The Sainsbury's "Five Family Meals for £20" Plan - Day Four

Today's recipe: Bangers and mash with onion gravy

Didn't really need the recipe for this one, but we followed it anyway for the sake of fairness. The sausages took a little longer to cook than the stated 25 minutes, and we had three each rather than two as we are little piggies. They're only 84 calories each though, which is pretty low for sausages. Let's not talk about the fat and salt content though, eh? Also, TOO MUCH MASH!

This was lovely, but you can't really go wrong with bangers and mash can you?! We worked out that our meals cost just 30p each though, which is AMAZING.

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Overall score out of 10: 8

I really need to start taking the photos with our DSLR rather than my pathetic iPhone camera. The food looks so much better in real life, and I'm not doing it justice at all. Trouble is, I don't want to be bothered with focussing and so forth when faced with a plate of food, I just want to dive in. Not literally, but almost...

The Sainsbury's "Five Family Meals for £20" Plan - Day Three

Today's recipe: Herby tomato & mozzarella chicken

Again, very easy to make. We skipped the frozen green beans, and made egg fried rice rather than having plain boiled as, let's face it, plain boiled rice is boring. This was really tasty, although the Basics range mozzarella was a little bland - if we make it again, I think we'll buy better quality mozzarella.

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Plus bonus one of Andy's hand moving faster than the speed of light:

Overall score out of 10: 8.

The Sainsbury's "Five Family Meals for £20" Plan - Day Two

Today's recipe: Garlic mushroom and turkey bake

This one was less faffy than yesterday's (not that yesterday's was particularly faffy) and took 20 minutes to prepare. The recipe said it should take 15, but I don't think we did too badly! We put a little grated Cheddar cheese on top of the potatoes as we are both cheese fiends. It took 45 minutes too cook rather than 30, but it was worth the wait. Absolutely DELICIOUS! Creamy sauce, soft potatoes, tender turkey, rich mushrooms and, erm, leeky leeks.

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Overal score out of 10: 9. Point lost due to recipe timings being a bit skewiff!

Oh, and I had yesterday's leftovers for lunch with a poached egg:

The Sainsbury's "Five Family Meals for £20" Plan - Day One

My husband and I decided to try Sainsbury's (relatively) new collaboration with Jamie Oliver, the "Five Family Meals for £20" plan this week, as we've been finding ourselves going to the supermarket for tea every evening rather than planning in advance. Obviously, there are only two of us, so the plan will leave us with leftovers each day - we are going to either eat these for lunch or freeze them, both options will end up saving us money in the long run.

We went to shopping on Sunday morning armed with our list of ingredients (printed from the website), which we were told would cost us £19.97. It actually ended up costing us slightly less as some of the items were on offer. I was a bit worried that some of the items might not be available, but we had no problem getting any of the things on the list. The plan assumes that you have basic stock cupboard ingredients of things ilke stock cubes, garlic and olive oil, so if you didn't and had to buy them, the weekly cost would obviously be slightly higher than £20.

We started with week four, and day one's recipe was "creamy sausage & lemon pasta", which took about 25 minutes to cook and very little time to prepare. It was extremely easy to make, and very tasty. The only thing I would say though is that the recipe called for 350g of pasta for four people. 350g! That's almost 90g per person! I usually eat about 50g, so ended up leaving quite a lot on my plate. I think next time, we'll use less pasta and slightly less lemon juice as the lemony taste was ever so slightly overpowering.

 

 Overall score out of 10: 7.