Eating Frugally

Note: Updated 1/3/2023

Thirteen years ago a friend blogged about her achievements of spending only £40 a week on food - that was for a family of 4! Since then food prices have gone up by more than 50% and the national average spent on weekly food bills for two adults £70. Making it work for anything less is an admirable goal, especially if you live in a high-cost area.

Where do I shop?

This is the number 1 question I get asked at church these days.

I see shops in categories. Lidl and aldi are German stores that some of you Americans might be familiar with, and the prices are generally good but you can be caught out. I tend to do 1/3 of my shopping from the local lidl because it does not deliver and that is all I can fit in the buggy or physically carry once a week.

I do not get fresh veg or most fresh fruit or meat other than sandwich meat from Lidl. They do not have the personnel to look over their stock and so you can easily pick up an out of date or bad lot of food and then have the nuisance of trying to return it - always an adventure in the UK.

I do 2/3 of my weekly shop from asda, via an online delivery. I can usually get a slot that costs 1 or 1.50 pounds on a Thursday afternoon. It helps us avoid impulse buys and stick to a menu.

Free food

See my post on foraging depending on the season.

Dumpster diving - kinda illegal so I've never done it. Anyway most shops are beginning to donate their out of date or almost out of date food to charities. I'll never forget one friend who went to a newly married student couple's for dinner and said, 'She told us after we at the mackerel that she'd got it from a dumpster behind Sainsbury's. I would rather have liked to know that before I ate it.'

About once a year one of my friends or I will discover a class or course with free food - check out the library and local churches for fliers, keep an eye on facebook events and check these places regularly! Occasionally you'll find a holiday club or church picnic which is a barbecue!

You can download a plethora of apps to try to snag free or cheap food. Also check out libraries, swap shops and other community centres for giveaways. 

Best of the British

The cream and chocolate here are amazing. We love baking with these high-quality ingredients!

British crumbles and various vegetable soups - potato and leek, lentil soup, pea soup - are cheap and filling especially if using foraged fruits and veg (for example, throw in a handful of nettles at the end of a soup or try my apple and blackberry crumble)!

My British friends have blown me away with their bakewell tarts, steak pies and venison stews. I don't know how economic these are but definitely delicious!

Go Ethnic like a Brit to save!

Getting into Indian cooking - for example making meatless curries and daals is a great way to save money.

Even a chicken curry can be cheap compared to eating out! Chicken Tikka Masala was developed in Glasgow  and is best in the UK because of the mix of ingredients.

Try falafel as well - sometimes chickpeas go on sale and this is a great way to use them up, especially if you have freezer space. We survived my 3rd pregnancy on frozen falafel as I was too ill to cook most of the first few months.

Prep-Ahead meals

Not everyone owns a slow cooker here - there isn't the space in most UK kitchens and most people work so don't have the time to nanny a simmering pot for hours.

You can do lasagna of course and use real Italian ingredients but it's usually going to be cheaper to buy the ready meal version than make your own. We also enjoy making my grandma's recipe for manicotti - to which I sometimes add foraged nettles.

A great British prepare-ahead meal which people bring when you've just had a baby is shepherd's pie. We have enjoyed a sweet potato and parsnip variation in the past!

Other favorites are doing a 'Sunday lunch' roast which then makes fab leftovers for days - a roast chicken with tons of vegetables for example can be remade into all sorts of exciting meals, and then the bones and leftovers can be boiled into a rich broth. Roast beef is our favorite to take to people who have had babies, along with potatoes, salad, fruit salad and apple pie.

British expectations - meat and potatoes

Most British people expect a meal to constitute a meat - like roast chicken with little or no seasoning - some form of potatoes and one or two other vegetables - say broccoli and carrots, usually boiled but steaming is becoming the fashionable and healthier thing to do.

British people like desserts - crumbles, trifles, tarts, or a fruit salad. Served with cream on the side - whether whipped or for pouring.

