Our frugal meal plan

I have been asked to talk about what we eat in a week. This was a question from someone who was sceptical about our annual food budget of £750. If I shopped regularly, I wouldn’t be able to survive on this amount. However, over the last 4 years I have adapted how we eat, and where we access food from. We try to stay out of supermarkets as much as possible as they just tempt people to buy more than you need. This is our frugal meal plan for this week.

I don’t shop weekly or monthly. I buy food usually when it is on offer, and bulk buy. Examples recently are buying 10 blocks of butter for £10 from Farmfoods. With the butter I made from reduced double cream around Christmas time, I now have more or less enough butter to last me 9 months or more. It is frozen in my freezer. When sugar is discounted I will buy lots of bags which can save me up to 30p bag. Farmfoods often have it at £1.60 for 2 bags, or Home Bargains at 89p. We don’t use a lot of sugar now except when preserving. We only bake once a fortnight as we are eating more healthily. It is nice to know that I already have enough sugar for preserving in Autumn 2026.

Most of my meat for the year was half price joints bought before Christmas as we only eat meat 3 times a week. We have a mincer, and have learned to make make products like sausages, burgers, koftas, etc, as well as cutting some into chunks for meals. Near Ramadan we check our stocks of rice, spices and pulses as some supermarkets discount these kind of items by 20%. They are generally cheaper in World food aisles than other parts of the supermarket, all year round.

Anyway, down to my meal plan this week, and what we will eat. Yesterday I made a slow cooker lentil chilli. This will make at least 2 main meals and 2 lunches for both of us. It was made with 5 handfuls of brown lentils, and a jar of homemade passatta I preserved from homegrown tomatoes and garlic. I literally throw anything in to the chilli to pad it out. In went homegrown mixed beans, and previously cooked kidney beans from the freezer. I also put in some 5p carrots stored from Christmas, homegrown onion, 1 of the cheap Christmas parsnips, homegrown mushrooms from a kit, and a bit of brocolli stalk. Some home made stock and tomato puree bulked out the sauce, and the chilli flakes were homemade from homegrown chillies. That big pot of food probably didn’t cost me £1 to make.

One main meal I will turn it into a spicy cottage pie with mash on top using 5p Christmas potatoes.  We have stored these in cardboard boxes in my cool porch. Sometimes I sprinkle a bit of cheese on top and serve it with a vegetable side. I will freeze some for another main meal another week. We might serve it with rice in a few months time when the potatoes start running out. It would be more expensive to use the rice now. I always try to use use what I have fresh first before using dried stored goods.

The lunches I will make are potato nachos (air fried sliced potatoes with the chilli and a sprinkle of cheese in between). This will be served with lettuce I have growing in a tub on my window sill, and some spinach leaves I picked from the garden yesterday. All the cheese was bought when reduced, grated, and frozen. We usually buy it from The Company shop.

The second lunch will be a chilli pasty. I will mix the chilli with a bit of the mashed potato, and encase it in pastry. It will be frozen uncooked to cook in the air fryer later in the week. Sometimes there is still chilli left which I dilute to make soup and serve with homemade bread for an extra lunch.

Another main meal this week is stuffed butternut squash. This is a vegetarian meal.  I grow butternut squashes but my garden isn’t big enough to grow many. I therefore buy them when on offer. Around Christmas time I bought 3 for 69p each and they are stored in a cool place.

The next main meal is a chicken pasta made from pulled chicken. I got 2 chickens for £1.25 each when The Company shop had everything 50% off in their chillers. They were already at a bargain price for £2.50 each. I cooked and divided the chicken into 7 portions and froze them at the time. Lots of stock was also frozen. For the pasta I make a kind of white sauce and added a bit of chicken stock. Homegrown frozen peas and spinach will also be added. The pasta I bulk buy when I see it on offer. The last bag  cost me £5 and it is stll two thirds full. It will last us all year. I store it in air tight containers.

The next meal is fish cakes from the freezer. A tin of tuna and homegrown potatoes made six. We will have 2 each. They have homegrown spring onions and parsley in them. The bread crumbs that cover them were made from homemade stale bread. I will serve them with a vegetable stir fry made from homegrown and 5p Christmas veg.

The fifth main meal is a wrap quiche. This will be cooked in the air fryer and use 3 eggs. I add onions and any bits that need eating up in the fridge (fridge gravel). It will be served with wedges and homemade coleslaw. A curry for our 6th meal was made in the slow cooker before Christmas and frozen. I will make fresh naan or chapati to serve with it.

