Social media has been excoriating Jack Monroe’s latest book — ‘Thrifty Kitchen’ — not least due to the insane ‘kitchen hack’ advising readers to open canned food with a ‘small knife’ and a ‘mallet’. I am sure that there are many pearls of wisdom in the book, but there is clearly a lot of nonsense too. Trying to steer a sensible course between Jack and her ‘using a small sharp knife to open a tin’ on the one hand and that tone-deaf, wrapping paper ironer Tory MP on the other, here are my suggestions of ways to save money when it comes to food.

In the following, I assume that readers have (a) a fridge, (b) a freezer and (c) an internet-connected device. So, in no particular order, here goes:

1. Join A Library

Almost all public libraries in the UK offer access to over 3,000 magazines via the ‘Libby’ app, for free. The UK magazines BBC Good Food, Delicious and Olive all have regular sections with ideas for cheap family meals, and the US magazine Cook’s Illustrated has a regular feature devoted to money-saving ideas in the kitchen. Published monthly, magazines (unlike recipe books) showcase ingredients in season in real-time, which helps you to save money because fruit and veg in season are always cheaper.

2. Check Special Offers

The discounter supermarkets Lidl and Aldi introduced the offer of 6 fruits and vegetables at bargain prices and now all UK supermarkets (including Waitrose) offer something similar. Check online before you go shopping and organise your cooking plans around what’s on offer. The prices of bakery items (baked in-store) are reduced by 30% at Lidl after 7pm.

3. Prepared Food vs. Prepared Food

Buying ready-peeled and chopped carrots is a waste of money, but buying ready-prepared and part-cooked/blanched veg can sometimes save time and money. Frozen baked and mashed potatoes need considerably less cooking than starting from scratch with the raw product. Tinned and frozen fruit is FAR cheaper than fresh, at any time of year.

4. Cooking methods

Unless you are addicted to fried food, an air fryer is probably not necessary. A halogen oven, on the other hand, is likely to save you quite a lot in comparison to an electric grill/oven. Some people swear by pressure cookers, but my suggestion would be a slow cooker, which is perfect for stews, casseroles, compotes, risottos, stocks, soups and even desserts. You can find 3.5 litre slow cookers for around £20. Microwaves are also a cost-efficient way to cook. For example, a jacket potato baked in the oven will cost you about 27p in electricity, compared to about 3p in a microwave. The last time Aldi had microwaves in their ‘Aisle of Wonder, Aisle of Shite’, they were on sale for £35.99.

5. Tools

You cannot (or should not) open a tin can with a small knife and a mallet. Buy a tin opener. Whenever you need to buy kitchen equipment, buy the best you can afford because it will last. The exception to this is a non-stick frying pan. Non-stick surfaces never last, so buy the cheapest you can find and replace as necessary. If you want a non-stick pan that will last your lifetime, then buy a ‘De Buyer Mineral B’ carbon steel pan. They are not cheap, but properly sealed and cared for, they will give you a completely non-stick surface that will, frankly, outlast you. What is really worth investing money in is a knife sharpener. The ‘Anysharp’ one is excellent, and although it costs around £10, it will give years of life to your cheap knife. A £12 chef’s knife properly sharpened is infinitely better than a £120 knife that is dull and blunt.

6. Learn to Cook

I’m sorry that this sounds condescending. Working your way through Delia (who teaches people to cook rather than simply follow recipes) is never going to be wasted time. But I’m thinking more about mastering the ready meals you might buy. For example, it is easy to buy ready-made lasagne on the way home from work, but if you do that quite often, it’s an expensive way to eat. A far better plan is to make a big pot of ragù in a slow cooker. Adding sausage meat to the beef mince will give you a richer, tastier sauce at the same time as it lowers the cost. Don’t buy lardons, but dice some bacon rashers (around 40% cheaper), and take some time to make a proper mirepoix (celery, carrot and onion). (Keep back some of the mince and sausage and add egg, breadcrumbs, onions and parsley to make meatballs that you can eat while the ragù is slow cooking — ready-made meatballs are around 60% more expensive per kilogram than beef mince, yet making your own takes less than ten minutes.) To make your lasagne, all you need is some sheet pasta, béchamel sauce (which is easy to make) and cheese. The same ragù could also be served as a spaghetti sauce, make a cottage pie, top a baked potato, fill a pastry pie, get poured over nachos, fill baked peppers and more besides.

