All these people who feed 10 for £5 a week what are your recipes?

[Kyrptonite]

Slight exaggeration in thread title but you get the jist. I need to get the food costs down whilst I'm on mat leave so need some budget ideas.

There's me, DP, DSD (6) EOW, DS (4 & fussy), DD (3) and baby DS who is just on milk for 3 more months.

Dust and tomato ketchup

Dust and mint sauce

Dust and brown sauce

You get the idea

I may have had wine

Ah we have plenty of dust. Does it work well with a side of cobwebs? Then I could save on my feather duster budget

Bottom of the fridge soup:
Fry an onion in a drop of oil and add all the chopped veg from the bottom of your fridge that need using up. Bung in a handful of red lentils, 2 stock cubes and a litre of water. Cook for 20 mins, blend and serve with home made bread.

Hi,

Soups once or twice a week are good as they balance out and lower the average spend for other slightly more expensive meals.

There are some cheap soup recipes here (esp the tomato soup) tyne-teas.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/soups.html (and some other ideas on the blog you might like)

Hope this helps

Meat with sauces and half pulses (from dried)

Pancakes

lentil cottage pie

tuna pasta bake

spinach and ricotta stuffed pasta bake (stuff giant pasta shells, then add chopped tomatoes, sauce etc and bake

Have you looked at A Girl Called Jack?

Was also going to say soup but I need to ask who or what EOW is!

I made green lentil pasta sauce yesterday for the first time which was as cheap as anything (think value passata, tin of tomatoes and dried green lentils) and DH said he like it better than meat bolognese.

Every Other Weekend

Here are a few tips:
-Use a couple of small pieces of bacon trimmings in a sauce to make it taste meaty (while actually containing about 10p worth of meat).
-make carbs and veg the major part of a meal, and cut meat out of a few meals a week (increasing to "most" if budget is still squeezed)
-trade down on brands and see if it matters. Sometimes it does, in that case trade up again.
-add dumplings or homemade flatbreads to casseroles, stews and curries to fill everyone up.
-get spices from "ethnic supermarkets", they're a lot cheaper. If amounts are too large, share the spices (and cost) with a friend (or ten)
-grow herbs and salad leaves. It only needs a window ledge and saves a lot of money (you can usually get enough seeds for a year for less than the cost of one meal's worth of fresh)

I agree with everything spare time has posted and doing that will save the biggest amount of money but also

Eat more pulses - chickpea curries with rice, butterbean stew on homemade flatbeard, homemade falafels or bean burgers.

Think about the veg you use. Are you eating a pepper when you would be just as happy with a carrot? Do you need the salad leaves or would you be just as happy with a chopped up tomato?

How much food do you waste? How carefully do you meal plan?

Do you know which are you cheapest meals and can you eat them more often?

Hi Kyrptonite, do you menu plan at all? I think that if you menu plan your half way there. I find if I know what we're all eating it stops my running up the shop and spending more on stuff we really don't need.
Also if I cook a big batch of food and freeze it it cuts back on my bill, as long as I don't forget its in the freezer that is... I've just started to do click and collect at tesco's it cost £2 and I pick my shopping up on a saturday morning, this saves money as I tend to throw loads of unwanted stuff in the trolly as I'm usually starving... you asked for meals...
Caseroles, bulked with pearl barley and lentils and chunks of veg
soups
I love tesco's part baked bagettes I think there on special at the moment £1 for 4... warm crusty bread always goes down well...
tuna pasta bake
macaronni cheese
spagetti bog
meat balls
burgers all the above home made and don't take long to make...
Have you got an iceland near you? as their frozen chicken is fab in my opinion... 4 fillet chicken breasts for 2.50... me and DS had a roast yesterday, he thought it tasted great...
also their frozen chicken slices/cubes are all meat and dead cheap £2.50 a bag...

phew.... good luck...

Agree with Spare and Too. Also think about the following -

what kind of fruit do you eat? - apples, bananas, soft citrus are almost always cheaper than berries, mangoes and pineapples.
What veg do you eat? - could you eat more seasonally? Carrots, onions, cabbage etc. much more affordable than peppers, mangetout etc.
Could you use more frozen veg?
Re you eating fresh salmon fillets, for example, when frozen would do? Perhaps you might need to cut these out entirely and go for meals that use tinned fish or cheaper kinds.

As Too says, do you know what your cheapest meals are? Have you costed per person? it's helpful to have an idea of how much you have to spend per person for each meal. Then you can use that to plan appropriate meals.

If you have an Aldi near you, it can be helpful to plan meals based around their Super Six, when they are useful.

Some of the cheapest meals that I make are
pasta with caramelised onions
pasta e ceco
egg rice
soup of all kinds
lentil dahl
chick pea curry
pasta with creamy white bean sauce
bean burgers
lentils and rice
rice and beans
Caribbean rice and peas
bean chilli
jacket potatoes with beans and cheese
barley risotto

The cheapest meals are meat free, so there need to be a few meatfree meals to offset expensive meat meals.

Soup is cheap. Pasta is cheap. Rice is cheap. So in a week add a risotto with leeks and mushroom, a tomato, red lentil and carrot soup, and a pasta with a spicy tomato sauce. or any other rice/soup/pasta dishes.

We have decided to like and eat a lot of pumpkin. They serve for two meals per gourd and make a good meat substitute. Meals like a pumpkin risotto, a pearl barley pumpkin stew, a pumpkin and spinach lasagne, a pumpkin laksa, roast stuffed pumpkin- all cheap and filling meals.

As others have said dried or canned beans and pulses are cheap and filing, dhal, chickpea curry, butter bean burgers, Cannelini and tomato casserole, mashed white beans with thyme and butter (served with fish or meat) all,work and taste great.

Bacon and sausages are some of the cheapest meats, bacon can be used very sparingly so a pack covers two meals, a carbonara one day, a fried bacon and pea risotto the next. Sausages make a million meals, casseroles, meatballs, toad in the hole, with mash and gravy, with roast veg, sausage rolls, hot dogs, the list goes on if you google.

I agree with the others - get to know pulses. They are incredibly cheap, very healthy and best of all - don't really taste of anything so they'll take on any flavour you want. You can plan a meal around them, or just use them to bulk out a meal like bolognese or cottage pie.

My absolutely cheapest meals are:

Lentil bolognese (probably works out at about 80p a portion)
Pea & ham soup (50p)
Pasta with tomato, onion & garlic sauce & grated cheese (£1.00)

Also, don't underestimate "on toast" meals. Beans on toast with grated cheese is a perfectly nourishing meal to have once a week. And the own brand b/beans are every bit as nice as Heinz (the value ones are rank, though).

I substituted eggs for meat a couple of times a week - omelette with ham, scrambled egg with peppers and ham on toast. Never been a big fan of pulses, so it's the best I could do. The upside is that fussy DS will happily eat scrambled egg!

Most value foods are just as good as branded.

Batch cook and freeze. No point forking out for takeaway when you have homemade ready meals! Great for when you can't be bothered to cook.