Cheapest ever meals for 4 days

[Firemansamagain]

Please?!

Huge bills this month and I have to try to do a food shop today for the week (until
Friday) on a small amount.
Two adults and one small child, plus enough from each dinner for lunch the next day for dh

How much money do you have ?

Omelettes? So just eggs. A bag of cheese. A bag of apples for a snack. And some pasta and sauce

These are my go to cheap meals:

Bean chilli & rice
Tuna pasta
Tuna fishcakes
Risotto with frozen veg
Lentil soup
Porridge for breakfast

Jacket potatoes. 4 for 45p in Tesco.
rice, tuna and sweetcorn.

Not much is open today though.

Do you have anything in already (herbs, spices etc)? Jacket potatoes and cheese, pasta with a tomato sauce, spag bol, chilli are all fairly cheap.

@Belledan1 Not in the uk, shops open as usual

@Thisislifefornow Around €25/30

Do you have anything in your fridge/freezer / cupboards already that you could use and reduce the amount you need to buy? Ie frozen veg / tins / porridge / eggs etc....

Dal and rice. Left overs can be used as a soup base.

Oven risotto. No faffing on the stove. It's filling and nice cold too.

Turkey mince spaghetti bolognaise. Turkey mince is cheaper and lower in fat.

I don't mean this to sound patronising but often I find I have lots of tins etc in my cupboards that sit there and I look past them ie .tins of tomatoes and the like.

@BeachTree I have bread, oats, pizza dough, spaghetti, some eggs…going to work around that..was thinking pasta sauce with the spaghetti, cheese and Passata for the pizzas, oats for breakfast, buying more eggs, more bread, milk, some fruit and a couple more meal ideas?

large Batch mince
make a chilli with rice
Then jacket pot with leftover chilli
Pasta with make your own tomatoe sauce - tinned Tom, onion and garlic for pasta dinner and/or lunches

Porridge for breakfast. Beans/eggs on toast for lunch, or soup. Dinners: lentil daal and rice, bean chilli and rice, lentil bolognese and pasta, pasta with frozen peas and cheese, pasta with tomato sauce and chopped up sausages, jacket potato with beans, egg and chips, chickpea curry and rice, fish fingers and chips. Cheap fruit (apples, satsumas, bananas) or whatever is on offer where you shop - grapes are 99p in Tesco at the moment. Always cheers me up if I have nice fruit. Cheap pack of biscuits. Maybe cheap yoghurts?

Rice and peas, with soy sauce, if you have in, surprisingly satisfying.

Porridge with sliced bannana, for breakfast or snack.

Spaghetti, nice oil if you have and salt added to boiling water, tin of tomatos, add garlic clove, plus oregano if you have it.

Bread, a brown soda bread is filling, nice with an apple slices on top.

Make white bread, same ingredients for pizza dough, flour & yeast mainly, check online.

See budget Italian cooking. They put time and love into simple ingredients, and you can eat really well.

Pasta bolognese - bulk out with veg
Tuna and sweetcorn pasta bake
Risotto, using frozen peas
Baked potato
Bean salad, using tinned beans - make a dressing with oil, vinegar and sugar
Ham, egg and baked beans
Good luck OP!

See if you can pick blackberries and apples locally for free

Lentil soup is the cheapest meal I can think of.

Orange lentils onions and carrots as a base. Stock cubes if you've got them. And then any other left over veg or veg thats on offer. 1 kilo of lentils for £, bag of carrots for 50p, 3 onions for £1 and will do a few meals

Spanish omelette as well, eggs and potatoes are cheap

Lots of other lentils and similar are cheap as well, so you could do daal, hummus etc

Lentil curry/dhall!! Bag of lentils, you can use water rather than stock if don't have it and buy some very cheap curry powder if you don't have normal spicing. A bag of lentils made into dhal would probably do about 10 meals worth of food I reckon. You can have it on its own, with rice, on jacket potato, I like a boiled egg with, make some simple flat breads if you have flour. Obviously a bit repetitive but very cheap, filling and nutritious.
You could also add some additional water/stock and a bit of your passata and blitz and have a soup when you're bored of the dhal!

I made a lovely curry yesterday.

Fry an onion and some garlic, add 2 teaspoons curry powder, tin of coconut milk and 200g lentils. Chuck in any frozen/fresh veg you have and cook until the lentils have absorbed the liquid.

Serve with rice or homemade chapattis (BBC recipe). Makes enough for 4 portions.

This TikTok guy does £5 meals it might be a starting point
vm.tiktok.com/ZMFe8vgSk/

Lentil and Veg soup as above. A splosh of soy sauce perks it up if you have any. And if you can get some bread rolls on the cheap (I got 6 rolls for 20p in Lidl the other day) they go well with it.

Some great ideas above. I would tend towards pulse based meals e.g. lentil dahl and rice, as well as porridge, and eggs which can be cheap and extremely filling - scrambled eggs on toast etc. For packed lunches you could get basics bread and cheese or ham very cheaply. There some websites such as Cooking on a bootstrap which provide priced meals also.

This week we have had lentil stew which cost less than a pound for a really big pan (8-9 servings)

Potato cabbage and cheese bake which I absolutely love, I’m sure it has a fancier name, there’s an Italian chef with a recipe online. Costs very little but really feels like comfort food.

three bean chilli

rice pudding or bread and butter pudding

saag aloo