Best great budget recipes for 50% or less: Cottage Smallholder 2009 Challenge
Posted by Fiona Nevile in Save Money | 14 comments
Photo: Home grown potatoes
2008 was an eye opener for me. We set a challenge to save 25% on our over the counter spending. It was tough at first but by the end of the year we were almost enjoying the test. And the savings meant that sometimes we could afford real treats, visit the organic butcher and still save way beyond our original budget.
We actually managed to achieve an average of approximately 50% savings each month over the year. How did we achieve this level of saving? The secret was to try and ignore all the old strategies that haven’t worked for me in the past, such as:
- Menu Plans
- Drifting into the butcher shop and being seduced by meat, without being able to think practically on the spot
- Buying irrelevant offers without planning a future for them
- Shopping with a friend (it’s easy to return home with goods and treats that you just don’t need)
- Having a ceiling on the weekly spend. This is lethal. On some weeks you need to stock up on expensive items. Often people tend to set their average budget based on these higher spend weeks. Last year I’d take £25 out of the ATM before stepping into the supermarket. Often I could feed us both for a week with that amount (breakfast, lunch and supper for 7 days). The next week it wouldn’t work at all as we might need washing powder, a large jar of coffee or friends were coming round for supper. A budget just needs to be viewed across a month rather than on a weekly basis.
Meanwhile we’ve developed a strategy that works for us. The secret of every guerrilla shopper is to hunt for bargains and think on your feet.
Apart from essentials such as milk (I’ve discovered that there generally seem to be offers on this), we are shopping and meal planning like supermarket hunter gatherers. We tend to focus on offers and ‘condemned’ soon to be out of date food. This isn’t targeting cheaper items at reduced prices. It’s choosing best ingredients when they are on cut-price offer. There are a lot of organic offers out there too. If this food isn’t snapped up it is tossed into skips and eventually landfill. It is not offered to the homeless. It’s just trashed in the UK. ( Health and Safety have a lot to answer for). In the past, communities received this food. Now most corporations are frightened of litigation.
We often buy and cook in bulk. This means that we have a freezer that is crammed with tempting home cooked dishes and a swathe of ingredients waiting in the wings to star in their own opera, when the time comes.
Our 2009 challenge is to develop more recipes for this sort of cut price top quality food. Cutting back doesn’t need to be a life of ‘value’ food and food packed with preservatives. With a bit of luck and imagination anyone could be eating better and cutting back on food being wasted. We are spending less and eating far better than we have for years.
The 2008 task to save 25% on our over the counter spending challenged our small repertoire of recipes. It expanded rapidly. It had to.
“What can we make with ham, fennel root, cabbage and cream?”
“I reckon that we use the cabbage for the pheasant.” Fingers then fly across the keyboard.
“If we’ve got cayenne, we’re in with a chance.”
Danny peers over my shoulder at the recipe on the screen.
“I’d definitely add garlic to that.”
Adapting a recipe can be fun
I hated the 2008 challenge for the first three months even though I’d set it myself! It was way outside my comfort zone. But as the months flew by I twigged that with a few essential ingredients we could transform most ‘bargain buys’ into delicious meals.
We disagreed about this year’s challenge.
“I want us to spend 75% of our new food budget on discounted / offer / condemned food.”
“We need some slack here. What about vegetables and my potatoes?”
“A challenge should be a challenge!”
“Let’s start with a realistic level. We could up the ante later.”
So this year’s challenge is to spend at least 50% of our food budget on discounted food and try to transform these ingredients into easy, delicious recipes. The percentage saving may be increased if it’s too easy but I suspect that D is right. Finding great discounted food takes time and we may find that we don’t have the time to hunt every day.
We will also continue last year’s challenge, now aptly renamed ‘How to save money in 2009’ and are delighted to announce that we are just edging into our third year of not buying supermarket flowers for the house.
We will be posting these new recipes regularly on our blog and giving a monthly update on our new challenge. And this year our savings are going to be given the respect that they deserve and put into a piggy bank so that we can physically see them. They might be swapped for IOUs but we’ll enjoy the relationship with both, however fleeting.
Leave a reply
If you’re on a budget, how about this for a challenge….some years ago, I read an article in a Sunday paper about a discount dinner party. We subsequently discussed it with some friends and agreed to give it a go. I can easily say this has triggered more creative menu planning – and conversation – than any other dinner party. The challenge was this – for just £1 per head, can you cook a three course meal for 6 people?
There are some rules:
1. You can use storecupboard ingredients without including them in your budget – as long as it’s only a pinch of this or a drop of that, not a key ingredient. So, a tablespoon of flour to thicken a stew is fine, but if you’re using it as an igredient in a cake, you’ll need to include it in your budget.
2. You can pro-rata a price. E.g. if you buy 6 eggs for £1.50, but only use 3 you can allocate just 75p of your budget.
There have obviously been some price increases since we first started this 4 years ago, but I think you could still do it for £1.50 a head.
If you’ve got any great menu ideas, I’d love to hear them!
