Trying to keep costs down by cooking at home is all well and good – until the ingredients add up to more than takeaway or eating out would have. That’s why we’ve rounded up five recipes that go heavy on taste without a big price tag attached. There’s a seriously saucy (and surprisingly easy) carbonara from a popular Sydney pub, Victor Liong’s choose-your-own-adventure congee, Rosheen Kaul’s speedy noodles with burnt spring onion oil, and more.
Cheap and cheerful, carbonara is so much more than the sum of its (affordable) parts. This spectacularly saucy dish, from The Dolphin Hotel in Sydney, takes full advantage of those ingredients and makes the most of the guanciale – instead of draining away the fat rendered from the salt-cured meat, this recipe utilises it in the sauce for extra flavour. Plus, it includes a super simple way to avoid your sauce splitting or your eggs scrambling. Once you have the recipe down pat, you’ll surely be adding it to your regular dining rotation.
Harnessing the power of leftovers is a great way to make your buck go a little further. Italian-born food writer and TV host Silvia Colloca gives last night’s spaghetti (you could even use leftover carbonara from the above) a new lease of life with a few extra ingredients, including eggs and milk. The result? A “delicious, golden frittata” that’s “even more intriguing than the original recipe”, according to Colloca.
The base recipe for Lee Ho Fook chef-restaurateur Victor Liong’s congee calls for just six ingredients – all of them easily accessible (one of them’s water, in fact). They come together in a comforting savoury rice porridge, and you can build the dish into whatever you like (and your budget allows) by adding toppings like pork fillet, century egg or shredded chicken with ginger. Simple, cheap and nourishing.
Short on time and money? Meet chef and cookbook author Rosheen Kaul’s deeply umami noodles, which are on the table in just 15 minutes and require very few ingredients – you probably already have a few of them in your pantry. Spring onions are fried until they’re almost burnt, then given a savoury punch with a dash of soy and vinegar, resulting in a new midweek meal winner.
The easy-make marinade that coats the chicken thighs in this recipe might require you to pick up a few dried herbs and spices before you hit the kitchen. But once you have them, you can recreate this versatile marinade again and again, swapping and changing out proteins to yield an array of cheap meals week to week. A little spicy, a little smoky and a little sweet, it’s a genuine crowd-pleaser.
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