Tea is 'like a fullstop' to a meal and some people hand round a box of After-8's or chocolates especially if it's Christmas.

Don't over-stretch your budget to impress

One newly married person I know ran out of money in her food budget and her hobby budget and her household maintenance budget but she had guests coming for dinner so she took money out of savings to make a splendid feast. The guests ended up canceling at the last minute so she and her husband were eating a feast for days which they couldn't afford and would really rather have had lentil soup instead.
It would probably have been better for the guests to see the realities of living newly married on a single income anyway.

Bread

Although carbs are falling out of vogue in dieting philosophies, is there really anything better than warm toast with butter melting into it?

You can get bread fairly cheaply in UK if you don't mind shopping for the generic brands but certain critics refer to it having a 'texture of cardboard.'

We prefer to make bread from scratch. I discovered it is possible to hurt your wrist with too much kneading so we got a bread machine. But it brings the price down and also tastes better and fills the house with the lovely smell of baking. Maybe if you get a bread machine on Freecycle or freegle, or share around the kneading job to other family members, you can avoid hurting your wrists.

Crescent rolls in bakeries can be as much as 2.50 each and in supermarkets the ready-made rolls can be dried out and tasteless, so we find it's cheapest and tastiest to make them from scratch.

Doughnuts used to be horrible in the UK - all these ones which were frozen after being made and thawed before being sold so they were already stale - and dense - even the yeast ones with tasteless toppings. With the rise of Krispy Kreme's, even generic doughnuts have been overhauled so as to be palatable. We used to make doughnuts from scratch a lot but the almost-boiling oil around so many small children has put me off in recent years.

Cakes and pastries

Cake boxes in the States can be marked down to cents, but here cost significantly more than the necessary ingredients. We always make cakes from scratch - using British recipes and digital scales so it's actually not too much work. Check out 'Fool proof cakes' from the library for ideas! Digital scales are investment of about 10 or 15 pounds but are well worth it!

This cake cost more than our usual birthday cakes because of the candy involved but thanks to Lidl's generic brand for kit-kats, gold coins and tropical candy, it seemed very special!

Another thing we sometimes do is slip a cake mix box into our suitcase in the States and save for birthdays or busy times, like when we are having a baby or birthdays near Christmas.

We have looked into buying readymade cakes - Sainsbury's and others have bakeries which even personalize them for you - but the cost is extortionate. Apparently Costco's does good cakes for less but you have to have a Costco's membership which last I checked was about 74 pounds for an individual!

Scones are always fun to make if you have a digital scales and only call for a few ingredients, then you can jazz them up depending on how you're feeling with cheese or chocolate chips or whatever.

A lot of convenience food here is surprisingly expensive, for example pie crust. Making your own pie crust can be a good way to save. In my great grandma's recipe it's like 3 ingredients - flour, salt, and Crisco which you might have difficulty finding here until you realize it's called Trex or hydrogenated sunflower seed oil. Not too arduous!

Eggs and dairy

We have found certain shops generally have cheaper eggs and milk and we try to shop there - Iceland and Lidl historically. I can't seem to find 15 eggs for less than 1.99 at the moment though.

Meat

My best advice, become vegetarian - eating meat is expensive.

We generally do a tin of fish per week, chicken breasts once a week and red meat twice a month to cut costs.

Generally in the summer months we get invited to at least one barbecue which is lovely.

And of course we have haggis on Burn's Night.

Fresh fruits and vegetables

Some shops mark down their fruits and veg and other sell-by-today items by 10% or 25% and then mark down more as the day goes on - I find fruits that have gone soft can be used in smoothies and purees, old bananas in banana bread, etc.

I have only found marked down bananas about twice a year despite hitting the shops daily to snoop for deals, so when you see a deal JUMP ON IT. Small, personally owned shops tend to be willing to haggle a bit more.

Foraging for blackberries, apples, rosehips and other fruits in the autumn can be a great way to save - particularly if you have freezer space or the ability to turn them into jams for the whole year. See my full post here!