7. Drop a Take Away

Instead of ordering a takeaway, learn to make your favourites yourself. Replicating your favourite Indian will save you a lot. Buy ready-made spice mixes (the idea that everyone in the subcontinent grinds and blends their own spices each day is a myth) but make your own curry (i.e. sauce). Learn about the importance of marinading and begin well ahead. The night before, brown the marinaded meat and fry the onions with the spice mix (or according to the recipe) ready to go into the slow cooker on the day with the tomatoes and other ingredients. Make a double quantity at least because curry freezes well.

If you need poppadoms, buy uncooked ones from an Asian grocer and cook at home (over a flame, under the grill, in oil or even in a microwave). A jar of mango chutney, lime pickle and some homemade kachumbar (onion, tomato and cucumber salad) complete that ‘course’. If you want pakoras (often called bhajis in the UK for some strange reason), make your own. You will need gram (chickpea) flour, which you can buy from Asian grocers and most supermarkets. They will need to be fried in oil, so filter the (cooled) oil used into a bottle for ‘Indian’ use. Supermarket pakoras always seem to be doughy and unpleasant, so making your own is worth the effort.

For samosas, buy a pack from the ‘international foods’ freezer section of your supermarket (Morrisons and Asda usually stock them, as do some larger branches of Sainsbury’s) or from an Asian grocer. You will get around 20 for not much more than the cost of 4 from the regular chilled food section.

Find a method of cooking rice (there are many that work), perfect it, and stick to it. If you want bread, frozen parathas are a good option. ‘Folded Flat Breads’ are usually much closer in taste and texture to authentic naan bread than the rather cakey product sold under that name. Making your own chappatis and naans is pretty easy, especially if you have a breadmaker or mixer to take the effort out of kneading the dough. You’ll need a heavy-bottomed frying pan to cook them.

8. Make Friends with Cheaper Cuts

Getting lamb on the table quickly is an expensive business because it tends to mean chops, steaks or roasting joints. But if you are slow cooking, then scrag and middle neck are delicious. For beef, shin, chuck and blade are all good options for slow cooking. Skirt is a cheap way to enjoy a steak dinner (though you can’t cook it beyond medium rare). Slow-cooked brisket makes a flavourful roast. With pork, belly is still a reasonably priced cut despite having become quite trendy lately, as are ribs. Hand and spring will make a good braise/roast, but if you want crackling, ask the butcher to remove and score the skin before rolling the joint so you can cook it separately at a higher temperature. And sadly often overlooked are my favourite — cheeks, which make the richest, softest, tastiest stew imaginable. Chicken thighs are far cheaper than breasts, much tastier and do not become hard and rubbery with slow cooking.

Don’t forget offal either. While tunnel-boning a pig’s trotter and stuffing it with ham mousse might be beyond most home cooks, liver and kidneys are quick and easy to cook. If a slab of liver or a sliced beef heart (which works brilliantly with Asian flavours like soy, sesame and mirin) is a step too far, then a way of ‘hiding’ the unmentionable is to make faggots — minced pork belly and fry (liver and heart). Your butcher should be able to provide you with the caul fat you’ll need to wrap them. Then there is oxtail — the beefiest of all beef cuts and the reason why everyone needs a slow cooker.

