Feeding a family on a budget

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  • yirara
    yirara Posts: 9,403 Member
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    lynn_glenmont wrote: »
    yirara wrote: »
    Hamsibian wrote: »
    yirara wrote: »
    kshama2001 wrote: »
    yirara wrote: »
    snowyne wrote: »
    Buy whole roaster chickens on sale. One chicken will serve you 3 times over. You can eat dinner, use leftover shredded meat for another meal, and then freeze the bones to make homemade chicken stock for soup - just add water, celery, carrots, onions, garlic, salt & pepper, bay leaf and some white cooking wine...so easy, cheap, nutritious and yummy!

    Whole chickens are not really that cheap in the UK, and you'll spend tons on electricity or gas to cook it. I think if money is an issue then TO should also take cost of preparing the food into account.

    Whole chickens are the cheapest meat here in the US - is that not true in the UK?

    A 5 pound spatchcocked chicken cooks in only 50 minutes at 425 degrees F.

    https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10706093/spatchcocked-chicken-where-have-you-been-all-my-life

    You can't get such big birds here, but using an oven for 50 minutes will be fairly cost effective if using convection (ugh, on a bird?) but cost about 0.60 for a grill function, and possibly more if TO is on prepaid electricity.

    I'm really curious about this, because living in the U.S, I spend less money cooking raw chicken by saving the juice/fat to cook other things, and the bones to make stock (also a good reason to save vegetable scraps) . I freeze the stock, which means I dont have to purchase store brands.

    It is still not cost effective that way in the UK?

    Well, if you make stock then you have to cook the bones for quite a while. Which again costs a lot of electricity/gas. Both are fairly expensive in the UK, and people that don't have a lot of money are often on top-up meters, for which electricity/gas is more expensive. So you basically go to a shop/post office with a key, pay money, that money gets put on that key, you put it in your meter. The biggest utility cost in UK households is gas/electricity as most buildings are of such rubbish quality that the heat just escapes through the walls as soon as you switch the heating off. So heating bills will probably be rather high already. Spending more money on extensive cooking is not something I would chose (well, I didn't chose it when I lived on £1200/month including half for rent without any utilities for a 38m^2 flat). Stock blocks on the other hand cost a few pence. And you don't know if TO has a freezer. Many rental properties don't have a freezer but only a small under worktop fridge.

    I puzzled over "stock blocks" for a bit. Is it a small cube (roughly the size of a die) of salt, herbs, spices, and flavor (beef flavor, chicken flavor, etc.)? We call those bouillon cubes in the U.S.

    I mentally collect words that are different in different English-speaking countries, especially food terms (eggplant/aubergine, ground meat/mince, etc.).

    Haha! Then add freestyle as I’m not British, trying to get back into Dutch and feeling bored learning Norwegian confusion 😁

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