Home cooking to save money as a one person household in Ireland

Pulled pork, potato and sweet potato wedges and kale chips all cooked by me

I will heat up a frozen pizza and that’s OK by me but 90% of the time I am cooking from scratch, mainly because it saves me money.

And look (ah, sure, look it), if the most basic frozen pizza costs only 1.25 euro at the supermarket and a fancy Italian-made frozen pizza, also from the supermarket, is on special offer at 5 euro for two, I will buy it and enjoy eating it with no regrets.

Frozen pizza sorts out those days when I don’t want to do any cooking and I want something ready in ten minutes.

On other days, there’s me reducing a glut of apples (that I got from Aldi in a Too Good To Go deal) in the slow cooker for three hours to make apple sauce. The best thing about the slow cooker is that it doesn’t use up a lot of electricity and the added bonus was that my dog ate some apple sauce, too! The apple was unseasoned, of course, so it was safe for canine consumption. Earlier on that day I did give my dog a couple of fresh apple slices and he put them in his mouth first then spat them out. So, I am chalking up apple sauce as a win for humans and canines.

Looking back at my annual expenditures, in 2024 my food shopping was 2,500 euro and 2,300 euro in 2023. Considering that about 30 euro a month goes to dog food, my human food budget is about 2,000 euro a year, so approximately 170 euro a month, which is not bad at all for Ireland. It just makes sense to cook at home but I know this may not be feasible for everybody.

Slow cooking

Other foods that take me ages to cook include sauerkraut, which also goes in the slow cooker for a few hours, because that’s the food I eat for celebrations such as Christmas and when I feel nostalgic about Trieste, where gastronomy is heavily influenced by Austrian and Hungarian dishes. To cut a long story short, Trieste was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire for centuries and was only annexed to Italy officially in 1954, a whole 93 years after the unification of Italy.

Talking of slow cooking, I also enjoy making pulled pork by buying a whole joint of bacon and then adding a mix of spices, mostly Cajun-style spices and Chinese Five Spice, plus a dash of ketchup and bit of barbecue sauce. Everything slow cooks for the usual 2-3 hours until the meat becomes flaky when you pull it with a fork. Mind you, one day I even experimented cooking the pork in a sous vide and it took about 24 hours:

You can also make pulled pork in the pressure cooker, which I don’t have here in Ireland but my family in Italy has. Here’s the recipe I made a few years ago:

What I love about dishes like pulled pork is that, by spending around 5 euro, you get at least three meals.

Another advantage of slow cooking is that you can set it and forget it (well, you still need to keep an eye on the pot), which allows me to do some writing while I wait for my meal to be ready.

One of the things that helps me save money in the kitchen is to use wild ingredients that you can forage safely.

I wrote a whole book about it called The Foraging Home Cook.