9. Make the Most of Your Chicken

If you have a large family, then you may polish off a whole roast chicken, but if you live alone or with one other person, then buying a whole chicken is still a cost-effective way of eating. Roast your chicken and eat what you want for your roast chicken dinner. There are lots of things that you can do with the leftovers (which will keep for 3-4 days in the fridge in an airtight container). Dice the breast and legs for packed lunches: chicken mayonnaise, caesar salad pittas/wraps, coronation chicken (also makes a good baked potato topping) and salads. For use in other recipes, leg and thigh are best as they do not dry out like the breast. Tear into pieces and cook in a spicy sauce for a quick chicken curry, make a chicken risotto, use to make a chicken and mushroom pie, use in chimichangas and quesadillas, mix with bacon and make a creamy sauce for pasta, etc. Then, when the carcass is picked clean, break it up, roast it until golden and put it into your slow cooker. Add chopped carrot, celery* and onion with a few peppercorns and some parsley stalks. Cover with water (about 1.5 litres for a medium-sized chicken) and cook on low for at least 12 and up to 24 hours. The stock that you end up with is the real McCoy and using it will, I guarantee you, elevate your cooking in ways you barely imagined.

If you cook oxtail, or are buying beef from the butcher, ask for some bones (either free or very cheap) and use these to make beef stock.

* When carrots and celery in your fridge are starting to go ‘bendy’, peel and chop them and freeze in a bag to use in stock making

10. Get Soupmaking

Making soup is easy and cheap and the variations are practically infinite. If you have onions, garlic, stock (or a stock cube/pot), maybe a potato, and another ingredient, then you can make soup. Soups are an excellent way of increasing your intake of vegetables. Personally, I find butternut squash pretty boring, but made into a soup lightly spiced with cumin, it is utterly irresistible. We all know that kale is good for us, but taken in soup form — either blended to the consistency of cream, or in a more rustic, Tuscan style — one feels less like a rabbit consuming it. Soups can be a good way of getting children to eat their greens, smuggled into a tasty tomato soup, for example. Soups are also great ways of making use of tired vegetables and bargain offers. Those very cheap leeks that you spot may not work in the meal you have planned for today, but you can put them in a soup. Soup will keep for 3-4 days in the fridge and 4-6 months in the freezer. Adding protein to a soup in the form of meat, fish or pulses, mean that it can be eaten as a main course.

11. Plan and Take Notes

Plan your meals and make a shopping list (use something like Google Keep on your phone). A lot of vegetables are either cheaper when bought in quantity (a bag of carrots, a net of onions, a big bag of potatoes) or tend only to be available in quantity (three courgettes, three leeks, etc.), so plan how you are going to use them. A massive bag of carrots may be a bargain, but you don’t want to be eating boiled carrots every day — turn some into soup and make some coleslaw. Think about the quantity you need. Shopping ‘by eye’ — or, worse, shopping when hungry — means we tend to buy more than we need. The same goes for ‘cooking by eye’. There are advantages to following a recipe and even more benefits to annotating the recipe afterwards, especially if it’s something new that you’re trying. Those notes in the margin — ‘not quite enough for four’, ‘needs 15 minutes more in the oven’, ‘not enough chilli’ etc. will really help you the next time you make it.

12. Make a Recipe Library

I find the notetaking app ‘Evernote‘ really useful. Recipes found on the internet can be ‘clipped’ and added to your library of notes, and you can take a screenshot of recipes from books on your phone. These recipes can be annotated and searched (Evernote will even search text in photos). When you need to be reminded of the proportions of milk, flour and eggs for Yorkshire puddings, search your Evernote library first (there are 129,000 Google results for “Yorkshire pudding recipe” — far better to start with that recipe you’ve already followed).

13. Make Your Own Ready Meals

When making, say, a lasagne or shepherd’s pie, make an individual (or double) portion at the same time to freeze. Foil dishes with lids are sold by Wilko, Home Bargains and other retailers, working out at about 20p each. Then, next time you need a ‘ready meal’ for one or two, then the foil dish can go straight into the oven.

Foil pie plates and dishes can also be used to make and freeze sweet and savoury pies, crumbles and pie shells. For pie shells, make a big quantity of pastry and freeze a couple of pie shells. They can be baked blind from frozen, then filled with whatever you have to hand to make a quiche/tart.

