Recently we've been trying to save some money and cut back and the main area we knew we spent too much on was food! So here are a few of my tips for saving money on your food shop that we've been trying over the last few months.
Tinned Food
We always go for the value version of things like chopped tomatoes and kidney beans, because to me they all taste the same, they're both around 30p each from most supermarkets. I use chopped tomatoes to make all sorts of sauces and I always have things like kidney beans in, in case we want to make a chilli and they're great to bulk up a meal. When it comes to baked beans we have started getting Aldi's, they are £1 for a pack of four and taste exactly like Branston beans.We go through them quite quickly and that's one thing we're usually get fussy about but Aldi's are honestly just as good. Another thing I've started buying recently is tinned potatoes. There have been so many times when we've bought a pack of new potatoes and then we change what we want so they just get thrown away. I'm sick of wasting them so I've been buying tinned potatoes instead. They're great to throw into a curry, it's really bulks it out and you can get a few more meals out of it then rather than just one nights. They're great done in the oven too in a load of herbs and salt and pepper! In Aldi I'm sure they're only 15p for a big tin which is brilliant!Leftovers and Portion Control
We really needed to get the size of our portions under control, we were always making too much pasta or rice so now we try to make sure we're weighing things before cooking. We try to do 75g of pasta each which doesn't look like much but is actually really filling, and none of it gets wasted. It means we're not always having to buy pasta aswell as there's always plenty left in the pack for more meals. For Rice we use Aldi Boil In The Bag Rice, 1 bag serves 2 and it's the perfect amount, and I love rice but even for me it's enough! For a pack of 4 it's only 59p which is an absolute bargain! We also really make an effort now to save any leftovers, if I make something like chilli there will be enough left for two more meals, so George sometimes takes a portion to work and I'll have some for lunch.Freezing Food
We don't have a microwave so we don't actually freeze our leftovers but we used to when we were in our flat in Leicester and it was always great to pick something out the freezer and re-heat it on nights we didn't want to cook. Normally we just leave leftovers in the fridge for the next day but we really would save a lot of money and time on nights we can't be bothered if we had frozen a few meals. I really recommend if you can, if you make something like Chilli or Bolognese, leave some spare and freeze in a Tupperware. Something else I have started doing recently is freezing fruit that is about to go out of date or hasn't been eaten. We have frozen fruit in anyway most of the time for smoothies and it's great to grab out the freezer to top porridge or cereal, usually works out a lot cheaper than buying fresh fruit that goes off so quickly aswell.Plan Simple Meals and Use Up What You Have
Most of the time I end up spending quite a lot of money on meat for the week, but recently I've been making more of an effort to use up what we have first before ordering more. I also see what packets and tins we have, e.g. spaghetti, rice, tinned potatoes etc. so I try to plan meals around those things rather than getting extra things when we already have other stuff in that I could do something with. If we have a lot of bacon, I'll plan to do something simple using that, 1 thing which we love is just pasta and bacon made with a tomato sauce. I warm up a tin of chopped tomatoes, add in some beef stock, herbs, seasoning and let it simmer to thicken a little bit then stir in cooked pasta and bacon and it's lovely! So easy to make and cheap ingredients. We also like pesto pasta, that's another simple meal and cheap. We get jars from Aldi for less than £1 and it's great for a meal one night and then extra for lunches in the week. We also like doing breakfast for tea occasionally, eggs are cheap, we always have beans and bread in, bacon is usually always in our fridge so we make a slimming world friendly fry up.
These were just a few of the ways we've been cutting our food bill down, recently our main shop has only been £30 (we budget £50 a week) and then with a few extra bits throughout the week and treats at the weekend it's ended up about £40 so we've been making a saving of at least £10 a week which for us is great! They all seem like pretty simple tips and you might already be doing some of these but I hope for a few people it's given you a few ideas on how to save some money.
Do you have any tips for saving money?
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