Start With the Store Cupboard, Not the Recipe

Most of us plan the week's meals and then write a list. Try flipping that around. Open the cupboard, take stock of what you already have — the half bag of red lentils, the tin of chopped tomatoes, the tail end of a bag of pasta — and build the week's cooking around those. It is the single quickest way to cut a food bill without eating any less well.

When you do buy, own-brand staples are where the quiet savings sit. Value-range chopped tomatoes, dried pasta, porridge oats, plain flour, rice, tinned beans and custard are made to the same food-safety standards as the branded versions and are often packed on the same lines. A few taste noticeably plainer, so taste as you go and season properly — a pinch of sugar in a tomato sauce, a knob of butter in the porridge — and you will rarely notice the difference.

• Buy the shop's own version of anything you cook with rather than eat straight from the pack: flour, oats, pasta, tinned tomatoes, stock cubes, frozen peas.
• Keep buying the branded item for the one or two things you genuinely taste on their own — tea, coffee, ketchup, your morning cereal.
• Decant dry goods into jars. You will see what you have, and you will stop buying a third bag of rice.

Plan Around What Is Going Cheap, Not What You Fancy

Meals are cheaper when the plan follows the prices, not the other way round. Before you write your list, check the current offers and the reduced shelf, then decide what you are cooking. A joint of meat at half price is worth building two or three dinners around; a punnet of mushrooms on a yellow sticker becomes soup, a pasta sauce and a filling for an omelette.

Timing matters. Reduced items tend to appear in the last hour or two before closing, and staff work through fresh counters, bakery and chilled meat in roughly that order. If you can shop then, shop then — but only buy what you can use or freeze that day. A bargain you throw away is not a bargain.

Cook once, eat twice is the other half of this. Double a chilli, a curry or a tray of roast vegetables and put half in the freezer in portions. On the nights you would otherwise order in, you have dinner already made.

Grow the Bits That Cost the Most

Kitchen gardening pays best when you grow the things that are expensive to buy in small quantities: fresh herbs, salad leaves, spring onions, rocket, chillies. A supermarket herb pot kept on a bright windowsill and watered from the bottom will keep cropping for weeks. Better still, split it into two or three pots and it will bulk out.

You need surprisingly little space. A windowsill, a doorstep and a couple of deep containers will do.

• Sow cut-and-come-again salad leaves little and often — a small tray every fortnight gives you leaves from spring to autumn for the price of one bag.
• Stand spring onion ends in a glass of water on the windowsill and they will regrow; pot them up in compost and they will keep going.
• Grow mint, chives, thyme and parsley in pots. They are perennials, so one purchase lasts years, and mint is best kept in its own pot or it will take over.
• Let one or two of your best plants go to seed — coriander, lettuce, beans — and save the seed for next year.

If you have a bit more room, a courgette plant or two, some runner beans and a few tomato plants in grow bags will produce far more than they cost. Share gluts with neighbours and swap seedlings; most gardeners are delighted to offload spare plants.

Make Leftovers the Main Event

The average household throws away a startling amount of perfectly good food, and almost all of it is avoidable. Treat leftovers as an ingredient with a job to do rather than a sad plate in the fridge.

• Roast chicken or a joint: strip the meat for sandwiches, risotto, pies and soup, then simmer the carcass with an onion, a carrot and a bay leaf for stock. Freeze it in tubs.
• Boiled or roast potatoes: fry with onion and any leftover greens for bubble and squeak, or mash into fish cakes.
• Stale bread: blitz into breadcrumbs and freeze, cube and toss in oil for croutons, or soak in milk and egg for a baked bread pudding.
• Vegetable peelings and trimmings: keep a bag in the freezer, add to it all week, then simmer into stock.
• Overripe bananas and soft fruit: freeze in chunks for smoothies, or fold into banana bread and crumbles.

Stretch Meat and Dairy a Little Further

Meat and cheese are usually the biggest lines on a receipt, and both stretch beautifully. Add a tin of lentils or a handful of oats to mince; bulk out a chicken curry with chickpeas, spinach or frozen peas; use half the cheese you normally would and finish the dish with a strong-flavoured grating of mature Cheddar or a spoonful of mustard instead. Nobody at the table will feel short-changed.

Buy cheaper, slower-cooking cuts — shin, brisket, belly, shoulder, chicken thighs — and cook them low and long. They reward patience with far more flavour per pound than a lean fillet ever will.

Buy Loose, Frozen and In Season

Frozen vegetables are picked and frozen at their best and cost a fraction of fresh out-of-season produce. Peas, sweetcorn, spinach, berries and chopped onions are all worth keeping in. For everything else, buy loose where you can so you take only what you need, and cook with the seasons: roots, brassicas and leeks in winter; salad, courgettes and tomatoes in summer, when they are cheap, plentiful and actually taste of something.

None of this requires a dramatic overhaul. Pick two or three swaps this week, see what your receipt says, and build from there.