Feeding 8 for a week for 175 euros

sports_brah

sports_brah

sports_brah

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Anyone got some good ideas on how to make 175 euros(ish) stretch well for 8 people for a week (all meals).

Got a kitchen (oven, hobs, slow cooker, pots pans etc etc).

Got some basic ingredients already.

Basically, I want to show a healthier way of eating than what is currently happening.


The budget is to cover:

Breakfast (not that taken up)
Lunch
Dinner
Snacks.


Alcohol isn't included in the budget.


Thanks! :)
 
Pasta, giant vats of it for dinner with assorted sauces.

Baguettes or some form of sammies for lunch.

Brekkie, mainly toast and peanut butter or scrambled eggs and some bacon now and then.

Should be in budget, that's what about 8 of us did on a week long ski trip and it worked pretty well for the money you're talking about
 
What is currently happening? What are/were they eating?

What ingredients do you have?

What do you mean buy 'healthier'? Low fat? More vitamins?
 
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Large volumes of bolognese with pasta of choice. (Beef or pork mince, or a mixture of both)
Large volumes of chilli with baked potatoes. (Cheap cuts of beef slow cooked to get them tender)
Slow cooked beef curries, so you can use cheap cuts.
Egg fried rice. (Rice, 1 egg per person, frozen mixed veg, some soy sauce)
Vegetable stir fry.
Macaroni cheese.
Barley Risotto with roasted squash and leeks.

To be honest, feeding that many people on so little makes healthy difficult, as most cheap meals are bulked out by carbs.
 
~>Dg<~ said:
if people cant eat well on that budget damn :confused:
Click to expand...

Its not about eating well on budget, it's about eating healthy.

I can stuff myself at lunch time for £0.99 baguette. I can choose chicken and bacon or even a full breakfast baguette with 2 eggs, 2 sausages and 2 bacon for £1.49.

Sure I would be eating well but it's not exactly healthy.

To get a tuna salad from Pret would cost £4. If I were to make it my own by getting a bag of salad and a tin of tuna, that's at least £2 + £0.79 for dressing. It costs almost 3 x as much and not as filling.

For dinner, even a packet of the cheapest chicken breast costs £4. That's not enough to feed 8 people, with only like £20 a day for meals, it doesn't go very far, so you end up padding the meal put with cheaper ingredients. You will get fed and fed well but hard to get items like fish, fruit (have you seen the price of grapes?) and fresh meat.

As for snacks, healthy to me means fruits, nuts and perhaps some beef jerky of sorts. Nuts....£0.99 get you like a tiny packet. Fruits? Even apples are like £0.40p each so £8 becomes £3.20 which is a huge percentage in a £20 daily food budget just for 1 snack a day. What you end up snacking on would be carrots, £1 a bag, perhaps some houmous may just come into budget.

Bottom line is healthy living costs more. On a budget you ultimately end up with lots of pasta meals, or rice, with minimum fresh vegetables. Carbs is the name of the game here.

For me....if I were in charge...£20 a day for 8 people... that means £2.50 a day food budget.

Porridge for breakfast, lets say £0.50p
2 Bananas for lunch with an apple, say £0.50p
Canned Tuna and baked potato for dinner £1 for the tuna £0.50p for the potato.

The above is provided that there is milk in the house for the porridge....£1 for a 2 pint carton...otherwise it would be porridge in hot water.

See what I mean......I mean sure you can buy in bulk to cut costs when cooking for 8 but it would be very difficult to make it what I call healthy.
 
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10kg sack of rice for a tenner should feed a large family with a few pans or 2 large rice cookers or maybe one i dunno. 4-5 cups per meal should be plenty of that size of family i reckon. It should last quite along time. This is probably a good addition with regards to the huge pasta idea.
 
It's actually really not that hard to eat well on a tight budget (assuming you have some essentials already, as you say you do).

Basically you will be going meat free, or at least well reduced. You can make a cracking pinto bean chilli for virtually nothing. With some flour to make flat breads you have a very scalable (and bloody nice!) meal for very little.

Pearl barley risottos work a treat. Find good deals on meat. My local market does a deal on sausages where you get a pound free if you buy two (amazing sausages too). You can make a sausage stew with that.

Get to you local butcher and buy a whole free range chicken (~£8 for a >2kg bird). That will just feed 8 roasted with some bread and salad. Then you have the carcass to make stock - another meal.
 
The most expensive part will be the meat. Aim for cheaper cuts and most likely chicken is going to be your best bet.

Veg curry isn't a bad idea as you can pretty much use anything you like.

Cous cous, rice and pearl barley are great ways to fill up with minimal prep and can be added to easily.

I was going to post earlier about flat breads, they are SO easy and cheap to make (strong white bread flour, carbonated water, quick action yeast and a pinch of salt/pepper). You could add a crushed garlic clove to the mixture or do what I did at the weekend and rub a garlic clove onto the breads and then crush the clove into the salad (saves money and gives a lovely flavour to the bread without having to use the whole clove, risking overpowering the bread depending on the size of the clove).

Making things from scratch will save you money and make things go further but actually far more nutritional.

Pitta bread is easy to make as well and you can stuff some of those with almost anything for lunch.

Porridge for breakfast is great and by far and away a great health/cost solution and you can then add what you like to it, depending on what you have (worst case a blob of strawberry jam!)
 
Buy some feather skirt beef (pretty cheap cut and looks very fatty), boil it for at least an hour and use the meat AND stock to cook up a Massaman Curry - beautiful!
I will get round to putting the recipe up soon! :D
 
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