Cheap and Cheerful Food

Save money with Every Day Value

I’m a huge fan of these money saving programmes that often frequent the TV listings in the Autumn. Whether or not they are trying to get us to save money in the big run up to Christmas or not I don’t know, but I’m fascinated by the way that brands are always put upon a pedestal by consumers that deem them a higher quality just because the price tag is perceived to be the benchmark for quality.

Let’s take one item on my shopping list.  Digestive Biscuits.

McVities are 89p for 250g and they’re tasty but Tesco’s Everday Value Digestive Biscuits are just 31p for 400g.  Ordinarily you would think that because they are branded, McVities are the best.  Not so.  If you want a biscuit, and only a digestive will do the Everyday Value is perfect. To me, there is  no difference whatsoever.  More biscuit for your pennies – no brainer!

But it didn’t stop there.  We decided to try and save on our own weekly shopping. Generally our shopping is around £65 a week, that includes steak, chops, lots of fish, potatoes, vegetables, salad, chocolate mousses and crisps.   Andy did this week’s shopping and swapped 80% of the branded shop for Everyday Value and we saved £20.

 

Cheap Food and Filling Food

We want to have a sausage casserole in the week, so instead of using Butchers Choice, Low Fat sausages we’ve swapped them for Woodside Farm 8 sausages for just 66p. I know it sounds super cheap and I’m a bit worried that they might be full of rusk and sawdust but we need to save some money and quite frankly if it tastes ok and fills us up, I’m not too concerned. We do try to eat healthily without too many sweet things and carbohydrate laden, but right now we need cheap and filling so they will have to make do.  Grabbed a bag of casserole veg for £1, some potatoes for 89p and a packet of sausage casserole mix we already have from Approved Food which I got for 10p and we have a meal for 2 of us for 2 days done in the slow cooker.  £2.80 (including electricity) for 2 of us, over 2 days so that’s 66p a portion.  Can’t grumble at that, we’re money saving after all.

Money Saving Ideas

Are you interested in ways to save money? What kind would you be interested in?  Cheap healthy food?  Let me know in the comments below and although I’m no Martin Lewis Money Saving Expert, I’ll write a series of articles to see if I can’t help you save some money over the next year to make life easier and more comfortable for you.

Cheap and Cheerful Food