Collection · 19 recipes

Cheap family meals under £2 a portion

Feeding a family well on a tight budget is mostly a planning problem, not a cooking one. The recipes below all come in under £2 per portion, and every one of them is a proper meal rather than a compromise.

What keeps the cost down is not cheap ingredients so much as ingredients that get used more than once. Plan two or three of these in the same week and the shared items, the onions, the tinned tomatoes, the rice, spread across several meals instead of sitting half used in the cupboard. That is where the saving actually comes from.

Costs are estimated from typical supermarket prices for the amount each recipe uses, so treat them as a close guide rather than a till receipt. Filter further by cooking time or nutrition if you need to, then set the meal planner's budget to under £2 and it will only suggest these. When you are done, the planner turns the whole plan into a single shopping list so you buy once and buy right.

Build a plan from these