Value Range foods compared

[jennyjj01]

Not so much a comparison as a warning!

Asda Just Essentials Cottage Pie from the chilled ready meals.

So, yesterday we were in Asda and I was wringing my hands at the price of Ready made cottage pie.

Regular Cottage pie £3 or 3 for £7.50 (I.e. £2.50 each)
or
Just Essentials Cottage pie for £1.60 (which I don't consider bargain basement)

How different can they be? Maybe a bit less meat?

Well, I don't know how good the regular stuff is, but the Essentials one was RANK.

The mashed spud. Top crust of about 7mm dry and tasteless: Lower layer of 7mm. soft, tasteless. no salt.
The minced meat layer: Where's the meat? It must have dissolved into the gravy, if we can call it that. The only glimmers of texture were little wiry lumps of onion. Seasoning? What seasoning? There was a flavour, but god only knows what it was. I forced my portion down. It actually made me feel sick. Tasting panel discarded theirs and made some sandwiches instead.
Here's the ingredients. Guess for yourself what ruined it. Molasses? Lemon juice? UH???!!!
Ingredients
Potatoes (53%), Water, Beef (14%), Onions (5%), Unsalted Butter (Milk), Cornflour, Tomato Purée, Colour (Plain Caramel), Worcester Sauce [Water, Spirit Vinegar, Sugar, Salt, Tamarind Paste, Onion Powder, Garlic Powder, Lemon Juice from Concentrate, Ginger Powder, Cloves, Chilli Powder], Salt, Beef Brisket, Molasses, Yeast Extract, Tomato Paste, Sugar, Flavouring, Onion Powder, Onion Concentrate, Concentrated Lemon Juice, Potato Flakes, Black Pepper, Sunflower Oil, Carob Powder, Onion Extract

[jennyjj01]

Candidate #1 : Dolmio original 500g 2 for £3.00 from Iceland* : The benchmark

Candidate #2 : Baresa spag bol 500g 49p from Lidl

Candidate #3 : Cucina bolognese sauce from ALDI 65p

DAMMIT! Bad news. with a bit of good..... and a bit more bad.

My beloved Baresa bolognese sauce has just leapt from 49p to 69p in my local store. WTH!
Some of the obscure bits of the range were still 49p, so if you want any and can find it at 49p, fill your boots.

But the good news. Lidl have another pasta sauce which i had not noticed before.
Gustibus Basil Pasta sauce 59p.
Now, it's only a 400ml jar, so not a steal, but I just gave it a try with meatballs.
As always I augmented it with fried diced carrot and onion.

The sauce as it came was much richer than just about any other that I ever tried. It was redder and thicker than Baresa.
Served up, it got spontaneous acclaim from Mr JJ who proclaimed. "That was one of your best ever!"

One jar, with 12 meatballs, 2 small carrots and a big onion, made 3 very generous portions. Previously, I'd have spun out the competitors to 4 portions.

And now two more bits of bad news.

Aldi's Cucina bolognese has gone up by 4p to 69p. ALDI's Asia sweet and sour has leapt to 75p
Lidl's very nice Batts' Tomato ketchup (45p) has disappeared off the shelves. In it's place is something that wasn't even recognised as ketchup. I haven't tried it yet, but it was nondescript and unappealing. Plain polythene bottle which would have looked primitive even in a greasy spoon cafe.

[steptoe]

Dear Jen get the hubbard ketchup you will never look back but be quick we have been stock piling like squirrels on a mission lol .

I will say i do like to do homemade bolo sauce as we grow well for what a a better phrase "more than you could ever eat " it is true i use to do 50 plants 2 years ago cut down to 25 last year cut down to 12 and still have more than enough for us and half the street lol , yup people even started hidding from us i am sure when we use to go roudn the street with a huge basket of toms cucumbers and strawberries lol i bet they don't nexyt year .

Please keep up the good work jen , you might have to start jens corner cook and serve

[jennyjj01]

Dear Jen get the hubbard ketchup you will never look back but be quick we have been stock piling like squirrels on a mission lol .

I will say i do like to do homemade bolo sauce as we grow well for what a a better phrase "more than you could ever eat " it is true i use to do 50 plants 2 years ago cut down to 25 last year cut down to 12 and still have more than enough for us and half the street lol , yup people even started hidding from us i am sure when we use to go roudn the street with a huge basket of toms cucumbers and strawberries lol i bet they don't nexyt year .

Please keep up the good work jen , you might have to start jens corner cook and serve

Steptoe,
You will know by now that I'm getting that allotment. I'll be trying to grow a mass of tomatoes, but they'll be in the open. Last lot I tried was a tiny crop under cover and the year before that, they got decimated by blight. Whole street had the blight, possibly the whole village. If I can grow anywhere near enough to make some sauce, I'd be ecstatic. I use at least one jar of tomato puree per week, often two. Share your sauce secrets.

So tell me? Did you grow them under glass? What variety, and how can I grow them successfully?
I don't know if blight comes back year after year, but in an open allotment space, I'm dreading it. I did find a blight resistant strain, but it's very expensive and i had a bad year, because I sowed too soon. Crimson crush F1 Hybrid. So they can't be seedsaved.

