out four ounces of bacon and writing in three ounces, and still having to put basic foods “on the book” as money ran short by the end of the month. It was the same for almost all of the families in the village. We were fortunate that the child benefit just covered our school dinners, which had to meet nutritional standards, and we had a third of a pint of school milk. 

At home we had a lot of bread and potatoes every day, porridge or toast for breakfast. Bread and jam or toast and dripping for tea, and large batches of scones, fresh or toasted. These were our energy foods. We had plain breakfast cereals occasionally, measured out by Mum. 

We had a lot of seasonal vegetables, anything my parents could grow in the garden, and a lot of cabbage at school. Mum added fresh chopped parsley to cooked vegetables. These were our vitamin foods. There was fruit in season, from the first rhubarb, to the last stored apple, and Mum made a lot of jam for winter. We picked many pounds of blackberries. Bought fruit was shared, so an orange was always cut into slices, or Mum would make a batch of orange squash. Even when they were old Dad would choose a nice, home grown apple from the bowl and cut it up and give Mum half on a plate. 

Growing children need as much protein as adults, but there was not much meat available. We were used to small portions. What we had was padded out with beans in stews, or made into pies. We had a lot of hot soups, made with bone stock for flavour, to fill us up. There was not much bacon in the bacon and egg pie. There wasn’t much fish, though we had sardines on toast quite often. Milk and cheese were important sources of protein, and we had cheese sauce on toast. 

It seems a very different world. We didn’t have snacks between meals, or fizzy drinks, and had to buy any sweets with our pocket money. We would never help ourselves to food. We were allowed 2 plain biscuits each, if there were any. We all had to help prepare the meals and lay the table and wash up afterwards. We had no say in what we ate. There was very little waste.

I have gone back to many of these standards. I have cut out as much UPF as I can. I can feed the two of us on £5 a day, and spend just £5 a week on meat. If a meat joint is on offer I cut it into smaller joints and freeze some. I do a pot roast so it doesn’t shrink. I shop at Aldi and Asda mainly, but anything I buy has to be real food, basic fish not fish fingers, plain mince not burgers, a litre of plain yoghurt and not little pots of additives. We add half of a small banana to our porridge and have half an orange each instead of juice. We make our bread and cakes, grow some fruit, make kefir and jam, and cook everything at home. 

I check the offers, the yellow stickered produce, and Aldi 30% or 50% off, and make use of the freezer to portion out the meat and fish for another week. I freeze weekly rations of cheese and butter and there is no more until the next Sunday. I made a lot of butter when fancy cream was sold off for pennies after Christmas, and made custard with the boozy buttermilk. We have four hens securely fenced in the garden, and have a surplus of eggs. I take a flask of tea (Asda loose leaf tea £1.50) or coffee (Aldi coffee beans £1.99) and a picnic when we go out. 

I hope that you can control your food budget, before your children become teenagers. One blogger sets herself short challenges, a set amount for a month, a use up the store cupboard month, a no waste month, to warn the family and try new more frugal ideas. 

carboot_karaoke

As a child growing up in a big family and now as a mother of a hungry brood myself l can empathise.  

My advice is to
1) Work out where the money is going.   That's going to take a bit of time going through receipts. But the research will focus you on the areas that will make the most impact quickly. 

2) Do a full freezer and cupboard inventory,  again it's time consuming but will avoid repeat purchases. If you write it up you'll only need to do it once and then cross things off when used

3) ALWAYS do a food plan, then base your shopping list on ingredients needed for the weeks dinners. This might cut down on visits to the shops and the inevitable extra spending whilst there.

I could go on but I think you already have a lot of good ideas, I'm going to try some myself 😀

gollygosh

I know this isn't ‘food’ but I hope it might help, with a family of six I bet your washing machine works overtime! Buy the cheapest supermarket own brand washing powder you can find and only use a dessert spoonful in the drawer, I wash everything on a 27 minute ‘refresh’ wash and if I want anything to smell nice I add a few drops of Zoflora to the conditioner drawer. Even hubbies grottiest work trousers still come out clean. Bulk buying anything you can, Pasta/flour etc is the way I keep the unit cost as low as possible. Good luck to you.

MrsStepford

When shopping in a supermarket, shop for the meat and fish first, then dairy, beans, nuts and produce. Growing children need protein and calcium.

 Frozen veg are often cheaper than fresh and have more nutrients, as they are flash frozen when fresh. Produce can be sitting around in warehouses for days. Iceland has a good range of frozen veg including broad beans, petits pois, mixed veg, okra, corn cobs, sweetcorn, jacket spuds, sweet potato fries. 

Add herbs & spices to veg to perk them up. 

Baking potatoes are pretty cheap. Baked beans, coleslaw or cheese can be added. A soupmaker makes soup in 28 mins. Ours (Tefal) washes itself up. Soup and a spud is filling and cheap, especially if you can get wonky veg or yellow sticker stuff.