Chinese Crab and Sweetcorn soup - only 27p per portion

I LOVE Chinese food and a Chinese takeaway is definitely my guilty pleasure. If I had the money, I could happily have Chinese takeaway every night of the week, I love it so much. With wise choice of ingredients, though, it's really not expensive to replicate at home. Crabmeat and Sweetcorn soup is one of my favourite dishes, and not only is it cheap to make, it's also dead easy. I mean throw everything in a pot and cook for 20 minutes easy. Hell, that's less effort than calling the Chinese Takeaway!

Ingredients (for 4 large portions):

Necessary:
1 tin sweetcorn (35p)
6(ish) seafood sticks (pack of 20 for £1 = 30p for this recipe)
1 fish stock cube (£1.50 for pack of 8 = 18p)
2 tablespoons cornflour (75p for 250g = 9p)
Hot water (I just tend to fill my pot up, I estimate about 2 pints)
salt (to taste)
1 egg (89p for 6 FREE RANGE - something I will not compromise on = 15p for 1)

price = £1.07 = 27p per portion (all prices at Tesco 11th June 2015)

Optional:
dash soy sauce (£1.19 for 150ml = about 15p)
dash fish sauce (£1.39 for 150ml = about 18p)
dash sesame or peanut oil (£1.60 for 250ml = about 13p)
tsp fresh ginger grated (about 30p)
additional egg (15p)
2 spring onions, chopped (about 10p)

total price = £2.08 = 52p per portion (all prices at Tesco 11th June 2015)

With the 'luxury' version coming in at only 52p per bowl this is a huge saving on your takeaway version. If Chinese cooking is something you do a lot of, it's work going to a Chinese Supermarket and bulk-buying things like soy, fish sauce and sesame oil - you'll get a much better price there than at a normal supermarket.

How to make:

- heat the water and add to pot with stock cube.
- pour in the tin of sweetcorn.
- roughly chop the seafood sticks and add
- grate ginger if using and add
- if using, add soy sauce, fish sauce and oil
- bring gently to the boil.
- mix cornflour with a little water and then add a spoonful of the hot soup. Pour this mix into the soup and stir while simmering until thickened.
- crack the egg or eggs into a bowl and beat until mixed. Take the soup off of the heat and, while stirring, slowly pour the egg mixture into the pot in as thin a dribble as you can manage. The egg will cook as soon as it hits the hot liquid, making textured strands of egg.
- top the soup with the chopped spring onions and add salt to taste if necessary. Serve. =)

Special Shepherd's Pie - under a fiver

'Special' because I decided to switch things up from my normal way of cooking this dish and use the rest of the creme fraiche.

serves 2-3:
250g lean lamb mince - £2
6-8 medium potatoes, diced - 50p
3 cloves garlic - 10p
1 onion - 16p
1 carrot - 8p
1/2 red pepper - 30p (this I had leftover so not the cheapest option)
about 120g half-fat creme fraiche - 55p
1 lamb stock cube - 10p 
1 tbsp cornflour or 1 1/2 tbsp plain flour - 5p
salt and pepper to season 
Olive oil to cook
stick of dried rosemary - free as I grow my own and it's practically impossible to kill.

Total cost: £3.84, per serving: £1.28

Dice potatoes into half-inch squares and put on to boil.

cook garlic and onion until starting to soften, then add mince and cook until mostly brown.

add the rosemary (minus the stalk), carrot, red pepper, the stock cube and 1/2 mugful of the potatoes' cooking water. Stir well until the stock is dissolved and then sprinkle over the flour and stir until dissolved and thickening.

Drain the potatoes and roughly mash, stir in the creme fraiche and then season well with salt and pepper.

Fill the bottom half of an oven dish with the meat-mix, then spoon the potato-mix evenly on top. Bake in the oven on a medium heat for 20 minutes or until top is browned.

To make it go further:

use a cheaper alternative to the red pepper, such as frozen or tinned peas
add more onion and carrot to bulk out the meat.
Switch the creme fraiche for a small amount of butter or margarine.
Use quorn mince, which works out cheaper, but you may need to boost the seasonings to make up for the blandness.

'Crab' and Rocket Linguine - under a fiver

When doing my meal plans this week, I came across a recipe for crab and rocket linguine. It looked delicious, promising a balance of sharp and sweet flavours. The problem is that even tinned crabmeat is out of my budget at the moment, so I decided to adapt the recipe to something more in my price range.

Just like the original recipe, this meal has a peppery kick from the rocket, a zing from the lemon zest, and the seafood sticks, tomatoes and creme fraiche add sweetness. All in all, it was delicious and certainly didn't taste 'budget'. Also contains 2 portions of your 5-a-day.

per person:
100g pasta - I used a mix of tagliatelle and spaghetti to finish off odd packets. (10p)
olive oil for cooking (10p)
1 large garlic clove, minced (5p)
2 tbsp half-fat creme fraiche (40p)
6ish seafood sticks, ripped into strips (30p)
handful of rocket, chopped roughly (30p)
zest from half a lemon (15p for half lemon)
5 cherry tomatoes, halved. (20p)
salt and pepper to season

Total: £1.50 per person (prices estimated from used percentage of item, costed at tesco, value range if available)
If you were making this for 4, you could use less garlic and lemon, and it'd definitely come in under a fiver.

cook pasta in water
cook minced garlic in olive oil until soft, then stir in the creme fraiche, tomatoes, rocket, zest and seafood sticks.
heat gently until warmed through. Drain the pasta and stir in.
Season with salt and pepper as necessary.
Garnish with a couple extra rocket leaves.

I also sprinkled Parmesan cheese over mine as I happened to have bought some for a risotto this week.

All in all, including chopping it took less than 15 mins and very little washing up (always a bonus!)

Worth noting that even with my substitutions, this is a 'luxury' dinner for me - creme fraiche and rocket are not usually on my shopping list, but I factored them into my mealplan, planning to use the rest of the packets elsewhere this week.

Whenever I use lemons, I try to get the most out of every part of it. Juice is squeezed and used or frozen to be used later and then the remaining outer pith and skin is quartered and used to de-scale my kettle (simply pop them in with a full kettle of water, boil and leave overnight). Lemon juice can be used for cleaning, but with pancake day approaching fast, I might just freeze the juice to use then.

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.