I wasn't there for 2 weeks walking around skimping and saving looking for offers, if I wanted sliced mushrooms, then I just bought them and I paid 85 centimos for them, and I bought more or less the same stuff in June and in September 2009.

I'm saying what I bought and spent, and I have absolutely no reason to tell lies, I know the price of food in Spain, so I don't have any intentions of going on line to compare prices.
We didn't have a car, we had 3 supermarkets nearby within less than 6 minutes walking distance, so why the eck would I want to traipse down to Mercadona or Fuengirola.?
If you haven't seen mushrooms for that price for years? well I've that price on 3 Maxi Dia receipts and I really have no idea if they were on offer or not..... Champinon laminado Bandeja (tray sliced mushrooms).
So, can we just leave it at that.?
Edit: for typo error

Hi
We shopped in the Mercadona at Montemar back in May and i have to agree that most stuff was a little cheaper than what i pay at home i dont think anything was more expensive (except british imported brands obviously).
Joxx

Have the last word if you wish, I have only lived on the coast 15 years....what do I know. I bow to your expertise

Jacky I don't think 'expertise' comes into it. If someone has receipts showing what they paid for mushrooms then they are hardly going to lie about it What's the point?

Hi
I would imagine Sanji was trying to show (in detail and as helpful as always) that you can do self catering on a decent budget and at the same time eat healthy and well.The budget has to be comparable to eating out every day or half board.Its not something to be compared to in relation to permanent living.
From Sanjis posts i would imagine her holiday experience for this holiday was just being in a place she loves.
Anyway the amount of holidays she seems to have she needs to do a little cooking on one of them

Jo xx

And what purpose would I have to lie either. I could link you to a few ex-pat forums discussing the spiralling cost of living on the CDS but I know they won't be allowed. I am out of here now, really don't care and dinner is cooking.

Laughable really when all one has to do is check out eg. Tesco online shopping with Mercadona

Well I've certainly learned a lesson we eat out the majority of time when we have our son with us as he likes 'dining out' and enjoys the restaurants etc. Hubby and I aren't fussed either way depends what we've done during the day. We are visiting Carihuela next year (without said son ) so might give the s/c more of a whirl.

Cheers Sanji you've now got me on a mission

I think in order to do the SC business economically, you need to eat in for the majority of the time. As an example, the last time we were in La carihuela we ate out mostly (it's what we're used to doing) but decided one day to have a change and off we went to the supermarket to buy a few things. By the time we bought the butter/marg, salt, salad cream, cooking oil etc we'd clocked up a fair bit which inevitably went to waste as we were back to eating out a couple of days later. However, if we'd been intent on eating in for most of the week we would have had real value for money.

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Well you never know Glynis, next year Champinon bandeja (mushroom tray) might be on 'offer'.

I think in order to do the SC business economically, you need to eat in for the majority of the time

Totally agree, and if you have a husband that loves cooking.....you're made.!

Totally agree, and if you have a husband that loves cooking.....you're made.!

I wouldn't mind the cooking as long as hubby did the washing up. Well, I wouldn't cook a 3 course gourmet meal on hols but I could easily throw a breakfast together and some nice snacks with local bread, cheese and tomatoes- might even use some mushrooms too if they were on offer

On our short breaks to the Costa del Sol, we choose to go self catering.
My Hubby loves shopping for food/drink, cooking and does the washing up and clearing up too!
We usually stay near the huge Eroski Supermarket in the Miramar Shopping mall and don't bother going to Lidls or Iceland
but probably we would have to if we were staying for 2 weeks but for just a few days, we can 'push the boat out' a bit.
We find the prices there very similar to back in the UK but when we compare what it would cost to eat out all the time,
it makes for a reasonably priced break. When we go out during the day for a drink around the marina (where a coffee and brandy
can still only cost 2 euros and a lunch consisting of shrimps and salad or chicken etc, plus a beer or wine costs 5.90 euros each and I am talking about sitting in a lovely position with the water just across the walkway), we go to the fish market and buy a half kilo of brown prawns (about 5 euros) and sardines etc - all so easy to cook and eat! Yum!
Why is it that any food tastes better when you are sat on your balcony, terrace or bar in the sunshine????

I can only comment on the supermarkets in the Algarve so am looking forward to testing out the Spanish ones

We always end up in the supermarket, hubby for some reason, loves poking round the supermarkets. He's a 'tomato' freak and loves those big beef tomatoes. Plus we always get things for snacks, plus lager of course! Oh and water

Don't think I could be bothered doing a big meal as I hate washing up But we usually get eggs, bacon etc in for brekky (on the balcony of course)

Why is it that any food tastes better when you are sat on your balcony, terrace or bar in the sunshine????

Suzie
That's what I often say, I've become very 'picky' with what I eat these days, I wasn't getting 'value for money' in the hotels, I'd walk around and around the food displays and come back with hardly anything on my plate, and Dave used to say "is that it?, so this is one of the reasons why we went back to s/c.

