Eat well, spend less. Who doesn't want to do that? But we get busy and we get lazy about sticking to a budget and planning out meals. The next thing you know you've spent a fortune for the weekly shop.
Food and grocery prices never seem to go down, so now's the time to step up cooking not on a budget, but within our budget.
Sophie Gray is the former editor of Food Magazine and the creator of the Destitute Gourmet. For more than 20 years she's been helping people shop smarter and eat better.
She tells Summer Times that she’s not a fan of the term ‘budget cooking’.
Photo: Sophie Gray
“I think budget has some really negative connotations and it really makes you feel like deprivation is going to be involved, it’s full of constraints. I think, when it comes to food, food is such an emotional issue that we don’t want to put anymore kind of baggage around it.
“What we try and talk about is eating well within your means, rather than eating on a budget. People have this idea that budget food is really nasty stuff on the bottom shelf of the supermarket, it’s the rubbish quality meat – all that kind of thing which isn’t necessarily the case at all.”
Gray says gourmet doesn’t mean expensive, it just means good quality.
“Really delicious, good food doesn’t have to be expensive.”
Most of the cuisines we eat at nice restaurants are cuisines that have evolved out of peasant cooking, she says.
“They’re cultures and peoples who didn’t necessarily have access to a wide variety of stuff, they had to cook from scratch and they had to use what they had on-hand.”
Peasant food didn’t contain a lot of meat and relied on seasonal produce, a direction that Gray has taken with her book.
Gray acknowledges it can be very difficult to feed a family of fussy eaters every day of the week and find something that pleases everyone, but we should let our kids dictate what we buy at the supermarket.
“When I was growing up, there was dinner and you ate it or went without it and, in a lot of households, if you didn’t eat quick enough one of your siblings would whip it off the plate when your back was turned.”
A comprehensive meal plan and fewer trips to the supermarket is key to well budgeted meals and Gray says and we need to recognised that with seasonal change, the price of greens and vegetables can rise and fall.
“If, in the middle of winter, you’re looking at doing tacos you might not want to put lettuce and avocado, you might swap that out for a slaw because those ingredients are very inexpensive at that time of year.
“If you’ve made your menu plan, it makes it much, much easier to do your weekly grocery shop and not necessarily get swayed by the fact that something’s on special.”
See Sophie Gray's recipes for loaded quinoa chilli nachos, peanut chicken and rice, and a fudge cake slice.