I have not found that growing your own veg saves money - in fact sometimes it seems more expensive if your crop suffers from blight, you have a snail epidemic, birds eat all the fruit before you do, or you spend a lot of money enriching the soil content. A few gifted gardeners might be able to pull this off, depending on the sort of garden available, etc.

Also I never shop at Lidl for most of our fruit - their fruit and veg seems to go off really fast. The exception is apples - we get apples at Lidl and they are fine. Also if you are going to use it the moment you get home, you are usually safe.

Generic brands

Get generic brands for everything. I can tell the difference between posh pasta and generic brand pasta - who can't? - but a person can get used to anything. You can make your own pasta from scratch if you're really picky.

Junk food

I have always been of two minds about the budgeting advice to 'never spend money on junk food.'

A bbc program recently pointed out a 30p bag of ginger nuts stretches a lot farther than one 30p apple. The person on the program was trying to make the argument that it's harder/impossible for the poor/extremely frugal to eat healthily.

We do buy apples but we also buy a 30p bag of ginernuts to carry in the buggy 'in case of emergencies.' We try not to buy loads of other junk food.

Chocolate does not count as junk food as cocoa is technically a health food. Having said that, there were times in the past when we had to forego cocoa powder for a month or two for budget constraints.

Icecream - We usually only buy vanilla or chocolate icecream - luxury icecreams like 'chocolate chip cookie dough' or 'triple chocolate brownie fudge' cost £4 for a dinky little mug-sized, 500 ml container at tesco currently. I know 500 ml is like 4 servings but who ever eats 1 serving of icecream? Iceland before the pandemic used to have a good deal in the summer £2 for a 900ml container and you can occasionally get one free if you have an Iceland loyalty card.
Asda and certain other shops have come out with their own range of luxury icecreams for less and we're still sampling these.

So basically there are ways to get what you really want if you look hard enough.

Coupons

Get the app for every shop you use! 

The sort of savings in the UK are NOT what they are in the States. They don't really do coupons to the same extent here. Most shops have loyalty cards with a 1% or less reward system.

A whole year shopping almost exclusively at tesco's might garner you 30 pounds' worth of vouchers, and they have a program where your vouchers go 'twice as far' with certain other companies - for example you can use them toward an English Heritage pass or toward 2-for-1 tickets at the Tower of London or a railcard.

Generally speaking though couponing in the UK stinks and it's not getting any better.

Mexican

There was a time when Mexican food was like the Holy Grail to every American expat. You couldn't reproduce it accurately or cheaply here in those days. Ingredients tasted wrong or were overpriced. It was an act of greatest charity to invite American expats over for a Mexican feast.

Now a days I feel I can find what I need. I've had to upgrade the tortilla crisps from the generic brand which is too oily and fried-tasting but the next brand up costing 20p more.

I have never found a good substitute for Colby Jack cheese and the consistency of the beef in this country is always going to be different. It's best to stick with chicken enchiladas to avoid this problem - anyway chicken is cheaper than 'beef mince.'

The British salsa has really improved over the years though it never beats homemade salsa, and I think the sour cream here tastes really good.

You can now buy flour tortillas, corn tortillas, mashed pinto beans, green chilies and taco shells from most places - including asda, tesco and sainsbury's. Online shops are easiest to accomplish this but if in the physical shop try the 'International foods' zone.

Pico de galla, enchilada sauce, taco seasoning and guacamole are best made from scratch. Some folk would say that for salsa too. I am not a fan of making everything from scratch now that I have 4 kids so I tend to import or ask my family to mail taco seasoning packets from the States.

Asda has recently come out with blue cornmeal chips and lime-flavored tortilla chips!

Alcohol

Although European wines and Scottish whiskies are cheaper here, alcohol is always relatively expensive - even buying it in the shops and drinking at home.

