Like a lot of families at the moment, we are on quite a tight budget. We have four children so a lot of food gets consumed in out house. When we go shopping, we are always thinking about the cost of what we are buying. We tend to buy a lot of vegetables because they are cheap ingredients. There are also foods that we limit our spending on. We don't often eat fish because it is so expensive in the UK. We also tend to buy the cheaper cuts of meat. Are there any foods that you avoid buying because of costs and budgeting?
It's only my boyfriend and myself so our grocery budget isn't HUGE, but we definitely try to save money in terms of watching what we eat. I try to buy more fruits and veggies (my boyfriend likes fruits and veggies but they are definitely not his go-to food in a meal), and we usually buy chicken and ground beef as our stable meat group. The seafood is definitely one of the things we don't buy often since it's so expensive, but if it's on sale for a really good price and we have extra money in our grocery budget I wouldn't mind getting some. Also, lamb. Lamb racks in the US is really expensive. Same with bacon for some reason.
I would like to eat more seafood as well, but what really irks me about it, especially when you buy it frozen, is you're paying for a bunch of water. Once you get the items home and thaw them out, they are about half the size. Then when you cook them they shrink down even more. I would buy bags of frozen Tilapia once in a while, and a filet would look fine for a single meal at first, but by the time I cook it, there's only like 3 oz of actual fish, and it's hardly enough for a meal. The seafood industry unfortunately engages in some shady practices like soaking their products in chemicals that cause them to swell like twice their size. This is especially true with shrimp. I will buy it frozen and it looks like jumbo shrimp, then I get it home and cook it and it shrinks down to the size of a marble. I used to buy a lot of ground beef, but I try to limit that these days, and opt for more straightforward cuts of beef so I can see what I am getting. Who knows what scraps they use for the ground beef. Plus it's more susceptible to contamination. For chicken, I only buy the breasts if they are a reasonable size, like 6-8oz. The larger ones are too hard to cook properly. But I've really been trying to make more use of chicken thighs, in place of white meat chicken. It can hold up to higher cooking temperatures and is more forgiving if you over cook it. I am OK with some expensive ingredients, as long as I know I can get a lot of use out of them. For example, smoked paprika is rather pricey, but I only use a small amount of it in recipes because it's pretty pungent, so one bottle will go a long way.
