A book by Amy Sheppard aiming to reduce the cost of your weekly shop. It's full of recipes based on ingredients you can easily find in cheap supermarkets such as Aldi or Lidl. There's also tips for shopping in those supermarkets which seem quite useful. There are no costings in the book (probably due to changing prices) so I'm going to see how much each recipe costs as a test of it's savviness.
JD and I love baked beans so we were keen to try the Boston Beans.
Ingredients:
2 cans baked beans
150g bacon lardons
1 onion
2 garlic cloves
2 teaspoons paprika
1 teaspoon mustard
1 tablespoon maple syrup
We forgot to add an onion to this but despite that mistake these beans were fantastic. Probably the best beans we've had. My only complaint is that it's listed as a main meal that serves 4 people and two cans of beans between four people just isn't enough for a meal. Not in our house anyway. We had ours with sausages and they were great together. We also had some homemade bread with it.
The cost of our meal (including 94p for the sausages) was £3.43. Pretty cheap for 4 people.
Next, we tried making the Sweetcorn Soup.
Ingredients:
1 onion
1 baking potato
200g sweetcorn
1 litre chicken stock
50ml single cream
1 teaspoon rosemary
1 teaspoon thyme
This soup was lovely. We left ours a bit thicker than the recipe suggests and left out the herbs as we didn't have them in (fresh herbs can be pricey). It made enough for either 4 small cups or 2 decent bowl portions.
It cost £2.40.
JD and I were keen to try the Chilli Beef Canneloni recipe, so one Saturday when the kids were away we made it. Feeds 6? We'll see about that, haha.
Ingredients:
5 tortilla wraps
200g cream cheese
3 tsp chilli powder
2 tsp cumin
150g grated cheese
1 onion
500g minced beef
1 tsp sugar
1 can kidney beans
500g passata
It's hard to see in our picture, but this dish is made up of folded over tortilla wraps covered in chilli. It was great, unlike anything we'd eaten before. Almost like a Mexican lasagne. We loved it.
You mix the cream cheese with the chilli powder and half the cheese and spread it over the wraps. Fold them up and put on the bottom of an oven tray. Use the other ingredients to make up the chilli part then pour that over the wraps. Sprinkle with cheese and then bake for 20 minutes on 200.C
The ingredients cost about £5.20 which is reasonable for quite a hearty dish. It's hard to cost up a few teaspoons of chilli powder or other items you already have in stock.
It's a decent cookbook, the recipes I've tried have all worked out well. The portion sizings, again, are a little on the small size. (I'm starting to think it's just us!) I think the costings were good, most of the recipes are made up of ingredients that can be bought cheaply using the supermarket savers lines rather than brands.
Next on the list to try is a recipe for Roasted Lettuce! Sounds weird to me but I can try it and include it in my next Veg Update :)
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