Wahaca

Food & Drink, Food Topics & Trends

Eat for a Fiver

Image from Paul Hudson via Flickr Creative Commons

The Guardian caused a bit of a stir by publishing a range of dishes from some well known cooks that could apparently all be made for £5. But readers complained that many of them would cost well over a fiver once you’d accounted for all the extras such as olive oil and salt. Zappa2007 wrote:

“Dinner for under a fiver? We don’t think so. We visited Sainsbury’s online and costed up the ingredients for these recipes. To buy all of the items would cost £22.16 (and thats without salt or olive oil!) though it does include a generous portion of cheese. As yet Sainsbury’s does not sell items by the teaspoon or the sprinkle. Even if we then worked out the pro rata cost per sprinkle and teaspoon we could only get the cost down to £5.39.

We are all in favour of cooking on a budget in these straightened times but slap my thighs and call me nancy if we could knock up Delia’s food as cheaply as she can. Are we missing something?”

Thanks to the comments of Zappa2007 and many others, the Guardian opened up the £5 recipe challenge to its readers and the published the best recipes from the likes of:

Into the Pot – Crostini followed by tomato rigatonefor £3.64
Eat the Right Stuff – Spinach, lemon and peppered mackerel pilaf followed by berry ice cream for £4.63
Football and a Baby – Cabbage bhajis followed by chanamasala for just under a fiver
Dinner Diary – Courgette soup followed by crab spaghetti for £4.98

We love the fact that the Guardian is embracing the online food world so wholeheartedly and wish we’d picked up on this sooner so we could have entered a few of our Mexican street food dishes. In fact, that’s a great idea. We’ll write a post that explains how to make Mexican food at home for a fiver. Watch this space.

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