Price Comparisons...

After the comment after my latest menu post from Mum, I thought it might be interesting to do a like-for-like comparison shop of what I bought this week in the UK, with what I'd buy if I were in NZ. I was shocked at how expensive everything seemed to be in NZ when I was home last year (and it seemed an increase on what things had been like when I'd been home the time before that, about 2 years prior). So, I went to the website of Countdown - my former main-stay supermarket in NZ and tried to get a similar shopping basket to the one I ordered here via Ocado. I tried to be as fair as possible with Countdown, buying the versions of products I'd buy if I were there (so picking the cheapest options and budget ranges were possible, but keeping the same higher welfare meat standards) or matching items to weight where there wasn't a like for like (eg. the white chocolate eggs I plan to use in a raspberry white chocolate slice). There were a few things I couldn't get - chickpeas (dried or canned) which seems odd, but we can assume the tinned version wouldn't be too pricey (and I know the dried ones are hard to come by in NZ). Also fresh raspberries weren't available, so I had to go with frozen.

This is my Ocado receipt for today's weekly shop:

And this is the Countdown list (I couldn't get a screenshot of their shopping cart)

Quite a big difference in cost because I think typically you spend dollar for pound and vice versa, rather than seeing a difference based on exchange rates, but not perhaps as huge a difference as I had thought. In saying that, spending $134 a week on a fairly basic shop (one which has very few vege, no pasta or rice, no milk because I forgot to order it and only a couple of small toiletry items) does seem expensive to me. Maybe wages have gone up substantially in NZ since I left?!

Reflections on the process:

• The Countdown interface is hellishly annoying and has miles to go before it'd be even half as lovely to use as Ocado 
• There is a BIG difference in what's available in different parts of NZ. I don't think this is the case in the UK. If you live somewhere obscure you can't always get stuff delivered, but the general food stuffs would be the same. When I did the Countdown thing, I initially put Mum's address in Clyde in, and I couldn't get ANY fresh items at all (meat, fish, vege, fruit - nada). Seems geared towards Auckland which isn't terribly user friendly for the rest of the country
• Dairy products are obnoxiously expensive and hugely price fixed in NZ. All the yoghurts were the same price regardless of brand. Surely this is highly anti-competitive behaviour on the part of (one assumes) Fonterra? I'm genuinely surprised that the WTO hasn't slapped them and the NZ government on the wrist. 

While there are many things which are expensive in the UK, I will say that I think the food is really good quality and very good value. I know that's in part because of EU subsidies etc, and I will also say that we have high inflation here at the moment (or, relatively high inflation) so prices have gone up noticeably. But still, we eat damned well for not terribly much money. And we spend well above the norm.

Interesting food for thought...

Meat-free Tacos

Part of the whole cheaper-shopping thing is trying to introduce more meat-free meals into our weekly menu. I love vegetarian food, but Andrew clings on to a feeling that he needs to have meat in most meals. This is more a psychological quirk than anything I think, because he's actually not such a big lover of meat and wouldn't trouble you for a steak. So I'm convinced that I can find meat-free meals he'll like. We don't normally eat a great deal of meat - most meals we eat use only a small amount anyway (this being for both ethical and economical reasons). But proper meat-free is harder. I've made the following dish a few times and it seems to meet with approval. Typical tacos in our household would be made with tomato-based beef mince chilli (usually with kidney beans added), but I think this is actually nicer. I do have refried bean mixtures I like, but in the interests of winning over the other half, I've been trying to think of something with a more meaty texture. Green or brown lentils have proven a winner. The spices I add are as I like them - feel free to adjust/alter to your tastes or to whatever you have in the cupboard.

This is my recipe (which makes enough for two greedy people with plenty leftover for lunch the next day).

Lentil Chilli 

2 medium/1 large onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic
1/2 tsp cumin seeds
2 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp paprika
1/2 tsp dried chilli
1 cup green or brown lentils
1/4 c tomato paste
1 tbsp soy sauce (or 1 tsp salt)
2 tsp brown sugar
1 litre (or so) of hot vege/chicken stock (or water)

Gently cook the onion in oil until soft and sweet, add garlic and whole cumin seeds if using. Cook a minute longer and then add the rest of the spices. Cook for a minute or so until fragrant, then add the lentils. Stir to combine and ensure they are all coated with spices. Add the tomato paste, sugar and salt/soy, plus half the stock. Bring to a simmer. Cook for about an hour. You will need to keep an eye on it and top up the stock/water. Keep the lentils moist throughout, but in final 10 minutes of cooking, let the mixture dry out somewhat. You don't want it to be too saucy as the texture is better when it's slightly drier.

Serve in tacos or soft tortillas (both in our house - I like crunchy, A like soft!) with guacamole, cheese, Greek yoghurt or sour cream, shredded lettuce, chopped tomatoes, coriander - whatever you fancy! I would advise that you don't eat it over your computer for lunch like I did. Tacos are messy. 

