Budget meal plan for a family: a cheap week that works

To make a budget meal plan for a family, build the week around beans and lentils, eggs, rice, pasta, potatoes, frozen vegetables and tinned or frozen fish; cook double and plan the leftovers; and shop once, from a list taken from the plan. Often what makes a week expensive isn’t any one dish, but the food bought without a plan that ends up in the bin.

Most advice on eating cheaply starts with cheap recipes and this week’s offers. They help, but a week of cheap recipes stops being cheap when half a bag of spinach wilts in the drawer and Thursday turns into a takeaway. What you need is a few decisions made before you walk into the shop, not in the aisle.

Decide the plan before the shop

First the plan, then the list, then the shop. Before writing anything, open the fridge and the cupboards and start the week from what’s already there: the half bag of rice, the carrots that need using, the tin of chickpeas at the back. Fill the rest with dishes you already know how to cook, and only then write down what’s missing.

Put whatever needs using up at the start of the week, so it becomes Monday’s dinner instead of Friday’s rubbish, and buy for the meals you’ve planned, not for “the week” in general. If planning the week isn’t a habit yet, the routine for planning a weekly menu as a family walks through it step by step.

Put beans and eggs at the centre, and let meat play support

Beans, lentils and chickpeas are the natural backbone of a cheap week: a bag of dried lentils or a few tins of chickpeas cost little, keep for months and fill a family. Eggs are the other cheap protein that never lets you down. Chickpeas in a curry or lentils stirred into a pie go further than meat alone.

Meat doesn’t have to disappear, just move to a supporting role. Cheaper cuts like chicken thighs do more than breasts, a tray of frozen thighs makes one dinner, a little mince goes further in a cottage pie with lentils mixed in, and an omelette with whatever vegetables are left feeds four from what’s nearly always in the fridge.

Fish and veg: tinned and frozen count too

Fish is the hardest thing to fit into a tight budget, which is why it’s the first thing to fall out of a cheap week. Frozen fillets, fish fingers and tins of sardines, mackerel or tuna keep it in: they cost less than the fish counter, wait in the freezer or the cupboard until their night, and nothing goes off if the plan moves a day.

Vegetables work the same way. Buy what’s in season, when it’s cheapest (in autumn, squash, cabbage and parsnips), and keep frozen peas, spinach and mixed veg for the end of the week. A bag of frozen peas doesn’t go limp by Thursday.

Cook once, eat twice

The simplest way to make the week cheaper is to plan the leftovers instead of waiting for them to turn up. A pot of lentil soup for eight takes barely longer than one for four, and the second half is tomorrow’s lunch or a box in the freezer. Dried beans work the same way: cook the whole bag, use some this week and freeze the rest in portions.

Write them into the plan: if Monday is a double batch of soup, Tuesday’s lunch is done.
Leave a gap for what’s left: a clear-out-the-fridge dinner at the end of the week means the last vegetables become soup instead of rubbish.

An example cheap weekly meal plan for four

Lunch and dinner, Monday to Sunday, with fish, beans and lentils, eggs and a little meat spread across the week.

Day	Lunch	Dinner	What keeps it cheap
Monday	Lentil soup (a double batch)	Chicken thigh traybake with potatoes and carrots	Dried lentils; frozen thighs
Tuesday	Monday’s lentil soup	Fish fingers, jacket potatoes and peas	Leftovers; frozen fish and peas
Wednesday	Tuna and sweetcorn pasta	Three-bean chilli with rice (a double batch)	Store cupboard; tinned beans
Thursday	Wednesday’s chilli in wraps	Cheese and vegetable omelette	Leftovers; eggs
Friday	Sardines on toast with salad	Homemade pizza	Tinned fish; homemade dough
Saturday	Improvise with what’s left	Chickpea and spinach curry with rice	Nothing wasted; tinned chickpeas
Sunday	Cottage pie with lentils and frozen peas	Soup from the week’s leftover vegetables	Mince stretched; leftovers

Notice what repeats: two dishes come out of one cook each, and the shopping list is short because much of the week comes from the cupboard. None is a special “budget recipe”: they’re ordinary family meals, in an order that makes each shop go further.

A cheap store cupboard to plan from

Most of a cheap week is cooked from things that keep. With these at home, the weekly shop is mostly fresh vegetables, milk and bread, and a “nothing to eat” evening still has three dinners in it:

Pulses: dried lentils, tins of chickpeas, kidney beans and baked beans.
Carbohydrates: rice, pasta, oats, potatoes, flour for pizza dough.
Tins: chopped tomatoes, sardines, tuna, sweetcorn.
Freezer: peas, spinach, fish fillets, chicken thighs, a loaf of bread.
Flavour: stock cubes, an onion bag, garlic, a couple of spices you actually use.

Buy them when they run out, not when they’re on offer and you already have three. Bigger packs of what you use every week usually work out cheaper; bigger packs of what you use once a month don’t.

What to leave out

Recipes with an ingredient you’ll use once. The jar of curry paste that lives in the fridge for six months isn’t cheap.
Offers that aren’t on the plan. Three-for-two on something you weren’t going to eat is spending, not saving.
Meals you won’t eat at home. If Saturday lunch is at your parents’, don’t shop for it.
A plan so strict nobody sticks to it. Friday’s homemade pizza is part of the plan; the 10 p.m. takeaway is what happens when there isn’t one.

Cheap is what gets eaten

A budget meal plan isn’t measured by the price of each recipe, but by how little is left to throw out on Sunday. Deciding the week calmly, around what you already have and the dishes you cook well, is what makes the shop go further: food bought with a meal in mind ends up as a meal.

Doing it with Wenu

Wenu doesn’t know prices, keep a budget or know what’s in your fridge: that part is still yours. What it does is take the legwork out of this routine. The Recipes tab keeps the cheap dishes you already cook, with their ingredients and category, so filtering by “Legumes” or sorting by “Least recently planned” gets you most of the week. In the calendar, a gap can be marked “Improvise” for the leftovers night or “Eating out” so nobody shops for it. On Free you type the shopping list yourself; with Pro it fills itself with the ingredients of what you plan, and everyone at home sees the same menu and the same list.