I am a member of the Collective Bias Social Fabric community. This shop has been compensated as part of a social shopper amplification for Collective Bias and its advertiser.

As a family of five, with three growing children, making the most of my weekly food budget is very important. Over the years I’ve found creative ways to make our money go further, whilst still feeding Purpledad and the Purple children healthy family meals. So when I was asked to write about making a meal for my family for under £10 I was definitely up for the challenge.

One of the biggest ways we stretch our money is by not eating meat, obviously we have other reasons for being vegetarian but saving money is a plus. Instead we eat lots of vegetables, which are very cheap. So I decided to make one of my families favourites, nut roast with roast veggies. The vegetarians Sunday roast, except we had it on a Wednesday but I don’t think we were breaking any laws or anything?

So this morning, after dropping the boys at school, Wonder Girl and I headed to our local Asda to buy the ingredients. We shopped with a calculator to make sure we stuck to our budget exactly.

Our shopping list:

• cashew nuts – £2.50
• onion – 13p
• garlic – 25p
• butternut squash – £1.02
• frozen Yorkshire puddings – £1
• frozen peas – £1
• potatoes – £2
• parsnips – 69p

Total = £8.59

Our meal plan was: butternut squash & cashew nut loaf, roast potatoes, roast parsnips, peas and yorkshire puddings. I decided to make up my own recipe for the nut roast to give myself even more of a challenge. Here’s the recipe:

Butternut Squash & Cashew Nut Loaf

Ingredients:

• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
• oil for frying
• 450g butternut squash, cubed
• 225g raw cashews, chopped roughly
• 1/2 tsp nutmeg
• 1 tsp mixed herbs
• salt and pepper

Method

1. Roast the butternut squash for 25 mins.
2. Fry the onion until golden brown, then take off the heat and add the garlic to the pan.
3. Put all the ingredients together, mix well.
4. Press into a 2 ib loaf tin. Cover top with foil.
5. Cook for 60 mins at 190 c.
6. Enjoy.

This afternoon, after the school run, I rolled up my sleeves and got cooking. Purpledad came home from work to the smell of roast dinner (how very 1950’s housewife of me) and we all sat down to enjoy our meal and catch up on the day. All for less than a tenner, what a bargain!