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How to eat tasty, nutritious food every day without breaking the bank. |
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Sounds obvious, but...  Before I get to the meat of the post, a quick thank you to those who've commented and also to Idlewild who has plugged me on her own blog. Although you could argue that I've been blogging about cars for about nine years, I'm new to this format and really enjoying the community feel that it generates. Please, comment away. It was great to see people saying "That looks nice but I'd do it this way instead" - experimenting like that is half the fun!I'm just about old enough to remember the days when every product in every shop had a little yellow price label like the one in the picture above. Shops were full of people with label guns, clicking away. Remember that? These days, supermarkets just label the shelf where the product's sitting. I think one result of this is that customers just pick up the product that they're after, without looking at the price. I'm not cynical enough to believe that that's the reason shops made this change, but it does make it easy to accidentally overspend.So, and apologies if I'm stating the crashingly obvious, don't forget to look at the prices.
I don't think supermarkets abandoned the old yellow stickers purely to dupe us, but I do think they take advantage of consumer-blindness.Take vegetables.As a general rule, you can get veggies loose, or in a packet, pre washed, pre cut up and ready to cook. Just look at the price difference - the per kilo price! - next time you're in the supermarket. You'll find a massive difference. It only takes a few seconds to wash, peel and chop most vegetables; wouldn't you rather save the money? On top of that (and feel free to call me weird) I find that this prep is part of the whole cooking experience. If you enjoy cooking, surely you'll want to choose how you're going to chop those veggies - fine pieces or chunky - rather than having a factory choose for you. That's before we even consider the factory methods of washing vegetables; I've read stories of some nasty bleach-type chemicals being used to wash our packaged salads. No link I'm afraid; maybe it was in the Weekend Guardian a year or so ago.Generally we expect larger sizes of anything to come in at a cheaper price, but that isn't always the case. When buying anything - vegetables, cream, oil, yoghurt - make sure you look at the per kilo price and not the packet price. I believe that shops in EU countries are obliged to display this by law. Larger sizes are not always cheaper.Compare different shops. I buy a lot of my food from a fantastic independently-owned local shop which is generally cheaper than the supermarkets. However, for some reason their bog-standard, cooking vegetable oil is twice the price of the equivalent oil at Sainsbury's. Very strange.I noticed something really weird a little while back. You know how supermarkets sell onions in little string bags, usually packs of three or four? I used to pick these up, just because I was too lazy to get a bag and take three or four loose onions. Until I took my own advice and looked at the per-kilo price. The onions in the string bags were twice the price of the loose ones. They weren't organic or anything - just in a string bag.If this post has made me sound like a penny pinching old miser then, well, yes, I am. But my grandma always told me to take care of the pennies and let the pounds take care of themselves... and since I've been seriously looking at the price of my shopping I've started to really enjoy it. Weird, yes, I know, but there is a certain challenge in walking into a supermarket with a fixed budget in my head and meeting it. If I'm under budget, I buy ice cream or a bottle of wine as a treat. It's also fun to have about the right cash in my hand to pay when the cashier has rung everything up on the till; I'm usually within three or four pounds of the total.
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