How To Feed Your Family Well On a Budget
Spend Less And Keep Your Food Tasty and Interesting
Mar 3, 2009
If you want to feed a family well but inexpensively, cook from scratch. This rule is rather obvious, but often invokes images of slaving at the stove for hours. It doesn't need to be like that. There is a vast number of dishes that can be cooked in 30 minutes or less, and there are even more that take longer to cook but barely minutes to prepare. Buy yourself Nigel Slater's excellent 30 Minute Cook and start from there.
Ready-made or prepared from the packet deserts are either awful or expensive. It's so much cheaper and easier to make simple puddings yourself: fruit salads, crumbles, fools and creams, pancakes and simple cakes are all easy to make, cheap and will taste so much better. Other tips:
Be Creative With Recipes
You can replace ingredients in may recipes and still get excellent results. Use frozen veg when fresh are out of season. Use less meat and more vegetables in stews and casseroles. Granulated sugar works fine in many sweet recipes and is cheaper than caster sugar. Some cakes work with margarine as well as with butter (though never use margarine for frying, creams and bread, it's disgusting).
Use Cheaper Cuts
This is probably one of the easiest ways to lower your food bill and at the same time often produce tastier food. Cheaper cuts of meat are often fattier, and that means they often taste better. Sometimes they simply require longer cooking or slightly more preparation, but they are excellent in curries, stews, casseroles, or even grilled and roasted.
The best example is probably chicken: chicken breasts are expensive, while chicken legs are among the cheapest poultry cuts there are. You can probably halve the price of your final dish by substituting one for another. Similarly with lamb, neck of lamb is a great, flavoursome cut to use for stews while being cheaper than diced "stewing lamb". Streaky belly pork cooks to melting tenderness, better than any other pork cut (but it takes at least couple of hours in the oven or on the slow hob).
Go Ethnic
Ethnic cookery has a wealth of cheap recipes that will bring colours and flavours to your kitchen while keeping the cost down. Indian food is wonderful, varied and can be produced very cheaply. Chinese, Mexican and North African cookery are also well worth checking. Italian pastas make a virtue of simplicity. Invest in some spices (buy from ethnic shops) and a few quality items (eg good olive oil) and you will never look back.
Go Veggie
Vegetarian food, especially ethnic vegetarian food, can be a great way to lower the costs. Don't use meat substitutes, though, which defies the purpose. Cook with pulses (lentils are good as they cook quickly, or use tinned beans of all sorts), roots and experiment with unusual types. Indian vegetarian food is particularly good, but many Eastern European dishes use curd cheese and other milk products in interesting ways.
And finally, shop for your food wisely.
