Cooking on a budget
can be fun and tasty

Cooking on a budget is becoming more important as the credit crunch bites hard, but it needn't mean tasteless food that needs hours to tenderize.

The essential part of budgeting is to decide how much you are going to spend on your groceries before you leave the house. And then stick to it. I think of it as a challenge! This is how much I can afford, now how can I get the most for my money?

How would you cope with rationing?

Of course learning how to stretch the food to make it go further is not a new problem.

Just think back to World War 2 and food rationing in the UK. People back then could not afford to waste anything. It was all used. And what they could not buy, they grew in their own gardens or picked from the fields.

Did their health suffer from this hardship? No! Actually on the whole it improved. People were eating the right sort of foods to provide all the vitamins and minerals they needed.

How would you cope if the following amounts of basic food were all you were allowed for a week?

• 4oz bacon or ham
• 8oz sugar
• 2oz tea
• 2oz jam (jelly)
• 1 oz cheese
• 8oz of fat (only 2oz of which could be butter)
• 1 fresh egg
• 3 pints of fresh milk (occasionally dropping to only two)

Things may not be that bad nowadays, but prices of the staple foods are going up all the time so isn't it time to start cooking on a budget in your house?

Are you throwing money away?

Buying own brand products and taking advantage of 2 for 1 offers will help you spend less on groceries. But unless you keep an eye on the big picture you could still waste money.

Think back over the last couple of weeks...

• Did you throw out any food that you bought and didn't get around to eating before its passed its use by date?
• Did you cook too much and put the leftovers in the fridge to use up, but end up throwing them away?

On the whole we throw out much too much food. Food that we have spent our money on, and then just wasted.

Most people do not go shopping every day, but do a week or a month's shopping at a time. Therefore learning how to store food is important when cooking on a budget.

Our forebears were expert at preserving foods for use at a later date, and they didn't have the luxury of freezers!

Maybe we should take a leaf out of their book and do our own canning, drying, pickling and jam making? Especially if we grow our own vegetables and fruit, and have a seasonal glut. Putting some aside to use when it is out of season (and expensive in the shops) is a wise move.

Create a Master Shopping List

Writing a shopping list is the bare minimum of planning that should be done before you go to the store. But how do you know what should be on the list?

It is easy to say "don't buy what isn't on the list" but what if you have forgotten to write down an essential item?

One way to avoid this, is to create a Master List, either on paper, on your computer or your mobile phone. Everything that you normally buy should be on this list, which you can refer to each time you need to go shopping.

To create this list, you can look back through store receipts from the last few weeks. Or, even better, go through your pantry and cupboards jotting down everything that you already have in stock. You might well be surprised as to what is in there! Along with the basic components of a well stocked pantry you may find tins and bottles that were impulse buys and have never even been opened.

Once everything is written down, go back to those receipts and jot down the price you paid for the items. This will give you a guideline as to whether the cost goes up or down over the coming weeks. When the store is promoting a product you will be able to see if it really is a saving, or whether you paid the same the week before.

Create weekly dinner menus

Deciding ahead of time what you are going to cook in the following week is a good idea when cooking on a budget.

There is no need to plan everything, down to what snacks you will eat when, but basic weekly dinner menus will help you to ensure that you buy only what you will be able to use in a given time. Just grabbing fresh vegetables from the shelves, with no meals in mind, will almost guarantee that most of them are wasted!

When working out what you will cook for everyday meals remember to vary what you eat. Not only would the same foods every day be boring, but you may miss out on vital nutrients.

Even if you are just cooking for one, don't overlook the economy packs designed for families. Who says you have to eat it all at one meal?

There is no law that says you have to eat meat every day! You might like to slot some vegetarian meals in to ring the changes, and save money.

But for those days when meat (or poultry in this case) IS on the menu you might like to spend a little extra on a whole chicken rather than just legs or breasts. Although the initial outlay may be higher, you will most likely get more for your money. The chicken could be roast for Sunday dinner and then the rest of the meat cut off the carcass and curried for another meal. Lastly, make chicken stock with the bones, so that nothing is wasted.

Following through with the same example menu, you might add a homemade soup recipe to your plan to make use of that flavorsome stock.

So that is three dinners taken care of! Perhaps you fancy red meat once or twice, fish one night and something vegetarian for the remaining main meals that week.

Again, make use of leftovers, if there are any, as a base for your lunches.

If you cook more potatoes than you need to accompany your main meal, you can use them in a Spanish omelette the following day, for example.

But don't just tuck the leftovers into a corner of the fridge and forget about them! If you know you won't use them the next day then pack them up and put them in the freezer, where they will keep until you do want to use them.

Cooking on a budget is possible!

I hope this page has helped you to see that budget meals need not consist of cheap and nasty ingredients. but can be healthy and exciting. Plan ahead before you go shopping, and use up the leftovers wisely, and you will save money and eat well when cooking on a budget.