A Cost-Saving Recipe From Ella Mills Woodward

As we head into January, I know two things are top of most people's minds – keeping costs down and making 2023 a healthy year. Whilst I’m not a fan of the ‘new year, new you’ premise and the associated implication that the current you isn’t quite good enough, I do think it’s a nice time of year to focus on healthy, sustainable, long-term habit changes.  

There’s long been a pre-conception that healthy eating is inherently expensive and therefore the two goals above could be difficult to achieve. The good news is that there are some ways to keep costs down, one of which is switching animal protein for plant-protein, for example swapping beef or lamb mince for lentils or tofu in a Bolognese or using butter beans or chickpeas in a curry instead of meat/fish. Research shows that switching to a vegan, vegetarian, or flexitarian diet (using whole-foods, e.g. beans and tofu, not meat mimics) could cut the cost of your food shop by up to a third.

Autumn Bolognese: Mushroom and Lentil

This autumnal bolognese has lovely depth to it, with rich tones from the mushrooms and tamari, a little freshness from the parsley and a perfectly chunky texture from the lentils. It’s hearty, filling, and a fantastic batch cooking recipe.

Serves 4, with extra for freezing

Ingredients: 

20g dried porcini mushrooms

300ml hot vegetable stock

1 tbsp olive oil, plus extra for frying

1 onion, finely chopped

1 celery stick, finely chopped

1 carrot, finely chopped

2 tbsp tomato purée

1 tbsp tamari or light soy sauce

500ml passata

2 × 400g tins of green lentils, drained and rinsed

400g chestnut mushrooms, finely sliced

4 servings of spaghetti (75g per person)

20g flat-leaf parsley, leaves and stalks finely chopped

Sea salt and black pepper

Instructions:

1. Soak the dried porcini in the hot vegetable stock and set aside.

2. Meanwhile, heat the oil in a large casserole and add the onion, celery and carrot. Season with salt and pepper and cook over a medium heat for 10 minutes until soft and starting to caramelise.

3. Pour in the soaked porcini with all the stock then stir in the tomato purée and tamari. Bring to a simmer and cook for a couple of minutes before adding the passata and green lentils. Bring back to a simmer and allow to bubble away while you cook the mushrooms.

4. Heat a little oil in a non-stick frying pan and fry the mushrooms in batches on a high heat. Season each batch with salt and pepper then stir into the bubbling sauce while you fry the remaining mushrooms, until they are all cooked.

5. Cook the spaghetti according to the instructions on the pack, then drain well.

6. Stir the parsley into the sauce and check the seasoning, then add the drained spaghetti and mix well. Serve immediately.

Note

This serves 4 generously but it takes hardly any time to make so the leftovers can be frozen for another meal. Good for batch cooking, it also works brilliantly served with rice or spooned over a jacket potato.

Tip for tinies

For toddlers, skip the tamari – it’s high in salt.

This works out around £1.75 a serving, with beef it would be an additional 42p per person, making it £2.17 a serving. If you replicated this saving across the week for a family of four, continuing to swap animal protein for plant protein in your evening meal then you’d be saving almost £12 across the week or over £600 across the year.