Be Excellent To Each Other

Sorry, I must be going blind /

Before I start eating fluff off the carpet from Tuesday onwards, I decided to bloat myself on a nice, large, dominos pizza. With dessert, and a drink. Total cost, about £18, the same amount as my budget for the first week

I thought you were eating cheaply, not becoming a lesbian.

I do my first shop tomorrow. Without any specific meal in mind (i.e., don't refer me to your previous recipes, I'll be looking at those anyway), please recommend some good generic ingredients that can be used in a wide variety of meals. Nice 'n cheap too.

Pie.

Can be used in Pie and chips AND pie and mash.


mmm...pie.

Pie can also be used in cake, to make delicious Pie Cake (or Cake Pie if you're southern).

carrots, onion and potatoes. Carrots are a good snacking food. They can also be used with mince to bulk the mince out and make it go further in something like a shepherds pie. Onions will give your cooking flavour. Potatoes. I know you are not thinking of specific meals, but if you made something like a cottage pie, a good generous amount of potato made into mash, with a pound of mince and carrots, onion for flavour would easily make four or five portions. That's nearly a whole week of meals for about £3 - £3.50, mince included. Obviously, this could then be frozen down and eaten in future weeks - so then affording you a little more money for treats on the weeks where you can eat ready made portions of food.

I'd recommend cooking in multiple portions always. After a couple of weeks you'll have loads of stuff already made to enjoy, and can treat yourself to bits and bobs you fancy.

Good luck again!!

Mimi is more useful than the rest of you bloody pie-cake-pie chancers combined. Cheers Meems

My pleasure.

Peppers - by which I mean capsicum peppers. You get a pack of three for around £1.50-£2.00. You cna use them to add flavour and bulk to stuff. eg in stor fries or on top of a chicken fillet.

£2 for a pack of three peppers is quite expensive if you only have a weekly budget of £17 or so, I think. Peppers are a relatively expensive vegetable. if yo enjoy spice you can pick up a pack of Indian dried peppers, crushed in a big ba for 55p at the supermarket. They'll last you over a year, you need only a sprinkle to add lots of flavour, and you can spend your money on fods that give you more physical weight in food for your money.

Also, either tinned tomatoes or some passata should always, always be in your cupboard, CUS.

Actually, both. Also, some cheap tomato puree. You can get all three for well under a pound, and can knock up a great pasta sauce on those days that you haven't got many ideas. Add in the onions and the rest of that mince and you have a bolognese.

What you need are ingredients that you can combine in many ways to make different dishes.

Also, cook a few extra potatoes if you boil any. Let them cool and slice them the next day, then fry them with a little chilli, or some salt and pepper as an easy and very cheap alternative to chips.

Corned beef if you like it and are not a veggie has a lot of flavour, and is cheap. You can make corned beef hash using your friends the potato and the onion this way, too.

Good luck Comical and enjoy your brekkie!

Of pie.

haha, a truly cackhanded start to the day, I'm having weetabix that I already have in the cupboard before I go shopping for real food later.

Haven't Tescos and Asda just chopped a huge amount off their staple groceries. I seem to recall reading about an impending price war or something.

Bread is so expensive now

I found some spuds growing in the edge of the field next to my house.

The field is planted with Barley, so these potatoes are self-growing, left over from a few years ago probably. A bit further along there's a wood, and in the wood there's kind of sandy ground with several big holes in it. Last night, there were two baby badgers running about, they are teh cute. So that's what lives in the holes.

Anyway we went back later and dug them up and ate them for tea. They were very nice.

The potatoes.

Good luck, Mister Gnomes.

I shall be following your efforts with interest.

Not sure if anyone's asked this or not, but does eating something cooked by another count as a cheap meal?

It's a fun project, by the way. As a cheapskate and absymal cook, I'm looking forward to your adventures.

He's said if he eats food from elsewhere he has to roughly cost it up and add it to his total.

What's a rough cost for breastmilk anyway?

mmmmm, boobs.

Six months, minimum security.

@Comical Gnomes: so, you have egg noodles, rice and pasta?
Have you already listed the entire contents of your cupboards? If not - Larder-Me-Do! What exactly do you have? Do you, for example, have any soy sauce? What else?

