Meals on £30 a week for 2 people?

Raymond Lin said:
£15 each for a week?

You can do that.

Porridge for breakfast, that leaves 2 meals a day for the rest of the week.

Have sandwiches for lunch and you can have a bigger budget for dinner.
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This.

Porridge with either a spoonful of sugar or honey.

Sandwich (Cheese, Ham, Jam, Marmite, Peanut Butter - take your pick)

Dinner
- Bit more budget, but think ahead :)

Worst case, Pasta and Cheese.

kd
 
arknor said:
tyou might want to look what they eat with those potatoes , rice and pasta.
then work out the cost.
then work out the op can not do it for £15 a week
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potatoes/rice/pasta are pennies
vegetables are pennies
fruit takes a bit more searching, but I get lucky a lot (melon - 2p :))

If you don't eat a lot of meat, £15 is easy.
deuse said:
Yes and the £1.55p ones are next to them ;)
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Hmm, I shall have to investigate, although their own brand versions are a bit minging tbh, even for me.

I see you're no bargain shopper :D
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Actually the opposite, I clear the shelves of all the late night reduced stuff. You should see the look on women's faces as I hand over £10 and haul five bags of shopping off the till :D Makes their food budget look like Mischief's shoe fund.
 
99p store or poundland and buy the pasta or noodles and the tin meals, my dad does it and lives on 10 quid a week due to paying his debts off.
 
Very possible.

Buy frozen veg so that it doesn't go off, try to shop near to closing time and plan meals on what's reduced occasionally. Pasta / Rice / Potatoes, frozen veg and meat if needed. Measure out portions correctly, a big bag of nuts can help with urges to snack although do add to the cost of shopping.

Cook in massive bulk and freeze as much as possible. if buying fresh/fruit and veg don't chuck it away if it looks like it's going bad. Veg can be simmered and blended into soup, fruit can be blended into smoothies.
 
Oh and porridge and milk/water is a good staple. Easy and good for you, really really cheap. Can also add cinnamon /jam / bananas / peanut butter as a means of mixing it up occasionally too.
 
Assuming you don't just have £15 left at the end of every week to spend on food, and can bulk buy then you can do it fairly easily and eat fairly well, don't buy pre prepaired stuff and buy things that will feed you more than once.

Pick up a couple of chickens from a supermarket, unless you have issues with it the halal ones are often cheaper and the quality isn't too bad for what you pay. Joint it yourself, and you can have enough for 6 meals, with 4 breasts, 4 thighs, and the carcass to make stock and you have enough for soups etc.

Pick up meat that is about to go out of date as it will be heavily reduced, especially the day before it can't be sold any more, and stick it in the freezer.

Italian food is very good for very simple, but decent food. You can rustle up a very tasty pasta dish using only olive oil, some dried chilli and a clove of garlic.

Also look for things that can be batch cooked, you can make a damn tasty bolognese, from giorgio locatelli (sp?) for bugger all, if you time it right, get into asda (or where ever) and pick up a couple of their 1kg packs of mince before they go off and are reduced down to a couple of quid, add some garlic, a couple of onions, a carrot, a stick of celery, and a litre of tomato pasata and and 1 litre of water, and your done (it wont be quite as tasty as the full recipie that calls for a bottle of red wine, but with some careful seasoning and maybe some worcester sauce it will be decent. That will make 8 servings so enough for 4 meals.

You have to get creative with a small budget as what you can get will vary, one week you may be able to pick up a load of chickens that are due to go out of date, but then the next time you go you may be able to pick up a cheap topside or something, so you have to be flexible.

Also only buy what you need when it comes to veg, yes that big bag of onions may look cheap when compared per 100g, but if you end up binning half of them then you have wasted money, if you have a local greengrocer then when you need some veg pop in there, if you only need 1 onion, then only buy 1 onion, or 2 carrots or whatever, but don't needlesly buy veg that wont get eaten, just because it looks cheaper to buy a big bag rather than nip out to buy 1 carrot.
 
Everyone always lists a load of pasta/rice/potatoes but that isn't very nutritious or tasty.

Instead look at vegetables, many are really cheap. Carrots, onions, leaks, broccoli, turnips, swede, celery etc. you can use these to make soups or as a basis in stews or to bulk out chili, spag Bol etc. the benefit beyond price is that they are healthy. Also look for frozen veg, e.g. Peas just as healthy as fresh.

Also look for dried beans/pulses/lentils. Take a bit to work with but a bag of kidney beans costs nothing.

