By RNZ When it comes to meal planning, Jordan Hammond, a 21-year-old student nurse, takes thrift to the next level. She’s in her final year of study and has a part-time job, but is on a limited income and manages to feed her household of two on $80 week. She’s sharing her tips in the second episode of RNZ’s new podcast, Thrift.
It helps that she loves to cook, inherited some good housekeeping skills from her parents, and honed her budgetary skills flatting with three blokes at university. “They ate like horses, and I got a knack for being able to meal plan on a really low budget.” Now she shares her tips on a blog where she posts sample weekly shops for budgets of $40, $70 and $80.
Recipes are part of the mix too - Hammond lists the ingredients she uses and includes before and after shots. She strings out the vegetables, sometimes only using one or two in a dish. The meals are things like beef stroganoff, red Thai curry and chicken and bean tacos.
Here’s how she does it. Find what’s on special and build meals from there A lot of us have had a repertoire of regular meals, but now more and more people are starting with the specials, adapting how they shop to use what’s cheap. Hammond uses online shopping to hunt down the deals.
“I look at what’s on sale. So, for this week, it was broccoli for 99 cents.” She searches up broccoli recipes online and checks out Uber Eats so she can find tasty dishes and then make them much more cheaply herself.
“All the food.
