Feeding ourselves frugally
I do love a meal plan, don't you? I mean I have a wee addiction to meal planning - we always have one, and I don't know how folk manage without one!
Anyway - it's been a while since I've written about planning our food, and it's such a good way to save on spending, so I thought I'd share my ideas here.
Since we visited Warwick castle in mid-August, we have been saving like mad for our next trip. The easiest way for me to save a few pennies each week is to make our meals cheaper - while they are still nutritious.
This week I have included:
Homemade vegetarian sausage rolls - made from chopped mushrooms and onion with mustard and dried sage. They were pretty yummy!! I made enough for us to have them over three meals - once with loads of steamed veg and twice with a jacket potato. We eat our main meals at lunchtime and a small meal - or supper - at tea time. Our main meals this week included egg and chips - potatoes cut into thick slice and roasted with a fried egg.
I have spent just over £20 on fruit and vegetables, and bought half a dozen eggs to supplement what we already had in the house. We have enough lentils to make two more big meals - something like a cottage pie or a stew - as well as a bag of pasta. In our freezer we have two kg bags of frozen spinach to use. I'm planning to make a potato and spinach dahl with some of this.
So anyway, these are the meals we have had:
Sausage casserole (veg sausages)
Homemade pasties
Woolton pie
Cottage pie
Goulash - made with home grown tomatoes
Roasted vegetables with gravy
Quiche for a picnic
Chicken and mushroom pie - Quorn pieces instead of chicken
Lentil cottage pie
Cauliflower and broccoli cheese
They all look delicious as well as super-frugal. xx
ReplyDeleteWe're very fortunate in that we don't have to be frugal, but even so, I never waste food.
ReplyDeleteMy parents were both 13 when WW2 started, so they were both well aware of how to live with little food.
We are meat eaters, although we have at least two 'all veggie' days per week.
I never throw food away, unless absolutely necessary, a chicken makes a dinner using the breasts, another meal using the drumsticks, the wings and carcass are picked clean, the carcass makes stock, and the picked off meat goes into a fried rice or pasta dish.
We have 'fridge' soup quite often, using whatever veg needs using up, we love our random veg soups!
Leftover bread is frozen and used as coatings or mixed into savoury crumble toppings.
We grow herbs, and if we have a glut of any, they're frozen with a tiny drop of water in ice cube trays, then tipped into freezer bags.
I go through an enormous amount of lentils, I have a lovely lentil curry recipe which I batch cook and freeze, it saves a lot of time and 'faffing' about. Cottage pie made with green lentils and a celeriac mash is very popular in this house, so I batch cook and freeze that too.
We love Woolton pie, and I also make a really good 'Blind Scouse', served, of course with the obligatory (home made) pickled red cabbage and crusty bread!
A neighbour brought over three exceptionally large Marrows from his garden last weekend, so we had one stuffed with a mix of cheese, onions and breadcrumbs, one was made into Marrow Chutney, and the third is now Marrow, Lemon and Ginger Jam!
One of our favourite suppers is a baked potato, with 'pointy' cabbage. The cabbage is cut in half vertically, then sliced across very thinly and stir 'fried' in vegetable stock and seasoning for about four or five minutes, with a bit of butter melted in at the very end, if wished. It's really lovely!
I am appalled by the amount of food wasted, especially rice. So many people cook far too much rice, and throw the excess away, which is awful, as rice is such a staple and cheap food in poorer nations. There are children on this earth who starve to death for want of a bowl of rice!