Frugal Food #4 (I think)

We'd all love to be living on organic Local Wagu steaks, and cutlets sourced from happy gamboling lambies, their tails wibbly-wobbly-ing right up until they're hit on the head, happy flu-free piggies, leaping through the lupins.

But we can't.

We can make choices about how and why we buy our food, particularly our meat based on a whole lot of factors.

Going SOLE means I will never, ever EVER buy from a large Spewpermarket. If they were giving away gas-backed foi gras for free, I'd not be tempted. That's one of my never-to-be compromised factors.

Having said that, I've recently blogged about Aldi and buying things like dog food, canned tomatoes and toothpaste. This weekend, I am off to our local Aldi to see just how much stuff I CAN buy from there that fits the SOLE criteria.

And then there's IGA.

I love our IGA. It really is our local. We know all the guys there by name, they know us. It might be a fallacy invented by The Hollow Men, but shopping at our locally owned IGA feels much more SOLE than shopping at Slaveways. We don't often buy meat and we never buy veggies, as its cheaper to buy from the butcher and the farm gate, but we get crackers, canned beans, bread, other staples from them regularly.

So, Imagine my suprise when, earlier in the year, I saw this:

That's right. 2.7kgs of porterhouse for less that $20.oo. I doubt it fits into any of the SOLE criteria (although I am going to assume the meat is at the very least, Australian!), but for that price I couldn't pass it up.

We are lucky enough to have a large freezer, so this little beauty got frozen as a whole and defrosted over the past few days and chopped into 8 individual steaks and approx 500g got cubed for a curry. We lost about 70g to the thick layer of fat that had to be removed, but hey, the pups LOVED that!

What with some dhal and some rice and a side of leftover mash (yes, I KNOW about all those carbs, but it was cold yesterday!), I estimate we'll get 12-14 portions out of it. Making each meat serve about $1.50.

We swung by the Organic grocer and picked up a sweet potato and a few carrots for $2.20, and a Thai green curry with rice, dhal and veggies was on the table for about $6.50, or about $2.10 a serve.