Active discussions

Meet the Other Phone. A phone that grows with your child.

Meet the Other Phone.
A phone that grows with your child.

Buy now

Please or to access all these features

Talk
AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

Original poster

To ask what you can actually cook for 30p/meal?

652 replies

Porcupineintherough · 12/05/2022 12:21

Following on from the comments by MP Lee Anderson I was wondering what I could actually make for 30p/head. I'm a pretty good thrifty cook but all I could come up with were:

beans on toast (budget brands)
tinned tomatoes on toast (budget brands)
tinned mushrooms on toast (budget brands)
egg on toast
cheese on toast (ditto)
some kind of veggie stew/sauces w red lentils (if cooking for more than one) to eat w pasta
stir fry noodles w a few shreds of veg
bowl of basics cereal

I'm not counting things like baked potatoes where the ingredients are cheap but the energy costs to cook them are high.

So what am I missing? What skills and recipes are this food bank teaching? Wild foraging? Poaching? Shop-lifting 101?

OP posts:
MaryAndHerNet · 13/08/2022 13:13

JanisMoplin · 13/08/2022 07:49

@MaryAndHerNet and @Crikeymaccrikey This is quite an easy site with videos, and has both vegetarian as well as meat dishes.

I also use Tarla Dalal's veggie recipes. www.tarladalal.com and Sanjeev Kapoor's recipes. www.sanjeevkapoor.com

None of these sites are known for evocative writing:)Strictly utilitarian. But if you are a little more experienced, Madhur Jaffrey's cookbooks are lovely reading.

I cook a lot of dishes from memory really, rather than using a recipe. But if you like paneer, one of the really easy dishes I cook a lot is paneer bhurji, which is a paneer scramble, which we eat on toast or with rotis. Very cheap and healthy.

Booarking both. Many thank yous.

MissTrip82 · 14/08/2022 00:36

I always love it when anyone says you can make xyz ‘for penneis’.

Every single time it’s abundantly clear they haven’t actually costed their meal, and indeed have no reason to.

It reminds me of doing the Live Below the Line challenge with a friend. She genuinely believed that she could eat three meals a day of tofu, brown rice and fresh vegetables for a pound a day. Absolutely believed that these were the cheapest of cheap ingredients. She had no idea about value bags of white pasta.

New posts on this thread. Refresh page