14. Bulk with Pulses

Lentils, chickpeas and beans are a cheap way of making meat go further. It is cheapest to buy them dried, but remember that you need to soak them. But even the tinned version is cheaper than beef mince. Add a handful of lentils to a beef ragù or some chickpeas to a prawn curry and it will stretch to another portion or two quite easily.

15. Buy a Cheese Grater

The best value Parmigiano Reggiano cheese in the UK is around £17.45 per kilo. Grated, it costs almost £25 per kilo. A cheese grater from Wilko costs £1 or £1.50.

16. Look at the Labels

This may seem obvious, but it is always worth looking at the display labels to see the price per weight. Those meatballs may be only £2.79 compared to £2.89 for lean beef mince, but per kilo they cost £8.21 and £5.78. The £2.41 difference will more than pay for the eggs, breadcrumbs, seasoning and onion that you need to make meatballs, and if you make more than you need, freeze some (they can be cooked from frozen).

17. Mind Where You Shop

Again, this sounds pretty obvious, but the price differentials can be significant. In Waitrose, Parmigiano Reggiano (Parmesan) costs £19.15 per kilo, and in Aldi it is £17.45. In other words, for the price of five 200g packs in Waitrose, you can buy six from Aldi. Like Parma ham, Jamón ibérico, Gorgonzola, etc. these are goods that have a D.O.P. (Protected Designation of Origin), so you are getting the same product, not some inferior version).

18. Explore Own Brands

Another obvious one, but well worth it. Fairy washing-up liquid for £1 from Poundland may seem like a bargain, but not in comparison to Lidl’s ‘Good Housekeeping’ award-winning liquid for less than 60p. For the basics — cleaning products, fruit and veg, pre-packaged meat, fish fingers, frozen pizzas, ice cream, flour, sugar, cheese, porridge oats, frozen fruit, and yoghurt — own brands are usually pretty reliable. Someone posted a picture on Twitter a few days ago of the display of eggs in an Aldi store which contained a rogue dozen Waitrose eggs. This may or may not prove that they use the same supplier, but the difference in price is sobering: £4.25 in Waitrose, £2.25 in Aldi.

19. Maximise Your Oven Space

Turning on a domestic oven is more expensive than it’s ever been, so cook as much as you can (and plan to do so). If you are using your oven to cook a pie or casserole, put some pulses in to cook too, or some potatoes (keep the cooked spuds in the fridge and they only need 15-20 minutes to heat through before eating). Or if you are making soup at the same time, cook it in the oven instead of on the hob. When you turn the oven off, put in any stale bread to thoroughly dry out for making breadcrumbs. Try to plan never to use the oven for just one dish.

20. Don’t buy Bagged Leaves

If you want watercress or rocket, then buying the stuff in bags is usually the only way, but for other leaves, ready-washed lettuce is expensive. Also, it is packed in nitrogen to ensure it stays crisp, so once the bag is opened it begins to oxidise and will be flabby or even slimy within 24-48 hours. Far cheaper is whole lettuce (little gem and romaine will stay crisp for several days in the salad drawer of the fridge). Buy growing herbs if you can, but if you struggle to keep them alive and therefore buy the bunches in bags, then pick and chop the entire contents, freezing what you don’t use. Otherwise, keep in the fridge with stalks in a glass of water (or wrapped in damp paper towels) to keep them perky.

21. Make Fruit Compote

Fruit compotes made from tinned, frozen, dried or discounted fruit are incredibly versatile and enable you to control the sugar content. They can be frozen or kept (unopened) in jars in the fridge for weeks, if not months. They can be stirred through yoghurt, added to porridge, drizzled over waffles, smeared on croissants instead of jam, and used in puddings or as a sauce for ice cream. Nigel Slater’s book Real Fast Puddings is a treasure trove of simple ideas for delicious and easy puddings (second-hand copies going for as little as 50p on Amazon).

