By choosing the right recipes and planning ahead, you can economise while treating your whole family to delicious and healthy homemade dishes. Planning your meals ahead is smart and fun and makes it easy to use up leftovers, plan shopping, buy in bulk and generate savings.
Choose inexpensive but nutrient-rich produce, in season, such as carrots, sweet potatoes or cabbage. Canned vegetables, such as tomatoes or artichokes, or frozen vegetables are also cost-effective and full of vitamins. Combined in flavourful stews or curries with pulses such as lentils they will satisfy the hungriest appetites.
Meat is often expensive. Serve meat as an additional bonus on top, in smaller quantities. You can stretch it out to feed more people if you grind it and serve it in meatloaf, meatballs, dumplings or empanadas. Or try to reduce the role of meat in your menus.
Substitute expensive ingredients, particularly if you will not use up the whole packet. For instance, if your risotto recipe requires 60 g wine, you don’t have to open a bottle: with 40 g water and 20 g vinegar, you’ll get the right acidity needed for the dish to sparkle. Avoid investing in saffron for a recipe where it is not the star ingredient; turmeric will do the job quite well in most cases. Be creative: you may discover you love your tomato sauce with parsley even more than with basil.
Bulk-buy a few staple ingredients, and transform them as you need, stretching the budget. Icing sugar made at home from ordinary granulated sugar is less expensive than shop-bought, and you save space, by only storing one ingredient. Buy spices whole, as they keep fresher longer than ground. You can make your own Greek yoghurt simply by draining plain yoghurt through a cheesecloth, saving even more if you make the yoghurt yourself. Proudly serve your own homemade bread, made from low cost ingredients.
The red pepper is looking a little worse for wear, and the carrots are no longer crisp: add them to a soup or to a vegetable and potato purée for colour and flavour. Zero-waste tastes good when cooked right. If your Gruyère has become too strong to serve after dinner, cut it up in smaller pieces and freeze it. Next time you need grated cheese, grate the frozen cheese directly in Thermomix®. Finally, don’t throw out the stale bread: grind into breadcrumbs. If the bread is not fully dry, store the breadcrumbs in the freezer.
Take advantage of promotions on ingredients, buy larger quantities and prepare extra portions to be frozen for later. Stews frozen in individual portions make a delightful and easy packed lunch so you can avoid spending money at the cafeteria. Cookie doughs and pastry are made in an instant in Thermomix® and freeze beautifully for baking when you are ready, so you never have to buy the ready-made kind again.
Our weekly meal planner can help you get organised and save money. Search for recipes on Cookidoo® that use ingredients that you already have, build your menus around them, and only shop for the missing essentials. With a clear plan in mind you’ll be stronger in the face of temptation at the shop, and you’ll avoid impulse purchases that might go to waste in your kitchen.
Here are a few recipes that are delicious and budget-friendly. Make sure to bookmark them or better, start planning your meals around them. Next time you want to cook, all you have to do is look in My Recipes or My Week to find them.
