Thrifty Thursday #3 - Bend And Stretch

Thinking about being thrifty with my food budget this week. I think the two key principles are just that - bend and stretch. Be prepared to bend things a little [your shopping list, your recipe, your meal plan] and learn to stretch what you have to feed more mouths or serve more meals.

The obvious things go without saying – make a ‘food audit’ of everything in your cupboard, fridge and freezer then try and work out what meals you can make from them. See if you can manage to find a week’s worth of meals there without going to the shops.

Then make a month’s worth of menu plans [you can find free charts on the netmums site and many other places] and work out just what you do need to buy. Try and be firm with the family, if Friday is designated casserole, then that’s what it is!

Except – and this is where the bending comes in – if circumstances change unexpectedly, you may need to say ‘ok, we’ve been at the hospital/waiting to collect Granny from the train/held up in a traffic jam – so tonight we will get a takeaway instead’ As there are just two of us, I often make just 6 ‘main meal’ plans for the week, and we still manage to get fed every day somehow!

And if you had planned to cook one vegetable but something else is on offer, then bending your meal plan is an economical choice. Courgettes v carrots, sweet potatoes v. butternut squash.

Then there is bending of recipes – I know that Delia’s recipes always work if you follow her instructions to the letter – but don’t be afraid to substitute ingredients sometimes. White sugar for brown, sultanas for raisins, a different oil or vinegar, chicken not pork.

As long as you are sensible and don’t expect exactly the same result, you usually get a passable meal. Not advised when someone important is coming for dinner though! Bob and the girls are much better at this than I am – there was the memorable occasion when we were first married. A colleague from school was really upset, and I invited her home to have her evening meal with us. When Bob got in, she was still sitting on the sofa weeping. “I’ll do the meal” he volunteered “What are we eating?” so I said “I was going to make some sort of risotto – there’s some bacon in the fridge” For reasons I will never know, he failed to see the bacon [in the packet labelled BACON] but he made a fabulous risotto, substituting large croutons of fried bread!

Then there’s stretching – making one meal go further, making three portions into four…

A can of baked beans will make a lot of meals go further – throw some into

• a cottage pie
• some pasta sauce
• a casserole

You can also add a handful of porridge oats or lentils to all the above  to stretch them.

Increase the volume of a bowl of salad with unexpected extras

• some frozen peas
• a chopped up apple
• chopped hardboiled egg
• a few chunks of melon
• large homemade croutons
• left over cold cooked potatoes, cubed
• a few leafy herbs from the garden – mint, lemon balm, parsley
• chopped nuts [esp the ones left after Christmas]

Take all the veg in the fridge, a can of tomatoes [and maybe another of beanz]and some meat from the freezer and make a batch of savoury mince. Serve it on Day 1 as it is, over pasta or rice, Day 2, top with mashed potato in a cottage pie, Day 3, if any remains, use it to fill jacket potatoes.  Jamie Oliver suggests adding the odd spoonful of chutney to pep up the flavour a little [most people have at least one jar lurking somewhere] If you cannot face 3 days of the same basic meal, portion and freeze it to serve later. Or use your veg to make some soup. Make it interesting with croutons, or dumplings, a swirl of yogurt, or a sprinkling of cheese.

Fruit can be made into a fruit salad, or a smoothie. Shirley Conran said in ‘Superwoman’ that it is a mistake to offer a mixed fruit bowl every day. Offer one sort of fruit each day – then at the end of the week make a mixed fruit salad with what remains. Serve it with homemade yogurt – not cream!

If I have only one pot of yogurt left,  I divide it between two pretty little glass dishes and add fruit [eg a peach, diced, and divided between the two] So much better than saying “There’s a yogurt or a peach left, which do you want?” If you have a limited amount of food, then divide it onto the plates or bowls before you serve it.

If you do ‘family service’ where everyone dives into the communal big bowl, you risk the last person getting a smaller share. Another true story from my past…

When I was a student, we sat eight to a table in the Dining Hall. I had a guest with me one Friday night. As the guest, he was handed the tray first and took THREE fish fingers. I took just ONE. For the whole meal, he berated me for not eating enough – whilst I and my friends sat in embarrassment, there had only been 16 fish fingers to start with! Reader, I ditched him.

Check out the old WW2 cookbooks for some excellent meal stretchers. Especially anything by the doyenne of the Ration Book Kitchen, the fabulous Margeurite Patten – 95 years old and still going strong! 

Be creative. Use your leftovers. Check out the Love Food Hate Waste website.

Martin Lewis, MSE says “drop a level at the Supermarket” If you usually buy ‘Tescos finest’, switch to their ‘regular’ brand, if you buy the regular stuff, switch to their ‘value’ range. He maintains any family can save a few hundred pounds a year on their food bills that way. [where do we ‘value’ shoppers switch to? Aldi, I suppose!]

Also remember that ‘Use By’ is a Health and Safety warning on foodstuffs that are perishable – but ‘best before’ is a recommendation only, there may be some deterioration in quality and flavour after this point, but it won’t kill you. Can you cope with ‘out of date’ stuff ? I usually say if it smells ok, hasn’t turned blue, and hasn’t got whiskers, then I will try it. If you can cope, then do check out Approved Foods – I’ve been very impressed with the two orders I have had from them this year. Website here. AF sell ‘beyond date’ stuff legally, and they are very helpful.

Try to avoid buying ‘pre-made’ stuff- learn to cook from scratch. It is healthier and usually cheaper. “Economy Gastronomy” by Allegra McEvedy is a good book to borrow from the library, if you need somewhere to start, in terms of meal planning and budgeting. Or anything by Shirley Goode [she blogs here]

I also use “The Benefit Book” by B Lawrence, and the “More With Less Cookbook” by Doris Longacre [a Mennonite, but never shiftless]

I’m sure there are loads of you out there with a favourite frugal food tip to share. We’ve had lots already this month about foraging and making jams and chutneys and the like from what Bob describes as “God’s amazing bounty” of the fruit of the hedgerows.

For twenty years I served my family with meals made from leftovers – they never did work out what the original meal was.

As Christians, it is our family practice to say Grace before meals, and recognise God’s continuing provision for us. Just occasionally [ok, more often than one would care to admit] I have had major disasters in the kitchen. But my family have nobly struggled through and ate what I put in front of them. I will never forget one evening though. Bob looked at the strange, unrecognisable mess on his plate, and smiled lovingly at me

“Ang, you’ll have to thank the Lord for this food, because I don’t honestly think that I can!”