Menu Plan this Week

This week we have visitors coming for lunch on Saturday so I've bought a larger quantity of beef than I usually would and the bill for the week is a wee bit higher (£55) but I will get at least one (possibly two) other meals from the beef so it'll work out.

This week's menu/plan is:

The falafel on Friday night are my Mum's good friend Shirley's recipe and they're rather infamous in our family circles. Haven't had them in ages but I'm looking forward to Friday's dinner already!

I've also just sown my tomato seedlings for the summer today and plan on Saturday (after lunch) to spend the afternoon sowing some greens in the garden. I love my garden but am not very good at gardening - tending to get excited in spring and then get distracted later on. This year's goal is to get the garden functioning more as a kitchen garden - with plans of growing so that we can have something to eat from it throughout the year. Will see how that goes! 

What I've been doing lately

My partner and I are incredibly fortunate and I'm always aware of (and grateful for) this good fortune.  Despite moving to Britain at the very tipping point of the economic crisis, we've not really been hit terribly hard by things. However, we've noticed lately that the household budget has begun to feel a bit strained. We took at look at it (and it's a terrifyingly well organised system of excel spreadsheets and different accounts - thank goodness one of us is good with money. It's not me, by the way) and realised that I had been wildly over-spending on food. Partly this is because food prices have gone up a large amount, but I think it was more that I had let the amount I was meant to spend gradually creep up. The budget might be £70 a week, but one week it ends up being £75, then £78 and then suddenly you've normalised the idea that what you actually spend is £80 and that's ok.

So I decided that I could do a lot better than this. £60 was what the actual budget was meant to be (so when I was spending upwards of £80 each week, that's a lot), and £60 a week is still miles above average in Britain. I figured that since I'm fairly competent in the ktichen, I should be able to feed us on a lot less. So I've set myself the target of spending less than £50 a week on groceries. Technically this is only £10 less than what the budget originally specified, but in reality, it's closer to £30-40 less than what I was actually spending.

It's not actually hard, but it does involve quite a bit more organisation on my part. My self-imposed rules are:
 - groceries have to be ordered online once a week in time for when last week's run out (this is about things like milk and yoghurts which are eaten daily and need to be topped up)
 - I should try to keep it as low as possible, without being unreasonable (because an extra trip to the shops to buy what I forgot/left out-and-actually-needed - is false economy)
 - I need to use what is in the freezer/cupboards already

The last one is quite a bit point actually. I've been doing regular freezer inventories lately because I'm prone to buying things on special or going and buying extras for dinner one night instead of what was planned and buying pasta/rice etc every week whether I need it or not. I think it's some kind of armageddon mentality - come the apocalypse, I need to know that we could survive on tinned tomatoes, pasta and dried lentils for weeks. And we could. (I come by this very honestly...my grandma and mother are both total kitchen hoarders. Grandma's freezer could easily provide for a family of four for about 6 months I would think). So I'm trying to make sure that we really do use things I've frozen (having a list of what's actually in the freezer helps with this a lot), and am making sure that I only buy what we need (or if something is running low, topping up only one thing a week - flour this week, pasta next. Same with cleaning supplies).

I'm not sure whether it will last - but I'd like it to. I'm still cooking good food, no one is going hungry and it hopefully eases money for other things. It's not that we couldn't afford to spend £80 a week on groceries if we really wanted to, but I don't think we really need to. It's wasteful and I don't want to be a wasteful person. Plus it's forcing me to be a bit more creative about how I cook and shop, so that can only be a good thing! Budget recipes plus ideas for vege dishes even meat eaters will like, welcome!

This week's "menu" (total grocery spend £45)
	Dinner	From freezer	From Cupboard	To buy
Sunday	Tomato soup and cheesy herb bread	Cheese, frozen herbs from summer	Tinned tomatoes, flour
Monday	Mystery pie night (ie. Leftovers in pastry)	Half portion of h/m pastry, small portion of cooked lamb mixed with leftover roast vege from last week, small portion of cooked BBQ pork
Tuesday (grocery day)	Szchehuan pork mince with beans	chillis, frozen beans	Jasmine rice, szchehuan peppers	Pork mince
Wednesday	Fish curry w h/m parathas	frozen beans/corn/spinach	coconut milk, curry paste	frozen fish
Thursday	Mac and cheese night	frozen cheddar	flour, milk etc	pasta shapes
Friday	H/M burgers		flour for rolls	beef mince
Saturday	OUT
Sunday	Potato and rosemary soup with foccacia	chicken carcass for stock	flour for foccacia, rosemary from garden
Leftovers/Carried over from this week:	Ideas?
250g pork mince	2x meatballs - 1 swedish and 1 for pasta sauce
250g beef mince
3 pieces of frozen white fish	Fish pie? Another curry?
Lunches
Soup and leftovers for J
Sandwiches from cooked/frozen chicken for A
Yoghurts/fruit etc
H/m chocolate caramel cookies
h/m banana muffins