I was about to say that - all you need is a bit of chilli and/or soy sauce to make noodles palatable.

Come on CG, this could be your first low-cost meal and you're trying to avoid it

Good plan CUS, I'll do a complete inventory when I get back from the shops. There is a bit of soy sauce in the fridge, I think.

I also feel unable to cook while the man is still here cleaning carpets. For some reason I can't do things like talk on the phone or play games while there's a man in the house doing work. Odd.

I'm the same Had a Virgin technician (missus) around earlier. When he arrived, I was playing Rock Band. When he left, I almost offered him £5 as a tip Oh, the guilt of the non-handy.

I can answer this, roughly. Breastfeeding a baby rather than feeding from a bottle will save you about £900 over 12 months.
Assuming baby feeds 8 times a day (roughly), that's £(900 / 365) / 8 = 30p a meal.

What if you bottle feed the baby but sell the milk on... specialist... websites?

Boobs are superior. This is not information I did not already know.

I am back! With food! Before I can tell you what I bought I must eat something before I collapse and die.

CG - does this mean you committed the cardinal sin of going shopping whislt you were hungry?

For shame.

How cheap[sic] can you eat, ComicalGnomes?

Eh? What did I do now? As it happens, I do always, always have at least eight tins of tomatoes. Usually Neapolina (sic?).


You ARE Vegetables' friend's house-mate AICMFP.

Hehe, sorry, CUS, I have done that before. I must have been tired, I meant CG, of course.

Ok, I've updated today's entry with everything I bought:

http://www.pimpthatsnack.com/eat/



It took me about an hour to muster enough energy to write that post.

20p for a tin of beans? They saw you coming, son. I'm sure you can get the cheapie beans from ASDA for about 9p a can.

That milk is expensive too.

Decent start there, I think. I assume Sainsburys didn't have the 2 for £5/£6 on chicken breast. You can get plenty out of that.

Veg in packets is a big con. Go to your local greengrocer and be amazed at the savings you will make. You can buy just 1 or 2 of each item and if you explain what you are up to he'll suggest what's cheap at the moment.

Ditto your local butcher.

There was also a thing about this on Channel 4 the other week but I've known it for years from first hand experience.

Not much you can do about milk, they only sell one kind really. The chicken breasts were sainsburys basic, so no deal on them but they were the cheapest one there. Turkey mince was a good 70p cheaper than beef but its good enough for me.

The only precooked meat I've bought is that flavoured stuff that are two packs for a fiver. I reckon they'll be able to fill my sandwiches for at least a week, making my lunch £1 a day, and sounded pretty good to me. 26p for spread! Amazing.

Worth bearing in mind that again, I'm not travelling to multiple shops to get the very cheapest stuff. I always go to sainsburys (nearest local) so this is rather how cheap I can eat without changing my life too radically. You'll always be able to spend less if you go to lots of different and strange places, but that isn't really the idea here. This is changing my buying and cooking habits within my familiar environment and seeing how it goes. 'Local butcher' and 'Local greengrocer' simply don't exist around here.

I think thats loads of food for £30 though, I haven't bought so much meat in ages and not a piece of quorn in sight!

Aldi is very good for some things, the Lidl in Cheadle Hulme is good as well.

Turkey mince is better for you than the beef as well, with much, much less fat.

I went to Lidl today and bought two large Tesco bags for life of stuff for £15. Fresh herbs are half price at the mo as is all fresh fruit and veg.

Where the heck is that? I lived in CH for a year and don't recall there being a Lidl. There's a Tesco express and a piddly Sommerfield, and a Morrisons is you head towards Cheadle Heath, but Lidl?

Councillor Lane.

See that stubby road to the right of Calderbank Drive? There.

Aha, tucked down that road. I've been all around there, but never down there itself

But it's skimmed milk! Why not buy full-fat for the same price then water it down to make it go further?

(PS. Check the dates on that sandwich meat; if one pack is likely to run out by the time you get round to it, bung it in the freezer then let the pieces you want to use defrost in the fridge overnight -- making the sandwich at night with the frozen meat and leaving it in the fridge works fairly well)