I’M not sure what the tipping point was.

Maybe it was watching the Greek comic-tragic bail-out drama unfold on the news. Maybe it was the fact that I randomly deducted our family’s monthly outgoings from our monthly income and bizarrely kept on getting a rogue minus on the calculator. Again, and yet again.

But whatever it was, it’s left its mark. (Or euro, depending on whether the generic continental currency is still standing) Over the course of a couple of days last week, it dawned on me that as a family we need to tighten our belts. Even more than we have been.

Obviously, there are some things that we can’t really cut down on, like processed water, and electricity, and flea powder for the cats.

But there are other things that we’re shelling out for just out of habit. Hair conditioner. (I swear hair looks exactly the same without it as with it.) Shower gel. (Remember soap?) Ten minutes of fear and anxiety in an supermarket car wash. (Remember soap?) Bottles of freshly squeezed orange juice with genuine bits in. (Remember oranges?) And my personal weakness, industrial quantities of kitchen towel.

I stare at our latest supermarket receipt, and even though the supermarket seems to think I’ve saved the best part of a tenner just by giving them my custom, I’m beginning to wonder.

I don’t want to admit it, but the BOGOF offer doesn’t mean I get two for the price of one; it means I put the second pack of prawns in the fridge and forget about it, until it has morphed into a grey and green furry mass.

But eventually I come up with the answer: from now on, every evening, I will cook three times the quantity of food we normally eat, and freeze the other two portions.

No more picking up expensive, pre-prepared meals – and the slippery slope of “I’ll just grab a bottle of wine and a pudding while I’m here” – on the way home from work. It will save a fortune.

This plan works well, all in all. Of course, cutting up three times the amount of meat and veg takes roughly, well, three times as long, so most evenings we’re watching the beginning of Newsnight before dinner’s ready. I’ve never nodded off into so many stews.

And then there’s the trusty little freezer itself. Try as it will, it can’t accommodate more than its total capacity, so every now and again I open the utility room door to what looks like a visit out of Close Encounters, with lights everywhere and a loud humming warning me a bulging drawer is making achieving a temperature below 0 degrees C pretty tricky indeed.

Once the freezer has reached this totally engorged state, though, I feel a warm sense of achievement.

I check the list of meals that I’ve carefully counted in, and will eventually count out again – 27. Twenty seven completed meals! How good is that? I could go down with flu, or have a heap of gallstones removed, and still the household could function almost flawlessly without me. Everyone could eat. Nobody would starve.

I stand and stare at the list of contents, the freezer temperature gauge winking frantically at me, and feel at peace.

“What have we got tonight?” asks my husband cheerfully, the evening after I’ve told him the good news that we are now awash with casseroles and moussakas.

I pause to think. There’s a pristine list on a nice white sheet of A4 stuck on the freezer door. There are almost 30 bags of nutritious meals, carefully packed into four drawers so they don’t upset the temperature gauge. And there are flu viruses and rogue gallstones everywhere. I don’t want to lose my advantage now.

I bend down and look in the fridge. Yes, thought so. And everyone knows that sell-by dates are a scam. I cut open the packet. Not a green prawn to be seen.

I pour them out onto a plate. And I’m as sure as dammit that prawns are supposed to smell like that.