chicken soup
I really thought I was going to over my £21 limit during some of this week, but the total was just under for the seven days! The main reason I didn’t actually do even better was that I did in the end eat quite a bit of my favourite local fruit, which isn’t cheap: strawberries and raspberries work out at around 68p per portion and plums are 10.5p each, with apples 20p.
Cheap free-range chicken!
I was pleased to be able to get a couple of chicken carcases (for soup, but they have quite a lot of meat on them – we actually got seven portions off them, which is pretty impressive, working out at 58p per portion). Otherwise, omelettes make a good value protein meal – I treated myself to mushrooms on one occasion. (Eggs and chicken from the Hawthorn Farm stall at the Sunday Farmers’ Market.)
Vegetables
We spent a bit over £13 on vegetables from Simon Steel at Mayflower Organics: 5lbs potatoes, big bag of carrots, big bag tomatoes (£2 per kilo), 60p cucumber, radishes, beetroot
beet tops
(I ate the beet tops sauteed with soy sauce, as if they were chard – they were excellent and that means I got an extra meal out of that buy!), 2 large cabbages, several heads of garlic, big bag onions, stick of celery. The celery and radishes have all gone and three-quarters of cabbage, but there’s lots left of the other things at the end of the week. We ended up buying mushrooms, cauliflower and spinach from a local stall in the market during the week, but they can’t have cost more than £5, and we had visitors to feed on several occasions, so I guess all the veg I ate can’t have cost more than £5 max (but we did have home-grown courgettes, runner beans and potatoes, which helped).
Beans: the great cheap protein option!
As Harrison and Heather showed us, you can eat really well with beans as your main protein source, and I love beans, but I wanted to show that you can eat sustainably- and ethically-produced meat on £21 per week, as well.
Posted by Bev