One-pot Creole beans 'n' rice

Estimated price: £4.18 (£1.05 per person) or meat-free £2.79 (70p per person)
*priced at Sainsburys March 2014

Best thing about this meal, besides the price, is only one pot to wash up!!

Ingredients

Tin kidney beans (30p)
Tin chopped tomatoes (34p) or 5 chopped and peeled tomatoes (pennies if you grow your own)
mugful brown or white rice, uncooked (£1.50 for a bag, 60p for this recipe.)
2 stalks celery (90p per pack, 30p this recipe. Free if you regrow your own from scraps.)
1 red or green pepper (1.45 for pack of 4, 36p each. pennies if you grow your own)
onion (30p. free if you regrow your own)
2 cloves garlic (35p per head, 10p this recipe. free if you regrow your own. or, when in season use free foraged wild garlic chopped roughly.)
chicken or veg stock cube (90p for pack of 10. 9p each. free to make your own from chicken carcass or veg scraps)
Olive or vegetable oil for cooking (pennies)

Smoked sausage (£1.69) or another tin of beans (30p)

optional - few drops tabasco sauce. or a sliced chili

Seasoning - this is the tricky bit, because spices are an expensive up-front purchase, but if you use them sparingly they will last. You can buy Caribbean seasoning for £1, and use less than a tenth of it for this recipe at 10p. Or you can make your own Creole seasoning with the following :

2 garlic powder
2 oregano
2 basil
2 thyme
1 black pepper
3 salt
5 paprika
1 Cayenne pepper/chili powder - or more if you like it spicy.

The numbers refer to whatever measurement you are using. So if you are only making a little, each number can refer to half a teaspoon, so garlic powder would be 1tsp and paprika 2 1/2 tsp. you can mix up a batch of this and put it in a tub/jar for future recipes. Making it this way works out at less than 10p per portion, especially if you grow your own herbs.

Cooking

Firstly, cut the celery root off in one go and set aside to regrow. Voila, free celery for next time.

You can do the same with the onion:

Chop garlic, onion, celery and pepper and saute in oil until onion is tender. (optional sliced chili to be added at this point)

Add seasoning and sausage sliced and cook for a couple minutes.
Stir in the tomatoes, beans and stock and bring to the boil.

Add rice (dry), cover and simmer for 20 mins or until rice is cooked.

Add tabasco or chili to spice it up if you want.

Making it cheaper/go further

You can make this cheaper by omitting the celery and pepper, although it will be a lot less healthy. Alternatively, you can switch the celery and pepper for whatever other veg you have on hand. I used carrot in these pictures.

You can omit the seasoning mix and instead simply use salt, pepper and tabasco sauce or chili powder.

Garlic and onions can be bought in bulk for cheaper and stored, hanging in an old pair of tights, in a dark, cool place, like a garden shed or pantry cupboard. Both can be regrown from scraps, firstly in water in the kitchen and then planted out in the garden, windowbox or a pot in the kitchen.

If you cook a whole chicken earlier in the week, you can simmer the carcass and scraps in water with a small amount of chopped onion and some herbs to make cheap homemade stock. Stock cubes are only 9p each, though, so this might be more hassle than it's worth.

You can change the rice:everything else ratio to make the sausage and beans etc go further. Chop the sausage into small cubes instead of slices to spread them further through the mix.

You can make this meal in bulk and freeze individual portions in tupperware or freezerbags.

You can make this meal with or without the sausage in smaller portions and stuff into peppers or large mushrooms, then bake, making the expensive meaty part go further.