I’d rather eat at Nigella’s pleasure than Her Majesty’s

I like to eat. This is not to say I am greedy – although my love for cherry bakewells has often made me wonder if there is fat girl inside me trying to eat her way out.

What I mean is that I like food. I love to cook it, eat it, share it with friends, wash it down with red wine, spend lazy afternoons enjoying it and fantasise of living in Italy and making eating a full time occupation, or failing that, moving to a countryside cottage and magically morphing into Nigella Lawson.

But I am not a foodie. I know this because I recently met one. She was straight out of book of ‘how to be a dreadful snob.’ After remarking that she would think less of person for eating in a chain restaurant, I had a sudden desire to invite her round to my home for dinner and force feed her battery farmed chicken. Perhaps even mechanically reclaimed.

Foodies do not eat crunchy nut cornflakes, or skip dinner after a long day at work for half a pack of hobnobs and a cup of tea. And boiling up a pan of spaghetti, then stirring through some Jamie Oliver pesto is definitely not classed as cooking.

But, I imagine, being a foodie is an expensive pass-time. Farmers’ markets do not have BOGOF offers. Purple sprouting broccoli is expensive all year round. And happy animals mean high prices.

As someone who is trying to make necessary financial cutbacks I was interested to read that Sainsburys have launched a promotion that claims that a family of four can be fed on £50 a week. A £50 a week budget equates to £1.79 per person, per day. By these calculations I should be able to feed myself for £12.53 a week. Needless to say this is a lot less than I currently spend, so I was interested.

Shortly after, I learned that this amount is less than is allocated to guests of Her Majesty's Prisons, and only marginally more than is spent on the daily meals of the majority of NHS patients. Whilst one doesn't hear of too many people dying of malnutrition in hospitals and prisons, one also doesn't hear of too many people clamouring to change places with them when dinner time comes around.

As such, perhaps this is one scrimp too far, even for a non-foody. Come to think of it, having subsisted as a penniless a student – the regular arrival of bowls of soup or dishes of spaghetti bolognese, night after night, was enough to drive me to bloody murder.

For now I might allow myself to continue a love affair with food. I like Pizza Express too much to give up chains, could not get used to daily macaroni cheese and cannot bring myself to eat unhappy chickens. I'll never own a noodle maker. I will never tut at other people's lunches. But I will enjoy cooking and haplessly attempt to emulate the mighty Nigella.

I must practice my food related innuendo. With a sideways smirk announce: ‘My gleaming lemon cream is ready.’ Sigh giddily: ‘Ah, look at these gorgeous golden balls.’ Purr at the male guest assembling a fajita: ‘It's a very artistic package you have there.’ Easy.

But let me tell you my favourite part of the Nigella magic –  it’s the moment at the very end when the credits are rolling.  It always shows her (slightly slutty Nige!) in a silk robe in the dark, peering into the bright lights of her refrigerator to find the leftovers of what delights she cooked earlier.  She’ll find her midnight feast treasure and take a bite right out of the bowl.

Oh Nigella you are naughty. Are there any cherry bakewells in there?

Who on earth pays full price at Pizza Express?

Coupons are cool. Or at least that’s what I'm telling myself.

I had long embraced a ‘voucher’ even before the imposed ‘Saving Regime,’ but a pleasant side effect of the present economic climate is the increase of them. Thank you very much recession.

Do you remember going to Pizza Express without a voucher? No, me neither. But apparently it did happen in the dim and distant past. Probably just before the time people started incessantly saying that they ‘had an app for that.’

When Pizza Express approached a British marketing agency several years ago, they had just a few sacks of postbags with customer contact details on them.

By sending out some forward-able two-for-one vouchers that could be downloaded from the firm's website they attracted over 4.5 million diners (plus a database of 3m customers' details) keen to take them up on the offer.

With the economy slowing and unemployment soaring, it seems consumers are looking for ways to pinch pennies anywhere they can. Although this would suggest that they want to have their pizza and eat it.

Needless to say, other restaurant chains soon caught onto this idea. If any of this is news to you then sign up immediately at www.vouchercodes.co.uk for a weekly email of the best deals online and in stores. Click through, do it now. I don’t get any kick backs; although if vouchercodes would like to give me any, I accept cash or cheque.

When you book car hire, theatre tickets, flights, do your grocery shopping, or anything else online, you usually see a little box giving the option to input a loyalty, membership or special offer code. It's all too easy to ignore, but don't - typing the correct few letters can give a significant discount on the subsequent price. Thankfully, you don't need to actually be a loyal customer; you just need to google it. Open a new window right there and search for ‘discount code for ‘insert website here.’

There’s a widespread belief among the non-coupon set that ‘only poor people use coupons.’ Of course this is ridiculous, although some people are genuinely afraid of a stigma, as old fashioned paper coupons were once viewed as an embarrassing badge of stinginess.

Perhaps there is still a stigma surrounding these coupons saving you 20p off your milk or offering half price detergent; but new technologies like online voucher codes and club cards with automatic savings have pushed discounts into the mainstream.

Nowadays you just have to flash your phone screen to a staff member to get your money off. No ‘paper-coupon-possible-stigma’ in sight. Apparently, mobile coupons remove the stigma of discounting because your discount vouchers - delivered via sleek and expensive smartphones - are sexy and novel.

Frankly a discount is a discount, but if you would rather partake in ‘sexy and novel’ saving, then Vouchercloud is one such miracle saving app that will automatically find the best deals nearest to you and deliver a coupon straight to your ‘sleek’ (or otherwise) smartphone.

So be out and proud, become a coupon enthusiast. The real question is why you wouldn’t want to? Surely all it means is that you are a savvy shopper who knows the way to get the very best prices for the products you buy.

Sorry, backtrack - did I just say that there was an app for that?