SW on a budget?

raquelscatt

Full Member
I know this has probably been posted loads before, but I wonder if you have any tips for SW on a budget!

I try to keep our weekly shopping bill to around £80 for 2 adults, 2 kids and a small dog! Fruit alone tho has cost me a small fortune in Tesco this morning and that will be gone by Sunday!

We do tend to eat a lot of meat but I am prepared to reduce this for cheaper, tasty meals!
 
Do you have a local green grocer? I found a wonderful one yesterday in Durham. Tray of 30 eggs for £1.50, 10 large apples for £1, 10 sweet and juicy oranges for £1, 3 pineapples for £1, 3 melons £1.25, absolutely fab!
 
If you do a search under 'budget' in the sw section you'll find quite a number of threads
 
Try doing your shopping about an hour before the supermarket closes and look for the reduced stuff.

Also check out your local food market, again, about an hour before closing time - last week I got 2 large punnets strawberries, 3 medium punnets raspberries, 2x blackberries, 2x blackcurrants & 2x blueberries all for £1 per fruit. Also got huge bags of tomatoes, mushrooms and quite a few different veggies all for £1 each. I ended up spending around £10 but the whole lot would easily have cost me between £20 - £30 if I'd bought them in the supermarket.

Also try economising with your recipes. I cook for 3 adults in our house and when I use a 1 lb pack of mince I can make 2 meals out it and both meals yield around 5 or 6 large portions. My husband and son are both big meat lovers and they have no idea that there are more veggie ingredients than meat in the meal. ;)

I fry 1 lb mince with loads of mushrooms and onions and then half the mixture - freezing half of it for a meal later in the week. If I make spag bol, I add half a chopped yellow, red & green pepper, several grated carrots, a grated courgette and half a grated aubergine (peel the aubergine and courgette first - if there's no skin on it then it just cooks down into the smartprice toms and passata that I use and there's no trace of it so they can't complain, ;))

A handful of red lentils thrown into any casserole type dish will bulk it out.

If I do mince & onions then I will add lots of finely dice carrots and about a quarter of a bag of smartprice frozen peas, a few lentils to thicken it so I don't use as much gravy granules (extra syns) and don't forget the beef stock cubes to give it a meaty flavour. My wok is almost full but I've only used 1/2 lb mince and I still get around 6 large portions from this.

Its also worth checking out the moneysavingexpert forums for lots of ideas how to save money on your shopping and for cheap recipe ideas.
Old Style MoneySaving - MoneySavingExpert.com Forums
 
- - - Fruit alone tho has cost me a small fortune in Tesco this morning and that will be gone by Sunday! - - -

A friend of mine with four in her family used to find that she would buy fruit and it would disappear very quickly. Then she decided to "ration" it. She would only put out a small amount of what she had bought, and hide the rest.

And she found that the family were simply eating it because it was there. When it wasn't there they weren't that worried. I am not suggesting that anyone should be deprived, but maybe you might try not putting all the goods on display at once!
 
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