Saving Money With Aldi

Food bills. These seem to keep going up and up and this isn't just because the number of children I have has increased over the years!! It is the price of things like meat and fresh produce that I find to be the most expensive. So when I was recently asked by Aldi if I'd go and do a shop around my local Aldi store to see if I could save myself some money on my weekly shop, I just had to give it a go.

I was sent £40's worth of vouchers towards my food shop. I tried to stick with the things I would normally buy.

So lets start with the negatives. My local Aldi store is a very small one so doesn't stock the biggest range of things so there were certain items that I wasn't able to purchase, this isn't a reflection on all Aldi stores though. I also found that a lot of products didn't have long dates on them so I would be left having to buy the same again sooner than I'd like.

But having said all this, did I save money?

Yes I did!! £40 got me a lot for my money with bags of potatoes for as little as 59p and branded products such as Colgate toothpaste for a tiny 75p, I was impressed.

The best savings were when it came to the price of meat. A comparison to where I normally shop :

The cost of 540g chicken breast in Aldi was £3.35, in Tesco just 400g chicken breast cost £4.00.

The cost of 500g diced pork in Aldi was £2.39, in Tesco 500g diced pork was £3.00.

The cost of 150g king prawns in Aldi was £2.15, in Tesco 160g king prawns cost £3.50.

The cost of 500g beef strips in Aldi was £2.99, in Tesco 350g cost £4.00

And all these amounts saved add up and the great thing with the meats is that they can be bought, frozen on the day and eaten at a later date.

One of the recipes I came up with after shopping was for healthy beef fajitas :

Ingredients

* 500g beef stir fry strips (£2.99 in Aldi)
* 1 red pepper
* 1 red onion
* tsp chilli powder
* tbsp sunflower oil
* romaine lettuce (£0.89 for 2 at Aldi)

Preparation

* Heat up the oil in a pan and cook the beef until all the outside is browned off.

* Add in the pepper, onion and chilli powder and continue to cook for a further 4-5 minutes

* Place the lettuce on the plates and place the fajita mixture into each individual lettuce leaf.

* Serve with spicy mexican rice.

Overall I was impressed with Aldi. I don't think I'd do my whole shop at Aldi but there are certain bits that I will definitely continue to buy from there now as there are many savings to be made.

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