Hello Dear Reader,
(Warning - Lots of images of raw meat ahead )
After my bills have been paid by direct debit and we have left enough money in our current account for fuel and food for the month, then I go shopping. Today, I went to the butchers to restock my freezer. I bought more than enough for the following month and I won't need to go back for a while.
I need to get organised as I'm writing more now. I'm writing for the online version of the Daily Mirror as a money saving blogger and today, I've prepared, cooked and written about a date night supper for under £5 to celebrate Valentine's Day. The house is full of food, which means ready meals to reheat through out the week! Hard work today will save me time over the working week.
It also saved me time and money to use the local butchers. As I know some of you will ask, I go to Tregagles, on the Trago site in Liskeard and it's an abbatoir outlet store for the meat supplier St Merryn. They supply all the major supermarkets and I usually buy meat in Tesco packaging.
So, I'll explain how I save money this way. To start, I check the mysupermarket website. I look for the meat offers. I do this to make sure I'm getting a better deal. For example, today at Tesco, steak is £20 a kilo, chicken breast is £8.50 a kilo, bacon £7.15 a kilo, pork belly £6.50 a kilo and beef steak burgers are £1.50 each. Armed with that knowledge, I knew what to look for and what I was prepared to pay.
My butcher charges £3.74 a kilo for thick sliced smoked bacon - so half the price of the supermarket.
My best deal today, 20 beef burgers for £2 so 10p each! I've bagged them into 400g bags (five burgers) and I can break them up an use as mince or cook as burgers. They will offset the higher priced meats I've bought.
I bought four chicken crowns, effectively all chicken breast for £10. 2.6kg of chicken breast for £10 - Chicken breast for £3.83 a kilo - again, less than half the price of the supermarket. And for those of you who might ask, yes, I do stand in the butchers with a calculator and work it out. I love telling the staff there how cheap they are and they are half the price of most supermarkets. Note, they are shed chickens, it was the choice I made. I buy free range chickens too and usually pay around £6.50 each for a small one.
I use black pudding as a side ingredient, I'm going to try Black pudding Scotch eggs, I saw them on Gordon Ramsay's restaurant website when I was looking for Valentine's day menu ideas. I paid £1.50 this this beauty! Don't worry, I'm not going to eat it all at once as it contains barley which will give me belly ache so I'll only eat a tiny bit.
I thought I'd bought five steaks but one was underneath and there were in fact six, I paid just under £10 and paid £1.66 per steak. Again, half the price of the supermarket. Let's remember here, St Merryn are the main suppliers of meat to Tesco so I'm buying Tesco's meat for half the price.
Here's the sixth sirloin!!! It was obviously put into the pack to make up the weight! Here's where I was swayed by good quality meat, it's on offer in Tesco at £12 a kilo until 10/2/15 but I still only paid £8.98 a kilo. I still beat the supermarket price but didn't pay my usual less than half price.
Pork belly was only slightly less but, I still paid less than the supermarket.
I now have to do a bit of work. I got seven portions of bacon out of the pack, each of my packs had six thick slices and works out at £1.25 a pack. I keep a note of this when I'm pricing up meals. I like our eating costs to average out at £2 per person per day.
The chicken crowns have been individually bagged. Each crown will do us for two meals. They worked out at £2.50 each.
758g also includes skin and bone which we won't eat but there's still a lot of meat for our £2.50.
Steaks were bagged up. £1.66 per person for each meal is a lot but I'll still keep my average cost over the week to £2 per person per day.
I make sure the portion sizes are equal, although I don't cut down steaks, I always try to have a smaller steak than DB.
The rump is a bit too lean, it might be best for braising.
Even the black pudding gets portioned and frozen.
All the meat gets bagged, labeled and dated so I can rotate stock.
Now, not everyone has an abbatoir outlet store but you will find big meat stalls in markets around the country. I also use our local artisan butcher and he matches the supermarket and I try to use him when even I can. I can and do buy local meat from both suppliers and the abbatoir codes will tell yo where the meat comes from and you can look that up online just by entering the numbers. This means you can trace your meat. With the exception of the bacon, all the meat I bought was locally slaughtered, that usually means locally sourced as it's too expensive to move it around on the hoof and adds to the cost. In my early childhood, my parents rented a house owned by the Richard's family and we lived next to the slaughter house, it didn't bother me then and it doesn't bother me now. I've had an interest in the humane dispatching of animals for meat ever since. When I was a teen, my mum worked in a butchers so I'm not squeamish about meat in anyway. Even though meat isn't expensive, we still limit what we eat and don't eat meat every day as I don't think it's necessary to do so. In saying that, I'm not going to give up eating it either. I know some of you are vegetarians and I respect your choice.
Look out for local market traders. Look for multi-pack deals and ask for them if they haven't got any. Check out your local butchers, you will find they match the supermarkets and can give you a better service. If you only want to buy two sausages they will be happy to sell that few to you. They will also be able to tell you where and when the meat was slaughtered and which herd/flock/farm it came from. Knowing all that allows you to make an informed choice.
Over to you, who has found a meat supplier at a local market? Who has a local butcher who is the same price as the supermarket or cheaper?
Until tomorrow,
Love Froogs xxxx