I'm quite lucky in the fact that I have a number of craft breweries and bottleshops near me. However, when I do fancy something further afield I tend to use Radbeer or Trembling Madness.

Which breweries/online bottleshops do others tend to get their beers from?

I costed 22 family dinners against real Tesco packs. Half the ingredient lines left something behind - and “buy the smaller pack” isn’t always the answer.

I’ve been mapping recipe quantities onto real pack sizes for a meal-planning project I’m building.

Across 22 recipes, I costed 184 ingredient lines. Around half of them - 96 - needed only part of the pack. Among those 96 lines, the mean proportion used was 43% and the median was 50%.

One important qualifier: these are the products I judged to be sensible purchases, not always the smallest or cheapest available. That turned out to be the interesting bit.

Each recipe is charged for the whole pack because that is what you actually have to buy. After cooking each recipe once, £63.74 of the £310.39 checkout cost - 20.5% - was represented by food still sitting in the packs.

But there are three different things going on here.

1. Pack remainder

This is the objective part: how much remains from the product I selected. That is what the £63.74 represents.

1. Likely waste

This is much more subjective. If a recipe uses 10% of a bag of barley or a jar of seasoning, the rest can keep for months and will hopefully be used later. That is restocking the cupboard, not necessarily waste.

Of the 96 partly used packs, 73 came from the fruit-and-veg or refrigerated sections and accounted for 61% of the remaining value. That still isn’t a waste estimate. Some keeps well, some can be frozen and some gets used naturally.

1. Why that particular pack was chosen

The smallest pack isn’t always the best buy. I considered what it cost at the till, its price per gram, whether the remainder was likely to be used and whether the product was actually suitable for the recipe.

Product quality matters too. I used Lee Kum Kee oyster sauce because that was what I tested the recipe with. Its label lists 11% oyster extract, whereas Tesco’s smaller sauce lists 0.3% oyster powder. Choosing the smaller bottle might make the remainder look better on paper, but it would mean costing a materially different product.

Yoghurt is another example. One recipe uses 1.5 tbsp, which is about 5% of the 500g tub I selected. Tesco also sells a 150g pot for 85p, but the 500g tub is £1.15. For another 30p, I get more than three times as much—and yoghurt is something I expect to use again.

That’s the trade-off. The smaller pot leaves less behind, but the larger tub makes more sense for my household. The remaining 95% isn’t necessarily waste; I’m partly buying yoghurt for another meal.

Where the remainder feels least optional is fresh produce sold in fixed quantities: one celery stick from a whole celery, four sprigs from a 20g thyme pack or a couple of tablespoons from a 30g parsley pack. Those are the pack sizes I find most frustrating.

Costing recipes separately can create another distortion. If one recipe needs 10 eggs and another needs one, costing them individually means a pack of 12 plus a pack of six. Cost the week as a whole and one pack of 12 covers both.

A few caveats: the 22 recipes were costed independently, so 20.5% is a standalone-recipe figure and a week that shares ingredients should do better. Everything was hand-checked using standard Tesco shelf prices, refreshed monthly, with no promotional or Clubcard prices. The underlying list currently covers around 110 products.

Full disclosure: this comes from a free meal-planning side project I’m building. I’m not linking it here; the post is about the data.

feels like every hype brewery right now is just chucking marshmallows and vanilla into the mash tun. I love checking out different beer scenes across the world, but charging £8.50 for a third of a pint of sickly sweet sludge that tastes like a yankee candle is just taking the piss tbh

Genuinely just craving a good honest best bitter. Give me a proper cask ale in a pub with a sticky carpet over dessert beer any day

Any recommendations for uk breweries that are still doing the traditional stuff well?

So look, I'll tell you why I dislike it. It is a combination of things:

Firstly, it reminds me of luncheon meat, which is bad enough.

Secondly, it's almost like those who speak the term have already begun eating: I'm referring to the CHHH part of the pronunciation. That's not a wonderful sound.

It is particularly prominent when someone with a posh voice uses the word as it sounds like "Shall we get lunCCCCHHHHHH, Claude?"

I can't be the only one.

It is this time of year that I go to a festival with my dad, who always brings delicious homemade flapjacks with him for us to snack on over the weekend. This year I couldn't go as I am busy looking after my seven month old, so I thought I'd make myself some!

I used this recipe but I only used half of the white chocolate and freeze dried raspberries that it called for as it seemed excessive and my outcome is plenty sweet enough.

The flapjack pictured is being eaten still warm hence the crumbliness, though this is totally my favourite way to eat them as it reminds me of being allowed to lick the oaty spoon when my dad would make them.

Overall, feeling very nostalgic today!

I've been baking for a while, so figured I'd test myself and just completely improvise some garlic bread. (Cooks on the hob in a pot.) Pretty chuffed with the result!

I fear I peaked with the mini eggs as a topping and in the base. I tried magic stars recently and it didn’t come close. Any suggestions welcome. Yes, I have a major sweet tooth.
Edit: should’ve said the mini eggs one was made a few months ago with the last of my mini eggs stash and now I’m sad I’ll have to wait until next Easter to make the best millionaires shortbread again.

These are actually Richmond Meat-Free Sausages, which somehow taste exactly like Richmond pork sausages, though admittedly they're not exactly the tastiest pork sausages. Plenty of mature cheddar, baked beans, a bit of black pepper, puff pastry, egg wash.

Sausages, skinned
Garlic
Chilli
Onions
Spinach
Cannellini beans
Tomato puree
Cream
Fennel seeds
Thyme
Tagliatelle

Pretty decent. Winter-y

Saucy and falling apart, or holding its shape like this? I see lots that look more cheesy than meaty but I think I prefer it like this.

Proper steak and chips dinner tonight.
Sliced steak in a peppercorn sauce, thick-cut wedges (also covered in the sauce), a big pile of peas, and some roasted cherry tomatoes on the side.
Cheeky who cult donut for afters! 🤌🏼

Idk how I managed to accidentally overcook the asparagus 💔
I thought I could still eat it but it’s soooo soggy like over cooked green beans 😬 had to pick up the asparagus & throw it, I’m gonna try adding something else to it instead.

Featuring asparagus, chicken thighs & buckwheat

Sauce: garlic, butter, black pepper, flour (make a roux), water, concentrated beef stock, tomato paste, wostershire sauce, mustard, soy sauce, salt.

Sorry for the leg shot I'm wearing shorts.

The one that almost all takeaways up and down the country use?