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.