You can teach me how to grow strawberrys too. I do have a lonely cutting in a bucket, left out on the patio. Maybe you could teach me how to nurse it back to health and expand it in time for a summer crop? Last year, I think it was 3.5 tiny fruits, shared with some garden critters.

[GillyBee]

Jenny. If you can get just ONE expensive tomato plant you can cut the side shoots off and root them in water to make more plants. They catch up fast. This also allows you to buy one plant for a quid from the garden centre and multiply it up. The GC plants are expensive but you dont have to spend 2 months keeping them warm and cosy from seed so it can be worth it if you can then clone them.

[steptoe]

Hi jen blight is a bark and yes it lives year after year if you had it once do not grow any spud or toms there again they say 7 yrs but we grow ours in the 6 mt x 3 mt polytunnel , i grow in pots 15 lt pots of homemade compost topped up with tom grow bags i mix my compost and then i also add vermiculite , the tom sauces omg well we throw most herbs in basil oreg garlic and onion , i will have ot one day write thinsg down but most times we just play it by taste lol , the wife will always say yup hon more sugar for you as i hate tart tom sauce you knwo the one like you sucked a lemon .

Regarding tom varieties i stick with the tried and trusted , gardeners delight , alicante and shirley , they are the mains and some times i will throw in a beefsteak , but i do hang pots in the tunnel as well from the crop bars and i do lidi in them they are a small cherry yellow omg the taste but if you like cherry toms do grow sungold , you will love them .

I will have a chat with mrs and try and give you some idea of names to try but if i am honest best way on the allotment is ask others there , i will say i have had a nightmare with onions here so going back to me old fav leeks lol but as recommend here i have gone big on egiptian onions and welsh onions but i have huge beds of chive and other herbs to as i said i am getting well in to herbal medicine

Ok madam said bedtime lol as i had a blackout today so she is ordering me to rest lol

[jennyjj01]

Jenny. If you can get just ONE expensive tomato plant you can cut the side shoots off and root them in water to make more plants. They catch up fast. This also allows you to buy one plant for a quid from the garden centre and multiply it up. The GC plants are expensive but you dont have to spend 2 months keeping them warm and cosy from seed so it can be worth it if you can then clone them.

Thanks again. Will definitely try taking cuttings, especially once i have a few Crimson Crush started.

Must concentrate more on getting the sowing time right. Need a bit of patience. Last year sowed way early.
I need to get some of my precious mummy plants going, then cut from them almost viciously as fast as they can stand it. If I could grow just a couple of seeds to be big enough to take a couple of cutting each, it would be a major first for me. I don't mind keeping seedlings cosey, weather permitting. Sadly we dont have a south facing window, but there's my plastic tent and teensy polytunnel planter.

Anyoops. Thanks for the advice, GillyBee and Steptoe.... When the time is closer, I'll start some more posts so as not to have us hijack this thread.

[Ara]

It would be a good idea to ask other allotmenteers whether they get blight on their tomatoes BEFORE you start planting yours. I know when I had an allotment, my neighbour, a long term grower, told me there was no point trying to grow tomatoes out of doors there due to blight. Some people always tried it and, yes, the tomatoes were blighted.

[steptoe]

Jenny. If you can get just ONE expensive tomato plant you can cut the side shoots off and root them in water to make more plants. They catch up fast. This also allows you to buy one plant for a quid from the garden centre and multiply it up. The GC plants are expensive but you dont have to spend 2 months keeping them warm and cosy from seed so it can be worth it if you can then clone them.

Thanks again. Will definitely try taking cuttings, especially once i have a few Crimson Crush started.

Must concentrate more on getting the sowing time right. Need a bit of patience. Last year sowed way early.
I need to get some of my precious mummy plants going, then cut from them almost viciously as fast as they can stand it. If I could grow just a couple of seeds to be big enough to take a couple of cutting each, it would be a major first for me. I don't mind keeping seedlings cosey, weather permitting. Sadly we dont have a south facing window, but there's my plastic tent and teensy polytunnel planter.

Anyoops. Thanks for the advice, GillyBee and Steptoe.... When the time is closer, I'll start some more posts so as not to have us hijack this thread.

Hi jen if i can recommend one think you look at is grow lights to get plants started you can get them started early and get a head start on the season but you can hold plants under them longer with out them going leggy , don't ask how i got in to grow lights but lets say we went to a hemp festival (the special hemp kind) and well they showed me what i could do and not in the hemp growing but the lights omg a little 30w led i used ot keep all our early stuff under , these days i gave up on that i just have a hydroponic system on the kitchen side i got in to that again as fresh lettuce picked off there or fresh herbs and so on it seems like a outlay but well worth it .

You cab pick a cheap one up offthe bay either new or secondhand and like i say you can do so much with it use it in winter for extra fres hherb but then i remove the water tank and pump and just put trays of plants under them and i will say this some of the flowers the wife wanted me to grow needed the extra light to force them .

Sorry we got of the subject of value food lol , but jen your our little go to advisor on what tastes good so we want to offer help if we can hehehe , i wish you lived close we could furnish you with loads of tools we have enough for a army of workers collected over the years

[Vitamin c]

Anybody else noticed that the supermarkets seem to have a few foods that don't seem to be increasing in price as the rest ,I wonder if these foods are subsidised by the price of other foods so that a basic nutrition is covered.
Red kidney beans and pasta is what iv spotted have I missed any.