Making the meat go further

[Paul]

This by Paul's wife.

Like everyone, our £ does not go as far today as it did a year ago, and one of our savings has been a reduction in the amount of meat we eat.

Taking advantage of the 3 for £10 offers in the supermarket, we would buy a tray of 4 or 5 chicken breasts, a tray of 8 pork loin chops (all these frozen at home in 2s) and one other, which could be sausages, gammon steaks or a duplicate of our original choice.

That, plus 2 X 750g trays of minced beef (each divided into 3) would be sufficient to fill our freezer with 'meat meals' for the 2 of us for the month. Not so today.

Chicken breasts are now in packs of 2, perhaps 3, and chops 6. I already use only one chicken breast for a curry, but the biggest change has been our minced beef, which is what I shall concentrate on.

As said, we would divide each 750g pack into 3 parcels, so from each £3.50 pack, that worked out at just over £1 a meal.

In recent months though, I have taken to adding 2 tins of tomatoes and 2 large onions to the meat when cooking, then dividing this mix in 2, one for spaghetti bolognese and the other for lasagne (or if I added a large tin of red kidney beans as well, 2 chilli meals) so in theory, making the meat go twice as far.

Not a bad thing when you're watching your weight and cholesterol.

Then came the price hike and we bought the 500g packs of minced beef, but adopted the same principal, so again 3 parcels for the freezer, and then 2 meals per parcel.

Stocking up with meat last week, our budget could only stretch to the 400g packs and these were £4.68 per pack. We divided each pack into 4, but even with the biggest imagination, I cannot make each pack stretch to 2 meals now.

So in summary, our minced beef was originally 250g per meal for 2 (125g each), followed by 125g (62.5g each) with my first stretch, then 3 parcels out of 500g meant 166g-ish per pack and 83g per meal (41.5g each), and now we've managed to go up a bit to 100g per meal and 50g each.

I think I will try next time to get 5 parcels out of our 400g pack and so go back to around 80g (40g each) per meal, then chuck in a handful of peppers or chopped carrots as well as the onions and tomatoes to make it go further.

Soon however, I envisage us not buying minced beef at all.