Lid’s vegan range is not just for January, but what’s worth trying, and is it any good if you’re trying to eat “healthy” on a budget?
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Good evening, my fellow bears. And if it’s not evening where you are, I’ll let you decide if I am too early or too late.
Bear: It is Veganuary at Lidl and I just got back. So let me talk to you through what I picked up. I spent far less than the last installment that I did of this. So we’ll see why that is.
Some of these products will be available all year round and some of them you might find disappear in February And that they don’t reappear until picnic season. So sort of April to September time, a bit annoying if you find something that you do like, but now is probably the time to try it. If you are a Lidl plus customer and you download that app, you can get 15 percent off with that loyalty scheme of a range that’s already very affordable anyway, compared to the big name brands.
The first thing I picked up was vegan pizzas. You can get two vegetable vegan pizzas for two pound 49, and then 15% off. I tried the stone baked vegan salami last year. It didn’t taste like anything I really recognized as salami [00:01:00] or cheese, or pizza so, if you’re really curious, give that one a go yourself.
There are some winners and losers this time. I was really happy to see that they brought back the falafel cause that disappeared at the end of picnic season.
But they obviously decided that the way to save time on their production line.
was to stop cooking it on their end, which is a shame because now if you want to buy their falafel, you have to put it in the oven for five minutes, which is not a very long time, but at the same time, just sounds like an immense amount of faff just to eat a bit of falafel.
Also, I noticed that the vegetarian burger that’s in their magazine that was in store today, that I did not buy, had Chicken egg protein. So I didn’t get that.
I bought these again, the vegan juicy burger, because they would go with most things and are really quick and easy to cook, and edible, I suppose, is also important. I usually give the vegan chicken style burgers a skip because I don’t really like the look of the ingredients on those, something of nothing.
Same, I didn’t buy anything else from the very processed version range, like the vegan fish fingers or vegan nuggets.
[00:02:00] I’m not afraid of fat and carbs and whatever, obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t buy pizza, but I do want to be able to at least recognize something on the ingredients list.
I recommend the tofu, if you can get it. The other thing is to pick the day of the week that you go, because I’ve gone just after new years. And so of course, a lot of the shelves were completely empty.
They also have some stuff like Bosh! and their cake mixes at the moment.
I didn’t buy any of the vegan ice creams, the vegan ice desserts, because they tend to all be coconut based.
Similarly, if you look at the vegan cheeses, they just tend to be like a big old slab of coconut oil. And again, while I’m not afraid of fat or carbohydrate, they’re just a food group, you don’t have to eat them in excess if you don’t want to, At the same time, I don’t want to eat a big old slab of coconut oil and just generally don’t get on well with coconut based products.
So if you’re trying Veganuary for the first time, that might be something to be aware of. I also stopped buying the Gosh! Range because Aldi’s own brand range is a lot more affordable than the [00:03:00] Gosh! Burgers and falafel.
So I kept costs down today with a few things. One was, I went on foot to limit the amount I could carry. Because if you go back to the previous installment I did on vegan Lidl, I spent quite a lot of money, probably about five, six times what I spent today, actually.
But I was also just a bit more picky this time about trying everything because actually a lot of the vegans stuff, I either didn’t fancy the ingredients or it’s got a short life on it.
They’ve got some ready meal situations. I don’t normally buy ready meals. But there’s vegan, lentil Curry,
vegan chili sin Carne. So Chilli con Carne, without meat and a Bulgar wheat version that I didn’t pick up.
So those are the kinds of ready meals where it’s just a big old bag of seasoned ingredients for you and you can microwave it or fry it.
And as with single setting ready meals, I wouldn’t normally go for something like this.
Chilli con Carne or Chilli sin Carne, you can make quite easily and very cheaply yourself. The red kidney beans are one of the cheapest sources of plant-based protein that you can buy ordinarily, just [00:04:00] whack that together with spices and rice and sweet corn and tomato. You’ll be fine.
But I’ve got three YouTube channels, two podcasts, two blogs… Oh yeah. My day job. And what else? Oh, I’m also writing a novel at the moment. So I just wanted something that I could microwave and I normally eat about 75% vegetables for dinner anyway. So something like the lentil curry, there’s two servings in the bag in theory, but I would probably just cook a little bit of that a time and put it with loads more vegetables.
The lactose free milk is on offer what’s a grand total of 4p cheaper tha normal. But it’s useful to know that lactose free milk at the discounters is about half the price compared to the majors supermarkets. Anyway, if you have an intolerance or a genuine allergy, I don’t know if you do, you’d have to ask the doctor.
And then in keeping with it being January, but they do tend to have this all year round, they also got Budweiser zero, which I recommend if you want to try a nought percent lager. They’ve also got alcohol-free Stella Artois.
There are many things that I personally would rather do than drink [00:05:00] Stella Artois, whether it’s got alcohol in it or not. But if you prefer the taste of that then give it a go.
So I’m not going to call this a haul because I clearly didn’t buy very much. I only spent about 11 pounds. I think it would have been like 14 pounds if I wasn’t a Lidl plus member.
Clearly this is not a full week shop.. There were central things missing here, like breakfast, lunch, coffee.
This was just a top up shop to give you an idea.
But also, regardless of whether it’s January or anytime a year, I might just never make another podcast episode or YouTube video where something is a haul.
Funny enough, one way to save money is to not try and spend as much of it as possible in one fell swoop.
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