Can You Feed Your Family for £50 Challenge

This week’s meal plan is a little different because I’ve been challenged to try and feed my family for 4 for a week for £50. Sound impossible? Well it certain is a challenge for me but I'm going to give it a go this week and here's a run down of how I plan to do it...

I usually spend about £80 a week on food. Which isn’t astronomical but cutting £30 off my budget is a challenge. I looked online for lots of tips to reduce my food bill and hands down the advice was to shop at Lidl or Aldi which I do agree with but since having the kids having my shopping delivered is my holy grail so I decided to see if I can complete this challenge using my usual Tesco online delivery service.

So this is what £50 of food looks like using Tesco app. I’m actually quite surprised the amount I managed to get by shopping the deals wisely (another top tip). One caveat though - Husband doesn’t eat breakfast or lunch at home because he doesn’t eat breakfast and he eats lunch at the work canteen or on the hop. So he is only covered for evening meals. Little E also has free school lunches so we save a bit there.

Here’s what we are eating this week

Breakfast

I eat porridge with almond milk every day. My usual bag costs 75p for 1kg. Making my brekkie super cheap. I actually got substituted the bigger 2kg bag which is usually £2 so I am quids in there. The kids cereal is 3 boxes for £3 so they can chose which cereal they want or they can have porridge like me. They have semi-skimmed milk. We also have a couple of punnets of raspberries and some nectarines to add to our brekkie.

Lunch

I tend to skip lunch on days Little I is at pre-school but when she is home I have leftovers from the night before or some cous cous or packet rice. She likes a ham or cucumber french bread roll for her lunch with some hula hoops and a yogurt. She is a creature of habit so that is what she always has in her lunch box! On other days she some scrambled eggs with her baguette or a cheese twist. The petit pan rolls I buy are 25p each and they are so big she only eats half. I cut them in half and freeze them so there is less waste and they stay fresh.

Dinner

I make up for being completely un-creative during the day at dinnertime! Here is what I have planned this week with the shopping (pantry items like stock cubes etc I already have in the cupboard)

Monday: Pesto pasta with mini chicken fillets and broccoli. This is a really simple and cheap dish which only costs less than £5 to feed all four of us (the chicken mini fillets were on offer at £3)

Tuesday: Sweet potato, carrot and onion tortilla/frittata. This is super easy. Grate your sweet potato, carrot and onion. Fry off. Whisk up 6 eggs and a dash of milk. Chuck it onto the sweet potato mixture and give it a stir. Cook until the bottom is golden brown and then pop under the grill to cook the top. Serve with some of the Petit Pan rolls (the kids love to stuff it inside the rolls which is how they serve tortilla in the cages in Madrid)

Wednesday: Chinese Chicken curry using chicken thighs with rice (I forgot to buy rice but I do have some in the cupboard). This much chicken makes a double portion of the curry so I’ll freeze half. The kids don’t like this dish so they will have the frozen pizza from the picture

Thursday: Baked eggs with bacon, onion and cherry tomatoes. I’ll probably chuck in the rest of the broccoli too.
Some Garlic Italian herb seasoning from the pantry will bring this dish to life.

Friday: Porky Lights sausages (reduced to £2) and Sweet Potato Mash with oven roasted carrots and gravy (from the pantry)

Saturday: Pointy peppers stuffed with cous cous, onion and the rest of the bacon.

Sunday: I’m definitely running low by the last day of the challenge! So by my reckoning I’ll have half a jar of pesto, 1/4 box pasta, an onion and some carrots. So I’d probably grab a jar of tinned tomatoes from my pantry and add the carrot and onion to make a pasta sauce. I’d then serve over the pasta. I’ll probably have some of the petit pan rolls left in the freezer as I bought 12 of them! So I’ll warm them up in the oven and spread the pesto over them as a topping for on the side. I’m not sure the pasta would stretch to all 4 of us so I’ll probably get the chicken curry from earlier in the week out of the freezer and serve that up for Husband and myself.

The main challenge I think I’ll face this week is the lack of after-school snacks for the kids. Apart from one pack of Barney Bears (£1) and a few yogurts they will have to make with carrot and cucumber sticks. Or a good old glass of milk!

I’ll keep you updated with how I get on throughout the week

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