I'm a living nightmare for poor old Dave to cook for...I can't seem to be able to eat half the stuff I could years ago, my stomach just objects to it and it doesn't take much for me to be giving back to the local sewage works.
I like going out for a meal, but after having quite a few past experiences of being ill, at the back of my mind I've always got the thought 'now will I keep this down'....If there's one thing that I really hate, it's being

I'm not overly fond of salad stuff, I hardly touch it at home, maybe if the weather is boiling in the UK, but having a nice salad on the balcony and watching the sun go down behind the nearby mountain around 9 pm (June/July) and still sat in your bikini, it's just different and that simple salad tastes just yummy.!
Strange isn't it.? It must all be in the mind.!

Sanji x

Hi Sanji

Sounds like you had a great time self catering on your hols Sanji. I love the pictures of the food you made, you will have people wanting to go on holiday and staying 'Chez Shirley and Dave' You definately did better than me as this is an extract from a post I did on 28th July about supermarket costs for the week I was there and I seem to have spent a lot more than you - although I was buying for 4 and not 2.

"Just to give some brief feedback to anyone who may be going to Nerja or similar in a Villa in the near future.

We used the Mercadona at C/San Miguel, Pasaje San M, Nerja, which I think is the one kindly recommeded by LizSpain and others (sorry not great on directions ) so many thanks for this.

It was great for holiday grocery shopping, not too big so it didn't seem like you were doing your 'shop' at home and mainly used by Spanish people which I liked.

Three bills though

61.25 Euros - day 1
59.60 Euros - day 3
18.96 Euros - day 5

So 139.81 Euros for a week of shopping peripheral to the main meal of the day, apart from one evening meal on the first night "

and I think we ate out 5 evenings and a couple of lunch times

I must admitt I wasn't at all careful with what I was buying though and just put in what I fancied, but it only involved a couple of bottles of wine and maybe 8 san miguels.

Perhaps where you were was cheaper than Nerja.

Doe

Don't think I could be bothered doing a big meal as I hate washing up.

We make a shopping list as soon as we get there, and several other shopping lists throughout the holiday planning the meals, so when I go into the supermarket and I get to know where things are, I can whip around on a trolley dash.
IMO: Unless you've got all the facilities, you can't do a big meal in most tourist apartments and I don't think anybody would fancy making a big meal when it's hot, even if they could.....but if you've got a toaster, a microwave, a couple of hob rings and a bit of imagination, it's surprising what you can muster up.

Dave likes his Indian food, he makes his own recipes up and he just about lives on it at home from Mon - Sat, I do still manage to cook the Sunday dinner, and by the second week he was getting withdrawal symptoms.
In June we went out for a meal and he ordered a 'curry' and he did nowt but critise the meal and complained that he could do better, so I thought 'we're not doing that again.'
We went to Fuengirola for the day to stock up on the spices/herbs he uses, there's an excellent stall upstairs in the indoor market opposite the train station, and a lot cheaper to buy than in the UK. We also buy garlic bulbs to bring home, again a lot cheaper than in my local supermarket...oh and Spanish black pepper is far superior to the stuff sold here, Pimienta Negra Molida, we've bought bottles of the stuff over the years, and you'll find it on the spice racks in all the supermarkets.

So he used some of the cooked chicken and opened up some of the spice packets and made himself a 'curry'...and all he used was one pan for the 'curry' and one for the rice....then I had to pop into the big 'Chinese' shop in Torremolinos that sells everything apart from the kitchen sink, to buy a packet of bag ties, otherwise gawd knows what the suitcase would have smelt like, we'd have had the drugs sniffer dogs around us.

Most of you know that we are going to Australia for 7 weeks and we can't afford to eat out for every meal, so all this self catering experience in Spain is going to come in very handy, but at least I won't have to look at a tin of tomatoes and think to myself, zumo de tomate?, no that's a tin of tomato juice, I want tomatoes. and he won't be cooking 'curry', it's against the rules for renting the apartment.

Sanji

Ooo I love Indian curry too but there never as good as our favourite curry house delivery, so maybe I'll get Dave to make me one

Am going to give the cooking a whirl this year although I don't think we'll be having the type of kitchen stuff we've had in the Algarve apartments. Still...... I'm going to try and see what I can do with 2 rings and prob 1 pan

Sanji i can just see all those sniffer dogs, sneezing their heads off, after smelling Dave's curry powder..
Hubby enjoys a good curry, and we use the Noor Mahal, just opp Hotel Riviera on the coastal road, there are 2 restaurants with the same name, we have tried both, and they are both good....and not a sniffer dog in sight..

Nothing like a Paella when cooking on 2 rings Alternatively a rissoto with all those cheap ( ) ingredients.