Make your food
Supermarkets tell us that we are ‘time-poor/cash-rich’ and encourage us to buy their ready-made convenience foods. They are not particularly tasty and offer poor value. You are paying a lot for packaging and marketing. You will not only improve the taste, nutrition and flavour of your food by cooking it yourself, but you will also save money. Enjoy home-cooked food and save money.
Don’t be fooled by supermarket promotions.
It’s easy to overspend if you have a habit of doing your weekly shopping in one place. Deals and promotional offers, such as 3 for 2, multisavers, get-one-buy-one-free, and the like, are designed to get you to spend more than you intended. These offers on fresh or chilled foods can lead you to buy more than you intend. If you throw away a promotional offer, it’s not a good deal.
Choose meat from animals raised on free-range but take advantage of cheaper cuts.
Instead of switching to factory-farmed beef to save money, consider less-familiar but delicious cheaper cuts such as the shin of meat, pork cheeks, ribs, or duck legs. They are a great way to get a meaty taste for a fraction of the cost.
Bring lunch to the office.
Spending five dollars a day on take-out food is easy. What for? Perhaps a chilly sandwich with factory meat, rubbery cheese or watery prawns on industrial bread? Or a bag of salty chips and a sugary snack? It’s not good for your wallet, taste buds or waistline. You can save money by making your lunches. They are made with fresh bread, meats that have been raised humanely, and cheeses of your choice. Remember that leftovers from last night are often better eaten cold the next day. Cold meats, roasted vegetables, artisan cheese cubes left over from the previous cheeseboard, and a few salad leaves or cherry tomato are healthier and better than sarnies, ice-cold salads and other floppy foods.
Try something new at the fishmonger.
Overfishing has led to the price of many popular fish species. You can find some excellent fish in less popular species, and they will likely be caught more sustainably. Avoid cod and tuna. Instead, opt for pollocks, megrims, coleys, rockfishes, mackerels, herrings, sprats and mussels.
Buy seasonal foods
Buy fruits and vegetables – British, of course – in abundance and during their peak season. This is better than buying the same items year-round. You can eat them all you want, as they’re at their lowest price. Seasonal fruits and vegetables are at their best not only in terms of taste but also nutritionally.
Use every bit of food that you buy to reduce waste.
Never throw away perfectly healthy food. Use eggs past their “use-by” date in recipes that will cook them well, like cakes, egg mayonnaise, or Spanish omelettes. You can turn stale bread in a food processor into breadcrumbs and freeze them. They are then ready to be used as a topping for a gratin, in Sicilian dishes such as the ‘Mollica,’ or for a crisp crumb coating on rissoles.
It is a waste to throw away natural animal fats. Roast beef on sourdough toast dripping with watercress or parsley is delicious. Goose or duck fat makes fantastic roast potatoes or croutons.
Drink tap water
Bottled water is not only bad for the environment with all those plastic containers piling up in landfills, but it also costs a fortune. It can cost anywhere from 500 to 900 times as much as tap. You’ll be instantly richer if you give up this habit. You can invest in a filter for your jug if you do not like the taste and are concerned about its purity. If you want, chill the water and serve it with lemon slices.
Forage and grow as much food as you can
You can save a lot of money by growing your food. It doesn’t matter if you have a few herbs on the window sill, a grow bag in the sun with cherry tomatoes and chillies, some salad leaves that you cut and reuse in a planter on your balcony, or some apples on an old tree in your garden. In spring, sniff out wild garlic in the woods and pick blackberries in city parks or roadside thickets. Look for sea buckthorn and samphire along the coast. Eat the ground, elder, to get revenge in your garden.
Cook only once and eat twice or more.
You can expect to enjoy the same food at least twice – but in a different form. For example, a good free-range bird can be roasted, and then the meat from the carcass can be used to make risotto or pack lunches. The stripped carcass is then simmered with vegetables and herbs for a soup stock. You can get the most out of every food item you purchase.