Ah thanks Fiona. We can actually taste the difference between organic from our local farms and the supermarket. It’s not just the taste – you can often see the difference! We have started growing our own in the last two years and are hoping to go for it in a big way this year – but we’re not very green fingered! We’ve had moderately good success with beans and tomatoes. One of your other contributors mentioned the real seed company and we’ve ordered some seeds from them. We like their ethos and it sounds as though their seeds have a better chance of growing than some of the hybrids.
Hello KarenO
Your comments are never too long. They’re interesting.
Eating well and organic can mean a bit more effort if you are on a budget but I think it’s worth it. We don’t eat organic all the time but when we do we can generally taste the difference. Although when we buy local (non organic) it tastes great as it is fresher. Growing your own veg, if you have the space, guarantees that you know exactly how your vegetables have been treated. Loads of things can be grown in pots.
Vinegar and sodium bicarbonate and E cloths are great!
We have just been discussing the cost of visiting our ‘local’ shops. The supermarket is only a couple of miles away whilst some of our farm shops are 7 or 8 miles out! We do pass by them a couple of times a week tho and have 2 deep freezes so if we’re organised we can pop in then. This year we’re going to try to cut down on supermarket shopping even more than we have been. We’ve started cutting back on things like cleaners because they are full of unwanted chemicals but I am surviving on white vinegar & bicarb ( good old fashioned water) and the house is just as clean & we’re seldom ill and we’re saving loads of money on cleaners. We also decided some time back that for our health/well-being as well as animal welfare we would try to only eat organic where possible. This can be expensive but we halve the quantity of meat & make up for it with legumes & veg. With the price of oil going up all non-organic food has been pushed up but the local organic suppliers prices have been much more stable. oops this is a long one too. Sorry!
Hi Lindsay
Tesco often has offers on milk. £1.00 for 2 litres.
Hi Wendy
I enjoy shopping with with my mum but it’s easier to shop smart alone!
Hi Rachel
Wow, I’m impressed! There are so few independent shops around here. There is a market on Tuesdays and Saturdays perhaps I’ll give that a go in the future.
Hello Amanda
I love egg and chips. We have that occasionally now. Yes, like you, we used to have far too much meat now we are padding it out much more. When we eat Sunday roast it seems like a real treat!
Hi Pamela
We eat quite a few veggie or semi veggie (less meat) dishes. Yes, frozen veg are a boon too. We also have a larder full of lentils etc that can be transformed quite quickly into a decent supper. Our diet includes a lot more whole foods these days.
I think that flexibility is the key word to making money saving work. You have to be prepared to pay full price if there is nothing on the condemned counter that you are prepared to eat when you shop. Portion control is a big thing too. Whilst our portions are nowhere near the scale of American ones, it is all too easy to eat a larger amount of meat or fish than you actually need and that makes a big difference to outgoings. Fill up on veg which is much cheaper. Eating vegetarian a couple of times a week saves money too. Whilst I wouldn’t go totally vegetarian – I don’t like the mushrooms and peppers which seem to make up so many veggie dishes – I don’t panic if there is no meat or fish on my plate. I also use frozen veg to eke out my budget as they are so much cheaper than fresh. I’m also going to try out that free bus to Asda soon.
Menu plans don’t really work for us either because I always cook what I feel like when I see what I’ve got to cook with. I’ve always been like that and I think I always will. I’ve even been known to have people arriving for dinner in a few hours and still not know what I’m going to cook, we’ve always had compliments and never any complaints, at least never to my face. 😉
I thought that I’d repeat the challenge we set last year but to post the meals that we actually ate afterwards. You’re so right too about being flexible and buying what’s on offer at the time, we do that and it seems to work for us – but if I’m honest I haven’t checked our bills recently to see how much we’re spending, I just know it’s not as much as before we did our £70 challenge.
I also make sure that we have a few meals each week which really are cheap like egg and homemade oven chips or even beans on toast. I used to think the children wouldn’t grow if they ate food like that but balanced over a week, they still eat really good food and they still have a bit of salad on the side. We hardly ever ate food like egg and chips in the past, we always had meals cooked from scratch using a good cut of this or that and it’s just too expensive, and possibly a bit indulgent to do it every day now.
Anyway big long comment over. x
Last year, after deciding on a whim to stop the weekly trudge to the supermarket which always left us stressed and depressed at pouring money into the coffers of massive corporations, we challenged ourselves to use supermarkets only as a last resort, for things we couldn’t possibly get in an independent shop. Luckily, we have a great butchers down the road and a covered market in the middle of town. Every Saturday we plan our meals for the week (sorry – works for us!) and go to the various independent shops for our ingredients.
We are currently spending £12-15 a week for the two of us, compared to our old average of £40 at the supermarket. It just goes to show that the supermarkets very often offer little value and the produce we get from the local shops always tastes more like ‘real’ food to us.
I have become pretty evangelical about this, especially with people discussing the rising cost of food, so to anyone who doesn’t shop independently, please please give it a try. The politeness and willingness to chat and offer advice will take you totally by surprise, as it still does me after years of appalling service and being grunted at by checkout staff!
I agree with you about being distracted when shopping with someone else. I also enjoy looking through the ‘condemned’ areas. I often find interesting things which I never actually see when on their proper shelves. I didn’t realise that these goods are not given to the homeless or other charities any more though. As you say – such a waste. Another inspiring page today from you for the New Year. x
I have never found offers on milk!