Feed your family for £20 a week
As a family of five, we can spend an absolute fortune on food if we’re not careful. I have a few tricks up my sleeve to cut the costs and minimise food waste, but I’m always on the lookout for frugal recipes that will help us to cut back. When I was asked to review Feed your Family for £20 a Week, I jumped at the chance, it sounded just up my money-saving street!
Can you really feed your family for £20 a week?
I’ll be honest and say that personally, I don’t think our family would be able to pull this off. There are five of us all with different appetites and different food preferences. But if needs must, I know we could spend less than we do at the moment. £20 a week for all our food would be pretty tough though, if not impossible. I did also find that some of the recipes didn’t stretch as far as they said they did. For example, the Creamy Cajun Chicken Pasta recipe claimed to make enough to feed 8 people (4 portions + 4 leftover). In reality, this fed five of us with one portion left over. It’s not a huge difference and we don’t have huge portions, but it did mean there wasn’t a whole family meal left to stick in the freezer for another day.
But the tips and some of the recipes in this book will definitely help you to cut back on how much you spend on your food shop each week. The book has definitely made me take a look at how I cook and I’ve adapted quite a few things since receiving it!
Cooking from scratch
One of the big things that this book does is help you to cook nutritious meals from scratch without it costing a fortune. It also encourages you to batch cook and freeze which is a great way to save both money and time.
One of my favourite things I’ve taken away from this book is batch cooking tomato sauce filled with vegetables that’s been demolished by all the family. It’s such a simple thing, yet it’s made me realise how easy it is to make your own sauces which are far healthier and far cheaper than the jars of sauce you can buy. I also made my own cheese sauce for the first time, again it’s incredibly simple but I know exactly what’s inside and it’s so easy and cheap to make!
Feed your family for £20 – what’s inside?
The book is broken down into a few sections, making it really easy to find what you’re looking for. There is an 8 week meal plan you can follow if you want to, with a big shopping list to get you started. So if you’re happy to try all of the meals then this is a great way to do it. The plan covers 3 meals a day too.
The recipes are broken down as follows:
- Breakfast
- Soups & Salads
- Light Bites
- Meat & Fish
- Pasta & Rice
- Slow Cooker
- Fakeaways
- Sweet Treats
- Basics
I found this made it really easy to quickly flick through the book to find recipes I fancied adding to our meal plan for the week.
My favourite recipes
We’ve tried quite a few of the recipes so far and they’ve mostly gone down really well. My personal favourites are the tomato base sauce which made a lovely lasagne, the Chicken Hash and the Sausage Pasta Bake. These are all fairly simple meals but made with lots of nutritious vegetables and they made me rethink the way I cook!
The kids have got their eyes on making some of the sweet treats in the school holidays which look really straightforward and delicious too, so I’m looking forward to giving those a try!
* The Feed your family for £20 a week book was sent to be free of charge for the purpose of this review. However, all thoughts and opinions are my own.
