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this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2024
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Always good to involve everyone in the budgeting. I learned from an early age to keep an eye out for specials, compare by unit pricing etc. to keep the overall food budget down - if you get the cost of the boring stuff lower you have room to add in important stuff like lollies!
When I moved out at 18 I discovered that most of my peers had no idea how to stick to a budget or prioritise their spending - an alarming number would run out of food entirely before the end of the fortnight, then when they got paid they'd waste it on expensive stuff and start the cycle again. I was really surprised, I'd been shopping on a budget and planning ahead with my Mum for years.
Lol same, I lived with people who spent their entire food budget in a few days ๐คฆ๐ผโโ๏ธI was living on about $25 per week but it was easier then. I'd get a bag of spuds, bag of onions, garlic, big bag of red or brown lentils, some budget cans of tomatoes, dried pasta, rice, a bag of apples, a couple of key vegetables that were cheap and in season and a couple of packets of herbs/spices (thus building a supply of herbs and spices over time available to enhance my cooking). I would combine these ingredients in different ways over the week to try to make it interesting. When it was someone's birthday I'd lash out on a King Island Brie and red wine. I've probably never eaten so well lol.
I think my budget was $50 a week, but that included odds and ends like toiletries and magazines as well as food. It also included meat, although not huge amounts. My staple meal was stir-fry, with lots of rice and veg and a small amount of meat (about 60-80g per meal). I would cut up the meat into strips for the freezer (I had a bar fridge with freezer space designed to hold a couple of trays of ice-cubes!) so something like a single chicken thigh would cover a few meals.
I also had a butcher that would sometime have whole wild rabbits for a couple of dollars, so I'd use the meat from those for a stew & make a soup from the bones.
Budgeting and also knowing good deals and seeing one is an under appreciated skill.
I found a ripping deal on ham this week and bought quite a bit of it and made really nice sandwiches out of them and couldnโt be happier.
It absolutely is - it also needs to be paired with the ability to cook and menu plan well.
A lot of people have the basic skill set of being able to choose a recipe, buy the ingredients and make a meal, but don't have the ability to reverse the process and create something based on which ingredients are available. Which works well for me, I have often ended up with things like trays of meat left over from events because people don't have any idea what to do with them (or have a mental block against "leftovers").
Mix and mash all the stuff together. What could go wrong?
Iโm fairly simple so if there were trays of meat you could pair it up with rice, pasta, sandwich, noodles just on a basic level. Nothing fancy or complicated but maybe I just donโt have any good ideas in my head.