With prices rising, feeding a family is getting more expensive by the week, so seeking out tips on how to make your income stretch further can often be a productive pastime. One savvy mum has gained a massive 572k internet following after posting her ideas for feeding a family for about £20 quid a week. She has now shared how she cooked 100 meals for her family from just 57p per portion.
Lorna Cooper has built her tips on first hand experience. The mum to four says that she's amassed her knowledge over the years and grown her Facebook community (Feed Your Family) to share tips on how to make healthy, home cooked food on a budget.
The 46-year-old prepared a range of meals, bulking up the dishes by using things like lentils, beans and vegetables. She says she became a savvy shopper and cooker nine years ago when a back injury forced her to stop working, resulting in her and John being forced to make their food shops go further. In her latest money stretching advice, the now published author used a meat hamper to show just what could be accomplished. Lorna used MuscleFood’s £59 Value Hamper to cook 25 hearty dishes over five weeks with each dish serving herself, her husband John and two children.
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Altogether Lorna cooked 100 portions from the hamper with the meals coming in from as little as 57p per portion. In the hamper was a total of 7.3kg of meats such as beef mince, beef steak, pork sausages and chicken breasts. The bulk buy is designed to make 66 meals for under 90p per portion.
Among the meals cooked were two lasagnes, which cost a total of £5.20, two cottage pies - cost £4.58 - and a sausage chilli which came to £4.80. When cooking up her cottage pie, Lorna added in porridge oats to thicken up the dish, meaning she was able to make the minced meat go further.
She said: “Adding oats to a dish is actually an old trick from our ancestors. It thickens up the meal and anyone who eats it will hardly tell the difference between the oats and the meat because they’re cooked together."
She added: “Another way to bulk up a meal is to actually cut the meat up. Bulk up a typical pasta dish by chopping up a few sausages. No one is going to know exactly how much is in there, visually it will look like a lot more has been added. It’s the same with chicken, I personally like to shred this and once it’s done, it looks like there’s so much of it. It’s perfect for using as a bulky sandwich filler!”
Discussing the benefits of buying the hamper, Lorna said: “Good meat doesn’t need too much added flavour and the quality of the meats in MuscleFood’s Value Hamper is incredible value for money. I often find that supermarket bought meats shrink a lot in size when cooked and they let off a lot of water - two signs that the meat is heavily processed. The meats from the value hamper were a great size and didn’t shrink at all when cooked - the chicken and sausages in particular were huge. So much bigger than the packs you can buy from shops.”
Lorna’s top three tips for feeding your families for less:
- Always batch cook 2 meals - if you’re prepping a lasagne on a Sunday evening for the week ahead then why not make another one for the freezer. It will take the same time to cook two as it would to cook one and you’ll be saving on gas and energy in the long run.
- Fill up the freezer - it’s cheaper to run a freezer full of food than it is an empty one so you may as well freeze your meats and other foods to help them last longer. Lorna suggests cooking something like a whole chicken and taking it out of the freezer as and when you need it to cut your cooking time in the week by almost half!
- Create a price index in your head - Lorna advises keeping last week's shopping receipt and heading to a new supermarket with it. This way you’ll be able to compare the prices of the goods from different stores and eventually you’ll know exactly which products are cheaper from which store.
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