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Justine Pattison - expert advice for every cook

Justine Pattison

Everyday inspiration in the kitchen

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BBC Budget Meal Plans

tray filled with sausages

We’ve been busy in the Test Kitchen developing and testing recipes for BBC Food. We have created four different meal plans designed to work together and provide a week’s worth of budget recipes. Whether you are looking for ideas for a family of four or six, or recipes for one or two, I hope you’ll be inspired.

Our budget was no more than £10 for the single person meal plan, per week, and £1 per recipe per person for the rest. And the meal plans were designed to work with a very basic store cupboard – the kind of things that many people are already likely to have already in stock. Not easy, but I think we managed it. If you check out the links below, you can find some of my personal favourites.

BBC Food Budget Meal Plans

Sticky sausage traybake

Chicken dinner for one

Pasta arrabiatta

Barbecue-style chicken

Creamy mushroom pie

I’ve also included below some of the photographs taken from the first stages of recipe development – not quite as lovely as the BBC ones, but I hope you’ll see that what you can achieve at home is pretty close to what can be achieved in a professional photography studio.

If you do make any of the BBC recipes, please do let me know how you get on.

Some of the testing photos from the initial recipe development

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