22. Ditch the Breakfast Bars

A muesli or breakfast bar can give us a welcome burst of energy and protein in the morning, but they are not great value. Make your own using your favourite ingredients to enjoy first thing or add to your lunchbox. They will keep for a week in an airtight container, or else they can be frozen.

23. Buy Cheap Wine

We’ve all been told that we should use good quality wine for cooking. This was probably once sage advice back when a lot of wine on sale in Britain was close to vinegar or petrol, but now a lot of wine under £5 is perfectly drinkable (if not terribly exciting). By the time it’s cooked down for several hours and almost all of the alcohol has evaporated, you are not going to notice the difference between a boeuf bourguignon made with Château Lafite and one made with Lidl’s bargain red of the week.

24. Washing Soda

Sodium Carbonate (£1 per kilo in Wilko) is essential in any kitchen. Burnt residue on a baking tin or dish? Throw in some washing soda and fill with hot water. Within minutes, the baked-on grease will come away with a light brush or scrub. This saves you money because it means that you don’t have to use large quantities of hot water and washing up liquid to get dishes clean. Adding a scoop to your clothes wash will also make your laundry detergent go further and keep your washing machine in good nick.

25. Be Careful About Bananas

If you need to ripen some fruit (e.g. avocado), put it into a paper bag with a banana or two to speed up the process. This is because bananas give off ethene (formerly ethylene) gas, which causes ripening in other fruit. But if you don’t want your plums and peaches to go mushy too quickly, keep your bananas well-clear. Bananas ‘on the turn’ can be peeled, cut into chunks, and frozen for use in smoothies.

26. Go to Work on an Egg

It’s hard to imagine cuisine without the egg. Omelettes, fried eggs, poached eggs, boiled eggs, mayonnaise, meringues, custards, quiches, etc. Although they have increased in price considerably, they are still a relatively cheap and nutritious sauce of protein. Ratatouille is a side dish, but add a couple of poached eggs and it becomes a main course. Instead of making a classic omelette, make a frittata instead and take a slice to work for your lunch the following day.

27. Pep Up Your Salads

In Britain, we tend to think of salad simply as an accompaniment. However, it can become a substantial meal, or part of a meal, with the addition of protein and fat. Starting from the basics of leaves, tomato and cucumber, perhaps with the addition of peppers, onions, or spring onions, olives and the like, you can add chicken, bacon, ham, cheese, fish, nuts, croutons, chickpeas and more (though not all at once). One of the most amazing salads I have ever eaten was the ‘Full English Breakfast Salad’ — a base of lettuce and cucumber, with roast cherry tomatoes, cubes of black pudding, slices of sausage, garlic button mushrooms, sliced rounds of rolled cheese omelette and croutons of fried bread. The dressing was the oil and bacon fat from the frying pan with the addition of vinegar. Obviously, make your own dressings for salads. A simple 2:1 emulsion of oil to vinegar thickened with mustard will keep in the fridge for a few weeks weeks. Don’t buy those miserable ready-made croutons. Toss chunks of stale bread in olive oil, garlic and — if you like — grated Parmesan, and then bake until golden.

28. Tinned Fish is Good

Tinned salmon makes a bloody good fishcake, better than fresh salmon in my opinion. With garlic, spring onions and cream, it is also great in a pasta sauce.

29. Embrace Umami

‘Umami’ is that savoury, slightly ‘meaty’ flavour that one gets from meat as well as things like Parmesan cheese and things which have been browned (like roast potatoes). Umami flavours are satisfying but don’t only come from meat. Look for recipes using things like mushrooms. Most people eating a mushroom and lentil casserole will assume it contains meat because it is so ‘savoury’. Adding chopped anchovies to a beef stew will make it far tastier.

30. Start Small

If you are currently relying on ready meals, pre-prepared veg and takeaways, don’t try to run before you can walk. Choose one day (maybe at the weekend) when you are going to cook something inexpensive from scratch, or batch cook, or prepare ahead. If that works out, add it to your repertoire and try something else the following week, even if it’s just one course of a meal. Within a few months, you should have a basic fortnightly menu to work with.

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