Shopping Bill

I reduce my shopping bill by going for a curry 3 times a week.

 

Tonight was jersey royals, two peppered beef steaks from Iceland salad coleslaw.

Calorie wise it’s about 850 and C45g protein.

Usually, I eat a lot of chicken, breast or thigh done in some kind of herb or spice mix. Get them in massive tubs from Costco for example. With rice, couscous, salad, accompaniment. Or a stir fry.

Chicken you can get for £5 per kilo tops. A kilo does five meals.

Prawns frozen from Iceland or Costco as a change.

A lasagne made from scratch barring the betchamel sauce which I can’t make for love nor money as I don’t have the patience and the pasta sheets.. it’ll feed me for four/five meals depending what I put in it. It costs as much for the wine to tip in the sauce as it does for the rest of it. I’m not drinking half a bottle of ***** while it cooks.

Chilli... five portions for about a tenner.

The term premium ingredients especially with herbs spices etc. Put the work in and you’ll find most of them in B&M etc half the price of elsewhere...

 

‘Premium ingredients’ was referring to the protein mainly. We eat a lot of somewhat exotic fish, which isn’t cheap from a fishmonger, we also eat a decent amount of steak. It’s not unheard of for us to spend £15 for a couple of fillets of fish. Especially when it comes to things like swordfish, Sea Bass, Monkfish. We do eat chicken too, but we try not to have the exact same protein twice in a week.

We buy everything online, but we try and use small businesses rather than supermarket where possible. Especially for Butchers, Greengrocers, Fishmonger etc.

 

If I told my wife to shop in Iceland she’d be looking at hotels and flights

 

You’ll not find a butcher in town who won’t do you a deal on meat. Even the farm shops.

I’ll never order fresh fish online. I like to see what I am buying. And more importantly the smell.

 

Our food bill has gone up relatively steeply since the pandemic COVID-19

Georgio has developed a real penchant for grain fed lamb sausages which has burnt a real hole in my pocket.

On top of all the essentials like smoked salmon, chorizo, first pressing olives and locally sourced cheeses we buy all the usual stuff.

Between our family of two and our pet cat Lownsbrough we spend about £300 a week, with an extra £35 on the sausages

George Spicer.

 

£150 a week
Family of 5
£200 with booze

You can replace bechamel sauce with creme freche with a bit of Parmesan grated in - works a treat

 

£150-£180 a week for 5 of us

 

We used to spend about £20 a week on average for two of us but since we’ve been ordering from Prime Now we are now spending £80 a fortnight. We’re having to really pad that out with things like washing detergent etc. to meet the minimum spend requirements. Like you, we shop around but basically we only buy brand stuff when it is on offer and then we buy a few to tide us through until the offer comes back. E.g. only buy certain frozen pizza when it is £2 and never when £4. Only buy Domino’s jars when £1 and not at £2. Only buy toothpaste when £3 not £5 etc. (so we might buy 3 or 4 of the thing when it’s on offer and when we are down to the last one, we’ll start keeping an eye out for it being on offer again). If we didn’t buy enough to tide us through, we just won’t have it for a while, it’s never a staple thing that we would miss like milk so there’s plenty of other things we can eat until it is back on again.

 

Asda prices have definitely gone up over the last few months. We're spending £80-110 a week for me, the wife and daughter back from uni. Gonna be trying Aldi and Lidl this week...

 

So let me get this right.. so you dont have leave the house you are spending double what you previously did?

 

About 50 quid on bacca, similar on booze and drugs, couple of quid on food.

 

You really shouldn't be padding out your dinner with washing detergent Jamdrop. I think you've been listening to too much Donald Trump.

I do the same with things like toothpaste. Buy 3 or 4 when they're cheap and then buy them again when I'm down to one. I don't do it with the larger items though like kitchen roll etc because it takes up too much space and I don't do it with toilet roll because it would be in my cupboard for 5 years

One thing I always do now is to look at the price per kilo for everything and will buy whichever of similar items is the cheapest that way rather than which costs less

 

About 100 quid a week on food and maybe 20 on alcohol. Gone up a bit in lockdown but going out costs reduced from 150 a week to nowt.

 

This feels about right. I only buy food when I can afford it.

 

Yes but only on things we will use anyway and prices have increased which accounts for some of that. I’m not eating out anywhere so I need food to replace that. Everything I buy will get used, I just have a couple of spares of some things rather than getting down to the last one. I now save loads of time not having to drive there, queue up, shop and drive back. I also have less chance of getting a deadly virus so I can’t pass it on to anyone else (that’s my main thing, I go into school every week and I refuse to do anything that may pass it on. When school closes for summer on Friday I may start going back to the shop physically every fortnight).

 

About £150 a week, family of 4.

 

Good work, sounds healthy.

 

Lownsbrough, what a delightful name for a cat.

Incidently, you could always cut back on your meat intake to reduce costs; I've heard a little sausage goes a long way.

 

I haven’t seen a queue since June except for Next and Wilkos bizarrely in town.