Our last meal this week is Chinese beef and noodles. The beef was cut into strips from one of the half price joints and frozen. I basically stir fry it with spring onions and any vegetables that I have. I then make up a sauce using ginger, chilli, soy sauce etc, and add wholemeal noodles. I bought 4 packets of the noodles in 2024 when they were on offer. They are still ok and will make a couple more meals.

The rest of the lunches are taken from the freezer (falafels, wild garlic hummus), or made from whatever we have in (lentil burger), or needs eating up (pizza to use up fridge gravel and yoghurt). We do a pickie lunch once a week. This a great way to use up bits of hummus, pate, meat, salad, chicken wings, cheese, an odd goujon or fish finger, pickles, etc.  Carrot sticks and cucumber stick can be made, we may toast stale pittas and slice, add crackers. It always feels special even though we are using up things. We especially love them in summer when we have lots of fresh ingredients.

We no longer eat breakfast, and intermittent fast, eating in a 8 hour window. This keeps our weight down. We have really reduced our snacks but have foraged apples, nuts, homemade bagels, and popcorn (home popped), available. There is always bread and jam, too. We do eat desserts. I make a pan of compote from foraged or homegrown fruit each week. Yoghurt is made fortnightly and lasts about a week. A rice pudding is made fortnightly and eaten the alternate week. The oven is put on to bake every 2 to 3 weeks. This involves making two lots of sweet things, like tray bakes or jam tarts. Some of these are frozen. Bread is also made then, and we eat a loaf a week. We buy 2 pints of milk a week from the milkman. It is whole milk and very creamy and so can be watered down if we need more. If milk is on offer I sometimes buy some to make cheese, or cheese spread. There is also dried milk in the cupboard.

As for drinks, I mainly drink water, or homemade herbal teas from foraged or home grown ingredients. Mr S has 2 coffees daily, and lots of herbal tea and water. He buys his own coffee beans. I do make Elderflower, blackcurrant, and rhubarb cordial, but they are all gone now. This year I want to  learn to make fermented, fizzy drinks.

Growing my own food, foraging, and stategic buying, help us spend little on food. We also have no waste and make most things from scratch. Building up a stock cupboard by just spending a few extra pounds a week, meant that when I shopped weekly, I could have weeks when I didn’t need to spend anything. I saved the money to bulk buy things so that I could slowly change to rarely shopping and having a yearly budget.

The amount of things that we buy have reduced as we have learned to make more staples ourselves. This includes bread, pickles, hummus, wraps, passatta, and yoghurt. I even grow and forage some grains now. Our menu doesn’t feel like we are depriving ourselves, despite not spending a lot. We enjoy our food, and it has little UPF in it. Monthly, we mix it up, introduce new recipes, and constantly look for ways to make the ingredients that we already have have more interesting.

This all takes a lot of time and effort and it is harder for people that work. Just little things can help like making a big pot of something in a slow cooker, growing lettuce on a window sill, or going bramble, or wild garlic picking on a walk.  There are also community fridges, Olio, and other cheap food resources that are available.

This is just what works for us. It isn’t  a blue print for anyone else. Everyone has different tastes, amounts of time, and skills.  The trick for us is to use ingredients that we really like as the star attraction, but bulk them out, or serve them with cheaper ingredients. Spices and herbs also add so much taste to dishes. We are constantly learning and adapting as things change and our skills increase, and eat totally differently to how we did 4 years ago. Has how you eat changed due to price increases?

Summary of meal plan

Lunches

Chilli nachos with green salad.

Wild garlic hummus on toast with lemon coleslaw

A lentil burger in a bun

Pizza

Chilli pasty with salad

Falafels in wraps with coleslaw.

A pickie lunch

Mains

Fish cakes with stir fry vegetables

Chilli cottage pie and veg

Stuffed butternut squash.

Chicken pasta

Wrap quiche, potato wedges and coleslaw.

Sweet potato and lentil curry and naan.

Chinese beef noodles.

If we still ate breakfast we would be eating porridge with compote, beans on toast, or homemade pancakes or waffles with yoghurt and compote. A treat a couple of times a month would be a bacon sandwich. I will be slipping some bacon into the cool box when we go on holiday. That will be one of my vacation indulgences 😊

Here are some more blogs that might help.

How supermarkets trick us into spending more

33 Frugal Ideas for breakfasts

Managing a low food budget