There are various club or group schemes on the internet to bring down the price per bottle.

The cheapest thing of course is to make your own - get into foraging and make fruit-based, country wines. This can bring the price per bottle down to £2 or £3 each last I did the math in 2015. There is a great book in the Edinburgh library on country wine-making to get you started.

Thanksgiving

Turkey is easy to find in the UK. It is the national favorite for a traditional Christmas dinner - closely followed by goose.

Lidl did the best deal the last two years on turkey crowns, which we buy to avoid spending hours sawing away at a big old bird.

Sometimes the week of Thanksgiving certain shops - Iceland for example - will mark down last year's frozen turkeys to half price to clear them out for the new Christmas birds. We have jumped on deals like that in the past.

Cranberry sauce - very British, easy to find

Sweet potatoes - are a different breed here and more stringy than in the States so you may want to substitute butternut squash in your dad's amazing Sweet Potato Casserole or skip it as not worth the effort.

Potatoes - very British but I have had trouble finding frozen cubes of potatoes for a traditional Potato Casserole. Often the frozen potato cubes you can find are quite oily and grainy for some reason. So we tend to just peel and chop our own. This does add about 45 min to prep time.

Dressing/stuffing - you can find ready-to-make boxes of stuffing which is okay. The best dressing anyone has ever made me is made by my friend from Texas and it uses cornbread. Cornmeal can be hard to find here - it can be called 'maize meal' or 'polenta'.

Pumpkin - tins of pumpkin can be expensive! The best deal my friend found this year was on amazon for a bundle. Posh stores in the New Town, RealFoods and LupePinto's in town have all had pumpkin sightings. 

It can be cheaper to make your own from a pumpkin but it is a lot of work. It's easier to make it from a butternut squash instead. I usually harvest butternut squashes a month early and freeze the puree in pre-measured increments (i.e. the same amount as in a can). 

We have been known to pack a can of pumpkin in our suitcase in America once or twice.

Jello salad - all UK orange jello packets have stern warnings against using in conjunction with pineapple. I ignored these warnings to my peril and the whole thing melted. I have since imported US orange jello to make jello salad with a little help from my friends!

Pecans - whether this is for a pecan pie or a sweet potato casserole, it's a important part of Thanksgiving. They are much more expensive here than in Georgia. This is another thing we often bring in our suitcases. Don't let your friends bring the pre-chopped kind in carry-on though as Security may decide it looks like an ingredient for making a bomb! - as happened to one of our friends. Otherwise this is the best present to bring an expat without nut allergies with whom you might be staying/dining.

Cranberries for making your own cranberry relish/sauce - not every shop carries them. This year Tesco's seemed to have them but Aldi's, Sainsbury's and Lidl all failed on the days in November when I checked.

Things which are easy to source here from most shops:

• self raising flour
• plain flour
• butter
• margarine
• salt
• pepper
• dark brown sugar
• granulated sugar
• caster sugar
• cream of mushroom soup
• green beans frozen or in a tin
• friend onion toppers / salad toppers - to go on green bean casserole - these can be harder to find and more expensive. One American expat tried to make them and failed rather miserably once so take a lesson from this and just save up. Sometimes one container can last two years if you are conservative with its use!
• potatoes
• sprouts
• sweet potatoes
• chillies
• garlic
• red pepper
• avocado
• walnuts
• celery
• cranberry juice
• sprite

Picnicking

Eating at home costs about 1/10 what eating at a restaurant costs. For example, you can buy £1.5 pizzas from Iceland, whereas the local Pizza Express offers a £9.70-14.25 pizza per person. You can make carrot lentil soup for 30p per person, verses the cheapest soup at the Art Museum cafe was £3.00 pre-construction and pre-pandemic!

Instead we always pack picnics. You can find some great ideas for picnics online or just shopping in the supermarket!

popcorn made from kernals on stovetop - no salt or sugar or butter so really non-messy, 'wholegrain' snack! And cheap!