Frugal Friday on Saturday - Housekeeping and the Grocery Bill

On MSE, someone mentioned that they were struggling to get their food bill down  and wondered how others managed to stick to such a low budget for two adults. I was thinking about this when I was soaking kidney beans yesterday, so I thought I’d elaborate a little on how we do it.  Our full housekeeping budget is:-

£120 - MSE Grocery Challenge/general groceries/Farm shop & supermarket shopping

£ 40 - Meat Fund (spent irregularly at the butcher’s and Costco 

£ 40 - Bulk Fund (used for Costco spends, WingYip and booze)

£ 20 - Christmas (for the goose (£107 last year), tree, chocolates, etc)

£ 10 - Garden Fund

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£230

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That’s £60 up from when I started my blog in 2007.  (I think groceries were £100, Meat and Bulk were £30 each, Christmas £10 and we didn’t have a garden fund, back then.)

We eat really well:  plenty of home-made curries, stir-fries, stews, risotto, pasta, the odd roast, some vegetarian dishes.  For a stew, I’ll use about 300g of meat, plus onions, garlic, carrots, maybe peppers, and a (pre-cooked, dried) pulse or broad beans from the freezer.   I don’t do a lot of “meat and two veg” because, frankly, I find that boring.  

Most meals give 4 portions.  For portion control, I dish up the next day’s lunches as the same time as our dinner ( prevents my DH eating a second portion). 

A big secret is planning.  I don’t mean meal-planning, which I do rather badly. (I tend to stand in front of the fridge/freezer after dinner and think “what have we got in?  What needs to be used up?  What haven’t we eaten lately?”, when considering what we’ll eat for dinner the next day.). It’s about thinking ahead and cooking for more than one meal at a time - those kidney beans that I mentioned?  That was for three meals; two 400g portions are now in the freezer.   I’ll do the same with chickpeas, mung beans, black-eyed beans - dried the dried pulses we have in stock.  Since most of my recipes start “fry onion with garlic, add mushrooms”, I’ll cook up double quantities and freeze the second portion as “Base”, for those days when I’m time poor.

It’s also about thinking of the meal possibilities when you purchase meat.  A roast chicken is dinner one night (the legs), Chinese the next (one breast), then risotto (the other meat) on the third night, plus stock.  A 1kg package of cooking bacon from L!dl costs £1.39, will be split into 4 and  one portion can make any of the following:  Cuban Black Bean Stew, Breakfast Pie, Tuna Lasagne, regular Lasagne, “Bacon & Egg McMuff!ns”, Coq au Vin, etc.

Some of it is about buying in bulk, so I’d suggest you put £5-£10 a month aside for buying good storage containers.  (I use Lock-n-Lock; they aren’t cheap but are critter-proof and water-tight.).   Once you have those, save the cash for a large pressure cooker, in which to cook your pulses.

I only have one type of flour in stock - the bread flour sold as “chapatti” or “Atta” flour, which comes in 10kg bags and costs between £3 and £4 a bag.   It gets used for everything that needs flour: bread cakes (add 1tsp baking powder per cup to make “self-raising”); pastry; pancakes;  Toad in the Hole, etc.  A 2kg bag of kidney beans costs around £3.50, which equates to about 15p a can (NB each 400g can gives 250g cooked beans).   That bag of beans will last us at least 4-6 months. 

HTH

- Pam