I have gone many years without having to live alone, so for the first time I'm having to tighten my belt when it comes to things like food budgeting. Now, I'm a big boy and I have the common sense to do things like save leftovers, cook big portions and freeze them, and base my meals around cheap dried food like pasta and rice.
Trouble is my culinary repertoire is a bit limited in this regard, and I'm getting a bit sick of eating bolognese and carbonara every night. I hear lentils are a great budget staple, but fuck knows how to make nice food out of them. In addition, I've always been a devoted carnivore, and I'm finding it hard to get the amount of meat I crave without overspending or wasting anything.
Do you chaps have any ideas, or recipes that you use yourself, in order to make rich, tasty, tangy food on a limited budget?
I thought more people than myself could benefit from a thread about, specifically, cheap recipes and ideas. It's the sort of thing we've had plenty of sporadic discussion about around the site, but no dedicated thread.
If you're going to be a bunch of mardy cunts I'll delete it, but I don't see the issue.
>>12060 Careful, lad. People get pissy if you post about recipes outside of the sticky, even though it's dead.
If you want an alternative to mince meat then Tesco soya mince is £1.90 for 375g dry, which works out as £1.2kg once it's been soaked. It's certainly passable in stir frys and spag bol.
>>12056 >I hear lentils are a great budget staple, but fuck knows how to make nice food out of them.
Dhal. What you need to start eating is dhal. Get thee down a local Asian supermarket to pick up your spices/garam masalas and then just Google a recipe. You can even start with the KTC recipe on the back of the red split lentil pack.
Soya is pretty much un-noticable in most recipes if you mix it 40/60 with beef mince. Processed food manufacturers do it all the time, partly because it's cheaper but also because it reduces the fat content.
"Nosh for Students" by Joy May is excellent for cheap, easy meals. It contains five meal plans which cost about £20 a week for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Some of the writing is a bit patronising if you're not a wet-behind-the-ears teenager, but it's a solid basis for economical cooking.
