Top tips to beat
the high cost
of living!
As the editor of the TRUTH, I am and always have been an economist. When shops like Tesco reduce an item I have need of, breakfast cereal being one example, I buy around 4 boxes.
One of the ways in which I, as a single person, save money, is to buy a 4 pint bottle of milk costing (as of August 2022) £1.45 rather than a 2 pint bottle which is currently priced £1.15 (£2.30 for 4 pints).
What I then do, is pour 1 pint into each of two water bottles and place those in the freezer. Yes, you can actually freeze milk. Just remember to shake the unfrozen contents before using it.
Alternatively, you could buddy up with a neighbour and sell them the 2 pints in the 4 pint bottle for 72p the first time and 73p the second, otherwise you would end up losing 1p with each sale.
When it comes to actual meals, in particular, cooking time, I save around 44 hours of electricity each year by cooking more than 1 serving and freezing the remainder for next time. Here is the first of two examples:
Bolognaise sauce to go with spaghetti (see this magazine’s article ‘Healthy diet, healthy living’ for ingredients and cooking instructions). The total cooking time is 1 hour. I cook three times as much of the sauce each time and warm a serving of the defrosted sauce in the microwave for 4 minutes.
Roast chicken! While I dare say most singletons buy a bag of chicken pieces, the economical alternative is to buy a medium size chicken, the heaviest one possible, and cut it in half lengthways. You then roast one of the halves for 75 minutes on 200C.
In all, I get 4 meals from half a roast chicken. Again, see the article ‘Healthy diet, healthy living’ for the specific meals, geared to the time of year (summer/winter).
For the second example: The Saturday following that, I have a baked jacket potato. To save on electricity for its cooking time (1 hour), I cut a baking potato in half and score across the skin with a knife. I then place both halves on the middle oven shelf to the right of the chicken that is roasting on the bottom after its been cooking for 15 minutes. Once cooked and left to cool down, I put both halves of the jacket potato in a bag and put them in my freezer.
Come Saturday, I take the frozen halves of jacket potato from the freezer about an hour before heating them up in the microwave along with the baked beans that accompany a fried sausage.
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