Something different

There's been a lot of talk in Britain recently about the issue of food poverty. Despite being a G8 country, despite being a supposed world leader with a high GDP, despite being a world leader in global development aid assistance, Britain isn't sorting itself out very well, and there is a growing issue of food poverty here. There are two types of food poverty - there's the type where people can afford to eat, btu through ignorance or convenience, are choosing foods which mean they have a deficit of the appropriate nutrition. But then there's the other type. The type that A Girl Called Jack has documented in heart-breaking fashion in her blog. People who - through circumstances that have changed, through a shitty economy and the crappy state of the banks - are going hungry. Jacks' story is better told in her voice, so do read her blog. She's become the 'face of food poverty' in Britain, which is a title I'm certain she'd rather not have claimed. But her story has helped to raise awareness of what's happening in towns and cities across this country. And her recipes are so wonderfully budget friendly and healthy that they are now being handed out with food parcels across Britain.

The BBC did a special episode of its Great British Menu show a month or so back: called the Great British Budget Menu. In it, three celebrity chefs were assigned to three people/families who were struggling to eat on the tiny budget they had. It was deeply humbling and so very sad to hear their stories. One man, a pensioner, had worked his whole life and paid into the state pension, but the amount he was receiving meant that he could afford little more than packets of soup after he paid the rent on his tiny studio flat with its sad single bed. He split one of those watery packets of soup and had half for lunch and half for dinner - if he was lucky, he could have a slice of bread with it. This is someone who worked his whole life, and now he can hardly afford to feed himself?! That's wrong. As is the family of 5 who - even with two incomes - haven't got enough of a food budget to feed the family healthy meals. Processed food is so cheap. So incredibly cheap. Their budget didn't allow for anything else. And the working single mum who routinely went hungry so that her 12 year old daughter could eat regular meals. I think you can watch the TV show on Youtube. http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLM6Vm8M_vnSdMohB99KL7tSEyDXplunNC

The thing that was wrong with this well-intentioned show, is that the chefs were completely incapable of sticking to a budget. One of them decided, to hell with the budget - I'll buy the family a side of SALMON and let them enjoy it (?!) A nice enough thought, perhaps, but a total misunderstanding of the dire state fo these people's budgets. They don't have money to 'splurge' on a big piece of protein just 'because'. They're trying to decide whether they can afford to have the extra slice of bread with their soup. There's no room to run 'just a wee bit over' the budget. It was frankly outrageous (and I was not the only one to think so!) As if that wasn't bad enough, the solutions offered by policy-makers in the show were that supermarkets need to do more. Passing the buck. Well, perhaps, but that's not the whole problem. If supermarkets cut prices, they're going to take that out of the money they pay farmers, and they're already struggling. The bigger issue is that people aren't earning a sufficient wage to account for the rising costs of electricity, gas, rent and food. Salaries have not kept pace with inflation, and since the economic downturn in Britain, the number of people visiting food banks has been rising exponentially.

It all makes me so incredibly mad. Watching the show and reading Jack's blog, I felt guilty at my own good fortune, but also angry as hell that I live in a country that can allow this to happen. And I know many other 'Western' nations are the same. I'm sure there are families in Auckland and Christchurch in NZ who have similar experiences.

Food banks aren't the solution. They're a band-aid on the problem, but until policy-makers can really try to fix this (and not just spout empty rhetoric), food banks are a vital part of ensuring that people aren't going hungry.

A Girl Called Jack posted an idea on Twitter this week. Her idea was that for £3 - the price of a coffee - you could buy sufficient food for 22 meals for one person. She asked people to sacrifice one of their weekly coffees, go to their supermarket and buy these items and donate them to their local food bank. They don't provide a well-rounded meal, but like she said, it's better than going hungry.

I had been thinking about joining a group called 'Foodie Penpals' where you basically send a parcel of nice foodie treats to another person in another country each month with a £10 budget. After reading Jack's post, I realised that I'd much rather put that £10 towards helping to ensure other people have enough to eat. I have more than enough. We are incredibly lucky that we are able to eat whatever we want, whenever we want. The very least we can do is share that. So today I took that £10 to the supermarket and bought some food.

Bread, baked beans, tinned tomatoes, sliced carrots, sweetcorn, tuna, sardines, vege stock cubes, mixed herbs, pasta, jam, soap

To be honest, I was a bit surprised at how much I was able to buy, by sticking to the budget branded products. I was also a bit surprised, once I started shopping to see how expensive legumes and pulses have become. I would always have considered them the lifeblood of budget cooking - protein and nutrition at a fraction of the cost of meat. But the two tins of mixed pulses I bought were the most expensive items in this basket by far - £1.09 each, compared to 33p for the baked beans.

This has become a bit evangelical, and it wasn't meant to. But it's been on my mind a lot, so I wanted to share. Read Jack's blog if you have time. Her words paint a much better picture than mine have.