What are your cheap meals?

[DragonsAndDaffs]

I love reading food and grocery threads, one family's cheap meal is another family's weekly treat! Even the cost of the same meal can vary massively - take spaghetti bolognese for example: one could cost 4 times as much as the other, depending on the ingredients used - organic grass-fed mince, Mutti tomatoes, and fancy Italian pasta, or cheap mince, basic tomatoes, and value pasta.

I'm a frugal cook!
I feed 4 adults for less than £100 a week. We eat well, have 30 different plants a week, mostly cook from scratch and try to limit UPF. A cheap main meal for me would probably be a hearty minestrone soup served with homemade cheesy bread (costing around £1 a head). Our average main meals are around £2 a head. Last night I made sweet-and-sour pork with basmati rice, and tonight we are having chicken curry with flatbreads.
An expensive meal to me would be anything costing over £5 per person - we rarely have a takeaway due to cost.

What are your cheap/average/expensive meals?
How much do you spend on groceries?

Spinach, eggs and crushed or mashed potatoes in their skins
Herb quark with potates and green salad
Dhal with red rice
I also like asparagus in season & bought from local growers, ditto strawberries.
But I only have myself to feed, so all the above would definitely come from the local covered market or weekly farmers' market and would probably be organic.

I make my own pizza from scratch, takes 1h30 to prove the dough and makes 2 pizzas. As I make 4 pizzas, I have to spend an afternoon making the dough but it's so worth it as it's delicious. Feels healthy as all natural ingredients, dough is just flour, yeast, salt and warm water, topped with passata, herbs and grated cheese. I suspect it costs around £1 per pizza.

Jacket spud with tuna mayo, grated cheese and spring onion.
Pea and bacon soup

Loving all the ideas on here!

@Cappie73 - any chance you could post the chickpea, potato and cauliflower curry recipe. I’d love to try it 😃

Home made pizzas. I make 6 and it feeds 6 (often includes one hungry teenage boy who doesn't belong to me).

I had corned beef hash last night as had dental work on Monday and needed something soft to eat.
It was a childhood staple and I’d forgotten just how quick and filling it is.

There's 3 of us, one (me) coeliac and ive yet to find an acceptable gf home made loaf, so that is an expense. My cheap meals are often rice based, so fried rice, jollof rice, red beans and rice, risotto. If i make spaghetti(and I dont scrimp on ingredients or time, I have sofritto made and frozen, I use bacon. Morrisons savers garlic bread is less than 50p. I make enough for two meals and meal two will be chilli nachos. If we have chops or a roast then there's fried potatoes next day. I buy cooking bacon, which is often a big chunk of unsliced bacon for sauces and omelette and fried rice.

Placemarking!

Would love love to know how people make these meals cheaply - I’m so bad at this sort of thing! We are £120/week for 2 adults and 2 toddlers 😫 Like OP said a bolognese could vary wildly in price. Any tips appreciated!!

Must admit I’m not great at using leftovers or using up things. I think we also must eat a lot of meat - people saying a chicken does a roast on Sunday then two extra meals… we eat 3/4 a chicken between us all for the roast. Maybe we’re greedy!!