Hi mums!
I’m hoping some of you will have some awesome ideas and tips and hints to help me!
I’ve recently seperate from my partner, I have the 4 kids full time aged from 1year to 7years.
I’m a busy mum which means I’m super time poor, so I do a lot of little to no prep food, packaged snacks etc etc. I spend about 150-180 on a normal food shop per week, plus an extra 60ish twice that week for top ups. This obviously will not be doable. I’m wanting to know what I should have as staples for meal bases etc and any other tips you have.
Receipes for making bulk snacks to freeze that are cost effective.
I’m open to trying a lot, but drawing the line at making my own bread 😅😂
Thankyou!
4 Replies
Maybe try planning and doing an online shop. Its not cheaper but if you plan you can keep it down compared to impulse buys when youre there. It also saves you time and effort so you can spend that on the prep instead.
Cheap meals: pasta and pesto and salad, spag bog, curry (chicken, beef, or chick peas, potato or eggplant) meatloaf, lasagne, corn fritters, burgers. Bacon and eggs.
Cheap snacks: veggie sticks and dip. Apple slices and pb, date balls, dried fruit and nuts, fresh fruit, smoothies, ham and cheese and olives, jatz rice crackers avo, pancakes
Extra cheap and easy meals: toasties, beans on toast, soup and cheesy toast, 2 minute noodles with salad or fried egg, eggy bread/omelette
And pick up a bbq chook. Sometimes with steamed veggies and gravy but usually whacked on a plate with cuc, tomato, carrot, tinned corn, tinned beetroot.
I always plan my meals for the week and buy what I need. I always have go to meals in my freezer. Soup, bolognese, stroganoff etc all freeze well. Corned silverside, stir fries, home made snitzel, home made pizza are some of our favourites.
I make all lunches for the week in one go on a sunday and put them in the freezer. I usually just make sandwiches with ham or chicken. It is so much easier to just take them out of the freezer in the morning. Home made cake is cost effective and freezes well. It rained all weekend so we baked cupcakes for school and put them in the freezer.
At this stage in my life, I cooked every 2nd/3rd night.
Write a meal plan based around what we had in the pantry already, so not buying stuff when we already had food. I’d plan which meal we had based on what we had on during the week. For example Monday was a quiet night so I’d cook bolognaise (double batch) so we could reheat the next night.
It helps to know your special cycle. I know that the pasta we use is on sale every four weeks, so we buy our pasta that week.