Hello Dear Reader,

I often get emails asking how we manage to keep our grocery bills so low. I will admit, I have it easier than some people. We don’t have any children at home and neither of us are fussy about what we eat. We’ll happily eat stew every night for a week if that’s what there is. Neither of us are ‘foodies’ which to be is just food trends and snobbery. I don’t need anything to be ‘artisan’. I try to buy as much local food as I can and then British. I buy NZ lamb but often the lamb I buy from my butchers is Welsh.

The picture above is my week’s shopping. It came in at a whopping £29.09! It’s scary how much we pay for food. There are no cleaning products, I buy them cheaply locally by using the re-fill scheme at the local shop. As there are no children in the house, a nine pack of loo rolls will last us a fortnight and they are always cheap at Aldi. I buy ‘basics’ from Tesco on a bi-monthly order and have a stack of flour, pasta, rice, ketchup, stock cubes and so on that I buy every other month or when my stocks have run down. We don’t eat much bread and I make two small loaves a week. Neither do we regularly eat cakes or biscuits and when we do, I have dry goods in store. I also buy UHT milk every other month and we get through a litre every two days. My bi-monthly Tesco basics usually comes to £50 including delivery.

Here is my meat purchases, these will last over a week. British belly pork was on offer at £1.89 so I bought two and we have one slice each with vegetables in one meal. The chicken thighs are for our Sunday roast and we’ll also eat them the next day too. The lamb shoulder chops will also be for as Sunday roast either this week or next. I always freeze the meat I buy or just buy it frozen. The pack of sausages will also ‘do us’ for two meals.

Here’s my fish purchases, mackerel, tuna and sardines. We usually eat fish with salad for lunch. I make our salad dressing from oil, vinegar and mustard. I buy good olive oil and vinegar in Aldi and then make it last as long as I can. I buy frozen pollock too from Lidl and it’s really good.

The week’s dairy purchases. One of our lunches will be feta with salad. The block of mature cheddar lasts almost a month. I make it last by grating it very finely and using it in cheese sauce, on top of pasta and sauce or to sprinkle on to something I have cooked or part of a recipe. It’s expensive and it’s not a snack food. I use butter as I’ve de-chemicaled our diet and we don’t eat ‘spreads’ any more.

Vegetables. Salads are usually white cabbage, beetroot, cucumber and celery. As I said, we’re not fussy and can quite happily eat the same things over and over. We also eat the veg that’s on offer, usually for 39p in Aldi, this week (remember The Fast show? and Jessie’s diets?) we will mostly be eating cabbage, carrots and brocolli.

Even with careful planning, watch our portion sizes and cooking everything from scratch. Food is so expensive and I know it’s a real struggle for families to pay for food. I also appreciate the fact that we have really great fresh food, at affordable prices (I know, that’s also relative) and our supermarkets and local traders do some amazing offers which is why we don’t need to use coupons.

If anyone from else where in the world is interested in our supermarkets and food prices or if you want to do price comparisons to lower your own food budget. You can take a look at www.mysupermarket.co.uk. I could go to our local supermarkets when they reduce the prices and buy it even cheaper but I’m conscious that people need the bargains more than I do.

Over to you, how do you keep prices down? Any American readers who ‘coupon’?

Until tomorrow,

Love Froogs xxx