Bulk buy, as in go to Costco and buy 6 month supply of things like stock cubes, oil, spices.

Next, don't underestimate how cheap some meats are. Frozen chickens, frozen beef mince, fresh chicken legs. Also pork, you can sometimes can giant porc butts or shoulders for nothing per lb.

Then it is all about making large batches.


Also look in the discount section with food near sell by date, take it one even if you don't need it and freeze. It.


As soon as you cut out snacks and drinks you save a load anyway.
 
Spud21 said:
Assuming you don't just have £15 left at the end of every week to spend on food, and can bulk buy then you can do it fairly easily and eat fairly well, don't buy pre prepaired stuff and buy things that will feed you more than once.

Pick up a couple of chickens from a supermarket, unless you have issues with it the halal ones are often cheaper and the quality isn't too bad for what you pay. Joint it yourself, and you can have enough for 6 meals, with 4 breasts, 4 thighs, and the carcass to make stock and you have enough for soups etc.

Pick up meat that is about to go out of date as it will be heavily reduced, especially the day before it can't be sold any more, and stick it in the freezer.

Italian food is very good for very simple, but decent food. You can rustle up a very tasty pasta dish using only olive oil, some dried chilli and a clove of garlic.

Also look for things that can be batch cooked, you can make a damn tasty bolognese, from giorgio locatelli (sp?) for bugger all, if you time it right, get into asda (or where ever) and pick up a couple of their 1kg packs of mince before they go off and are reduced down to a couple of quid, add some garlic, a couple of onions, a carrot, a stick of celery, and a litre of tomato pasata and and 1 litre of water, and your done (it wont be quite as tasty as the full recipie that calls for a bottle of red wine, but with some careful seasoning and maybe some worcester sauce it will be decent. That will make 8 servings so enough for 4 meals.

You have to get creative with a small budget as what you can get will vary, one week you may be able to pick up a load of chickens that are due to go out of date, but then the next time you go you may be able to pick up a cheap topside or something, so you have to be flexible.

Also only buy what you need when it comes to veg, yes that big bag of onions may look cheap when compared per 100g, but if you end up binning half of them then you have wasted money, if you have a local greengrocer then when you need some veg pop in there, if you only need 1 onion, then only buy 1 onion, or 2 carrots or whatever, but don't needlesly buy veg that wont get eaten, just because it looks cheaper to buy a big bag rather than nip out to buy 1 carrot.
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To get around veg going off you can dice it up and freeze it. Next time you need some onside pull a bag it of the freezer and fry from frozen, same with other veg.

Also if you have a load of beg that needs using up make some thick vege soup.

I actually miss cooking on a budget. Always added an interesting dimension and meant you had to be more creative. These days I just buy high quality steaks etc. so my cooking standards have actually decreased!
 
It's doable but I imagine it will get boring quite quickly. Also need to make sure that you are getting the nutrition you need too.

I once lived on 5p beans and value toast for about a month when I was a student. Not enjoyable! :)
 
My shopping for a family of 3 is sometimes only 70 quid a week and we eat well.

This a do able I would say
 
Yes.

I'm a carnivore, because I can afford to be.

Meat is a luxury, people in the developed world often forget this simple fact. £15 is plenty for a vegetable based diet incorporating cheap sources of protein - eggs mainly.
 
If it's just food you're buying with that £30 then it's not difficult imo. If you've gotta get other groceries such as washing powder/cleaning products/pet food etc then you might have a harder time.

Our weekly shop for two people normally comes in at about £50 for everything, and probably only £30-35 of that is actual food. We eat well, have meat as often as we like and most of it is home-made food. We also get our shop from Ocado, so definitely not the cheapest place to go, but we do find we save money shopping online compared to going in store.
 
We eat on a shopping budget of £30 a week for 2.

We will do every three months a meat shop from the butchers and freeze (roughly £50). Before freezing we will separate the meat into meals we will eat.

All our pasta, ketchup,cereals, tuna and butter are purchased from Costco. (monthly £30).

We buy no pre made food (we obviously have some frozen pizzas, fish fingers and waffles just in case!), eat salmon once a week, and 1 - 2 meat dishes. The rest is vegetarian such as fajitas, quorn spag bowl, lasagne, pasta. I also find making curries and Eastern food very cheap and very tasty.

I often eat left overs for lunch.

We pre plan our meals for the week before we shop, and have almost 0 food wastage each week. Nor do we have the tins or spices sitting there for years.

We never feel like we are eating on a budget, and don't really know how we could spend more on our shop.
 
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