by Thrifty Lesley | Nov 20, 2022 | All Recipes, Cakes and Bakes, Christmas, Christmas Meal Plan 4, Meal Plans
Christmas Week Food. Lots of festive flavours & not many £££’s Christmas Meal Plan If you are on a tight budget, Christmas food can be very difficult, causing stress, and maybe even debt too. Happily, you can enjoy a delicious festive meal, and eat well for... 
by Thrifty Lesley | Aug 6, 2022 | All Recipes, Lunches, Round Up Post
School packed lunches – the dreaded chore! Can you feed a hulking teenager for 30p a head? Ideas for school packed lunches – many people with school aged children need them. Packing up a lunch box for children or an adult packed lunch is bad enough. It can... 
by Thrifty Lesley | Jul 20, 2022 | All Recipes, Dinners, Stretch A Chicken
Spicy Chicken Pasta Bake – Stretch A Chicken (4) Got a little bit of chicken to use up? Try it in this spicy pasta bake- make it as hot and spicy as you like! How to make Spicy Chicken Pasta Chop the onion and sauté in a little oil until soft. Add garlic,... 
by Thrifty Lesley | Jul 17, 2022 | All Recipes, Dinners, Less than 500 calories, Stretch A Chicken
Chicken & Sweetcorn Recipe for a tart – Stretch A Chicken (5) This recipe is part of a series on stretching a chicken to the max. I took one medium chicken of 1.5kg and made it feed a family of 4 for a week, with 7 different budget stretching chicken... 
by Thrifty Lesley | Jan 27, 2022 | All Recipes, Cakes and Bakes, Less than 500 calories
Parsnip Cake with Maple Syrup & Lemon I really like the carrot cake from Cheap Family Recipes. Like most carrot cakes, it doesn’t actually taste of carrots and I fell to wondering what other vegetables could be used in a similar way. At Christmas, I got... 
by Thrifty Lesley | Dec 22, 2021 | All Recipes, Christmas, Less than 500 calories, Puddings / Desserts
A roulade recipe using mincemeat, Bramley apple and whipped cream – gluten free I had surplus mincemeat from Christmas and decided to use some in a pudding. I have made chocolate roulades for some time and felt sure that swapping the cocoa for flour and using... 
by Thrifty Lesley | Oct 20, 2021 | Breakfast, Dinners, Lunches, Sides
Soufflé Croûton Slice I went to a Cookalong recently where we all took a different soup. I tasted 10 soups that day, which was fabulous! All of them very different. One of the members also brought Mary Berry’s Wonderful Soufflé Croûtons, which truly were rather... 
by Thrifty Lesley | Apr 19, 2021 | All Recipes, Cakes and Bakes, Less than 500 calories
Vegetable Muffins Are you looking for a savoury vegetable muffins recipe? I recently made some with some friends. We all made the same recipe, then met up on Zoom to compare results. Great fun! The use of the term to describe what are essentially cupcakes or buns did... 
by Thrifty Lesley | Jan 4, 2021 | All Recipes, Cakes and Bakes, Less than 500 calories
Apple Bread I like a banana bread, but today, I was looking at my fruit bowl and wondered if other fruit could be used in place of the bananas. How about apple bread I thought? Ooh, or spiced apple bread? How can I make apple bread healthy? To make the apple bread... 
by Thrifty Lesley | Jul 7, 2020 | All Recipes, Breakfast, Less than 500 calories, Lunches
Savoury Baked Oats I love baked oats and have made many a different variation of a baked oats recipe. Having tried a dozen or so sweet versions, I began to wonder about savoury baked oats. A bit of Googling later and I realised that it wasn’t really a big thing.... 
by Thrifty Lesley | May 31, 2020 | All Recipes, Cakes and Bakes
Chocolate Muffins. Quick, easy, great for packups and very cheap I first wrote this post in May 2017, and here we are 3 years later. Mike was again ‘needing some chocolate’, so I made him some of these. I’m baking much more whilst in lockdown and... 
by Thrifty Lesley | May 12, 2020 | All Recipes, Cakes and Bakes
Chocolate Fudge Cake, made with / out eggs I’ve updated this post a bit to make it look better. But the images come from the time when I did this experiment, in 2013, and they aren’t very good. I’ll try and repeat everything and take better pictures.... 
by Thrifty Lesley | Jul 17, 2019 | All Recipes, Cakes and Bakes
Quick Banana Bread This is such a classic recipe, and we haven’t got one on Thrifty Lesley. Tass, a Facebook member, supplied this delicious sounding quick banana bread recipe way back in 2015. We do get through quite a lot of bananas, but in summer, they go brown and... 
by Thrifty Lesley | Apr 3, 2019 | All Recipes, Dinners, Lunches
Bacon, Olive and Cheese Loaf Cake The U3A cookery group came round today. We have such fun, exploring recipes, stirring, tasting, baking and talking about flavours, options and possibilities. Not to mention the large amount of laughter and gossiping that goes on! This... 