Easy, cheap and tasty family recipes

Cooking tasty meals for your family doesn’t need to cost you lots of time or money and we have lots of ideas to help with breakfast, lunch, dinner and even snack times!

A helpful thing to do is to create a routine for when you and your family eat. This means you’ll have regular meal times instead of snacking throughout the day. Planning ahead for meals each day helps avoid last minute decisions and stress.

You can also use our meal planner to help you organise your family's meals for the week and find lots of recipes here.

Cooking everything in one pot saves time and washing up! These quick, easy and adaptable recipes often let you use the vegetables you already have or can easily get hold of. They’re also a great way to add pulses, like lentils or chickpeas into your family’s diet. Tasty recipes to try include chicken and pea risotto and roasted vegetable couscous.

A big bowl of hearty soup makes a tasty and cheap meal that the whole family is happy to tuck into. It’s also easy to turn into a more filling meal by serving with wholemeal bread or adding potatoes, rice, pasta or other grains.

Soups are also perfect to make in advance and reheat when needed. They can be stored in the fridge for up to two days or you can freeze them for the future. You can also easily change recipes to use vegetables you already have and add pulses, such as lentils or chickpeas to bulk it out.

Plus, if you’ve got a fussy eater at home, soup is a great way to sneak vegetables into their diet. By blending or mashing through a sieve, you can turn soup into a smoother consistency that can often help with picky eaters. Check out our recipes for vegetable broth and cock a leekie soup.