The man behind the veg stall in the Moor Market waited with the patience of someone who has watched a lot of people do sums, while I stood there at ten past one on a Thursday holding a bowl of peppers and doing mine. The bowl was £2.50. That is how a week of £35 dinners started.
The rules
Seven dinners for two, Saturday to Friday, for £35. It was the first week of August, with Matt on holiday and cooking on my office days. The £35 covers what we bought: £22.85 at Aldi on the Saturday morning and £12.35 at the market on the Thursday before. It leaves out oil, salt, spices, stock cubes and the half bags of rice and flour already in the cupboard, and the runner beans, which came from the raised beds and cost nothing but my back. That is cheating a little and I would rather say so.
The other rule was the list. We went to Aldi on the Saturday with it on my phone and one agreement: nothing from the middle aisle, which is where £22.85 turns into £41. I still came out with a tub of olives that wasn't on it. They count towards the £35, and they were gone by Tuesday.
The kit is a four-ring hob, of which we use two, and one decent pan. It's a deep 28 cm sauté pan with a lid that Pauline gave us last Christmas, and it has done everything from stew to fried rice. The other two rings hold the kettle and a chopping board.
The seven
- Saturday: jacket potatoes with chilli, half mince and half kidney beans, in a pan big enough to feed us twice.
- Sunday: a tray of roasted peppers, courgettes, red onion and tomatoes with halloumi on top, and rice cooked in the sauté pan.
- Monday: lentil and sausage stew, Matt's, with sausages from the market browned first.
- Tuesday: pasta with runner beans from the garden, garlic, chilli flakes and a hard Italian-style cheese.
- Wednesday: egg fried rice with peas and spring onions, using the rice cooked on Sunday.
- Thursday: soup from the leftover roast veg and a stock cube, with toasted slices of the sourdough loaf that had lived in the freezer since the market.
- Friday: homemade pizza, dough made the night before, with mozzarella, passata and half a pepper that was going spare.
What it cost and what we'd make again
The total came to £35.20. The 20p was a lemon Matt added at the till, and I'm calling it a pass, though the payroll officer in me has filed it as a variance. The market was good at what it's good at: eight thick pork sausages for £4.50, two bowls of veg at £2.50 each and a sourdough loaf for £2.85, which I sliced and froze the day I bought it. Everything else was Aldi, plus the beans.
The stew is the one we've made again, twice since. It costs about £4 for two and tastes better on the second day. The egg fried rice was the cheapest, nearer £1.40 than I'd have believed, and it took eleven minutes, which on a Wednesday is the whole point. The soup was beige and tasted of the tray it came from. The pizza base caught on the underside because I forgot the back of our oven runs hot, and Matt ate the burnt corners and called them rustic.
The mistake was the halloumi. A block cost £2.25 and two people ate it in one sitting, with nothing to spare for lunch. Next time it would be half a block and a bit more veg, or no halloumi and a second tin of beans, which is the sort of sentence I never expected to write.
What made the week work wasn't any single recipe. It was two hours on the Sunday afternoon: the rice cooked and cooling, the stew base started, a second night's worth of chilli in the fridge. Without it, Monday would have been toast.
Per head, per dinner, the week came to £2.51. I did the sum on the back of a receipt. Pickle was removed from the worktop twice during the dough.
