Friday 6 September 2013

Healthy eating on the cheap - this week's revelation

I hate wasting food.  I hate buying something and then either not using all of it before it goes off or, more commonly in my household, the fridge freezes it (we really need to get a refrigerator that doesn't freeze produce and yet somehow manage to leave the drinks warm).

In order to combat that, we used to make a list of meals for the week and do a big "weekly shop" at our nearest big grocery store.  Then we discovered the the Lidl nearest to our house is actually really quite good.  The problem with Lidl is that you can't walk in with a list and expect to be able to buy everything on it, they just don't have that kind of selection and a lot of the freshest food changes often. 

This week we did a version of the weekly shop in Lidl.  I still had a list of a few essentials that we were out of, but didn't have a weekly meal plan so concocted food plans as we walked through the aisles. 

I always thought that you could limit waste live more economically if you plan meals.  The problem with planning meals is that you have to think days in advance of what you might want to eat and, if you're me, you often end up making the same types of foods week on week.  These foods are good but it's nice to mix it up a bit.  

Amazingly this week's shop in Lidl, topped up with a few mid-week items from Tesco, came to about £35.  This covered the two of us for lunches and dinners and (due to us often buying lunches at work) ended up being nearly half of what we would normally spend on food in a week. 

Now, we did eat a lot of produce from the garden, but veggies tend to be the cheapest part of a weekly shop anyway so even if we had purchased everything I can't see it being that much more expensive.

This week saw me creating two new dishes that were super easy and healthy, which I'll post on here. 

Thumbs up to the Lidl shop. 

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