Recommendations for healthy eating, on a budget, with kids cookbooks?!?!
Recommendations for healthy eating, on a budget, with kids cookbooks?!?
Answers:
Firstly, buy as little prepared food in boxes as possible - often not very healthy, and frequently expensive. Avoid buying supermarket meats - again, often dear, and sometimes of dubious quality. Use a local butcher for your meat - often they will deliver to your home.
My local butcher charges as follows
Stewing Beef (Chuck) ￡2.11lb
Mince Beef (not fatty or gristly) ￡1.62 lb
Free range chicken breasts ￡1.24 ea
My local supermarket will sell you 6 chicken breasts for ￡4.50, but they are such weedy little things that it takes all 6 to feed 2 people, whereas the butchers chicken - 2 breasts are more than enough. (￡1.54 saved!)
Pasta - 1 lb of mince beef, a home-made pasta sauce and some pasta will feed 4 adequately. Including the cost of the pasta and a tin of tomatoes, onion and herbs for the sauce, you are talking about a meal for 4 at 75p per portion!
Vegetable curries - there are oodles of very tasty lentil and vegetable dishes that are dirt cheap and are easy to prepare - see the web sites of the Cultural Attaches at the Indian and Pakistani Embassies for links to recipes.
Don't buy oven chips, 'cook-in' sauces in jars or sachets, ready meals. Avoid cheap oils and fats - you need twice as much and they are full of chemicals. Sunflower oil, Fillipo Berio, Napolina or Bertolli extra-virgin olive oil should be in your cupboard.
Cookbooks.
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is a food writer whom I greatly admire for his committment to healthy eating - anything by him is recommended.
Antony Worral Thompson is a highly qualified chef whose cooking is not at all pretentious, uses readily-available ingredients and his dishes are easy for the home cook to prepare.
The BBC food site offers downloadable, free recipes from AWT and other top chefs- see link below.
Finally, do not avoid fats. Fats provide satisfaction, as they take longer to digest than other foods. So, if you or your children fancy a sausage or a burger, by all means have them - once or twice a week, but buy your sausages from a butcher and make the burgers yourself, if you can.
www.bbc.co.uk/food