The 3 Meals a Day for £1 in 2026 Food - Part Three and Final Musings

My little stash of freebies, picked up from all over the place when we eat or drink out ... something that I obviously didn't do at all on this particular week.  

Even though I gave myself permission to use from the stash, I didn't dip into it as much as I thought I would.  The salt and pepper sachets were very welcome and were probably the things that I used the most.  I had used a sachet of mayo on the toast that was under my beans on toast meals, but that was just about it.

The final two days ...

SATURDAY

Breakfast - Porridge

Followed by a black coffee and my last banana.

Dinner - Beans on Toast

Yes, I remembered to put it onto a bigger plate this time. 😄

Tea - Carrot and Lentil Soup

This was served with a slice of toast for dunking purposes.

Supper - Dahl and Rice

It was Saturday night and we were having a bit of a binge watch of something we had recorded so we both had some supper for a change.

SUNDAY

Breakfast - Porridge

The final day of my week on £1 a day, first I had a bowl of porridge and then ...

... I decided to finish off the last portion of the stewed apple.

Dinner - Dahl and Rice

A nice simple dinner, I could eat dahl and rice until it came out of my ears, there is absolutely no problem with repetition here.  😁

Tea - Spicy Potato Wedges with a Carrot and Red Onion Slaw

I had saved something special to have for my final meal of the challenge.  The largest potato was cut into wedges, par-boiled and then finished off in the Remoska for added crispiness.  With a nice fresh carrot slaw it was absolutely delicious.

So that was it, and it wasn't a bad week at all.  The careful planning made it all work out really well, I was never overly hungry, and if I was there was always something available to eat.

THE LEFTOVERS

I even ended the week with leftovers:

1 litre of Carrot and Lentil soup

675g Porridge Oats

500g Rice

1/2 tin of Tomatoes

Cumin - most of the jar

2 Crusts of Bread

and 1 portion of Dahl

And this is how a basic store-cupboard can be slowly built up, even on such a limited budget.  If I were to go into a second week I wouldn't have to buy oats or rice, and I would already have almost a full jar of spice in my cupboard.  So I would have the makings of two soup and toast meals and a portion of dahl and rice, so that's three dinner or tea meals sorted and enough oats to make porridge every day for the week.  Which means that I could concentrate on buying ingredients for the missing eleven meals.

I have already worked out that if I was going to do it for another week I would buy the following.

From Aldi:

Dairy-free Cheese £1.95

Red Lentils - 89p

Olive Spread - 1.25

From Sainsbury's:

1.5kg SR Flour - 70p

1 tin of Baked Beans - 30p

500g Spaghetti - 28p

2 tins of Plum Tomatoes - 86p

3 Onions - 31p

6 Carrots - 36p

Total - £6.90

With these ingredients I could add bread, flatbreads and pizza bases to the menu plan, a simple tomato sauce to be used on the spaghetti or pizza bases.  I could make another pan of dahl to go with my store-cupboard rice, there could be cheese on toast or on sandwiches with some of the onion.  I can think of lots of ways of carrying this forward.

It's been interesting doing this challenge after a gap of many years, and I think that I have proved that where there's a will, there is most definitely a way to eat for just £1 a day.

Sue xx

The 3 Meals a Day for £1 in 2026 Food - Part Two

 

Breakfast - Porridge and Stewed Apple

WEDNESDAY

Wednesday's food was relatively easy to both cook and eat, it was mostly a case of reheating what I had made previously.

The stewed apple waiting to be joined by the porridge.

Lunch - Vegetable Soup

I had the other half of this vegetable soup from Tuesdays meal plan, and yes I forgot to photograph that as well, so here's the jug again! 😄

I forgot to add that on both soup days it was served with a slice of toast for dunking.  Soup without toast is just very sad.   

Tea - Vegetable Stew and Toast

It was a small portion as I just wasn't that hungry, but I did have a couple of spoonful's of the stewed apple with a cup of coffee as a little bit of supper.

THURSDAY

Breakfast - Porridge and Banana

I decided to cook the banana in the porridge rather than slice it cold on the top.  It was a chilly morning, one of the first this year, with a heavy mist shrouding the garden.

Dinner - Beans on Toast

My dinner felt very different as I decided to open the tin of beans and have half on two slices of toast.  Beans on toast is a very British meal and a really comforting one.  This was very good but as I had put it onto a small plate, trying to eat this on my knee in front of the television proved ever so messy!!

Note to self - use a bigger plate next time. 😄

Tea - Dahl and Rice

It was so good to have a nice homemade ready meal waiting for me, no cooking and only a dish and a spoon to wash up.  This is one of the portions from the fridge and one of the six frozen blocks of rice.  I love that the dahl has moulded itself to the shape of the little plastic takeaway pot it was saved into.

FRIDAY

Breakfast Porridge with Stewed Apple

Yep, no photo ... I didn't do very well at all did I.  I could have cheated and had porridge one day this week for my breakfast and took a photo ... but I don't do that. 

The makings of my dinner.  

I saved a little bit of the red onion for later in the week and then used up all but one of the carrots, the smaller of the two remaining potatoes and the rest of the lentils.  The little salt and peppers from my freebie stash came in very useful as this really needed flavour adding.

Dinner - Carrot and Lentil Soup with Toast

This soup was delicious, and luckily I had enough to be able to have it again the next day.

Tea - Dahl and Rice

Another meal straight out of the fridge and freezer and absolutely delicious.  I could eat this every night of every week and never get bored with it.

Another day over and I wasn't flagging at all, maybe I'm a bit annoyed with myself now when I see how many photos I forgot to take, but that's just the way it was.  Life gets in the way and we all just do the best we can.  💚

I'll be back with the final part of the challenge next time.

Sue xx

The 3 Meals a Day for £1 in 2026 Food - Part One

 

The Aldi Shopping Trolley

So, following on from the last post, today I am starting to show you the way that I used the foods that I bought.  If you missed the first post in this series explaining what I'm doing and why and showing the receipts and the rest of the food ... it's HERE.

I'm keeping it simple and just showing the food and some of the preparation photos.  I am well out of practice with challenges and I have to admit to forgetting to take some photos, so I am simply going to use the same photo over and over when necessary.  

Breakfast was a particular forgetful moment!!

MONDAY

Breakfast - Porridge

I thought that as I had a full kilo of porridge oats, I would try to eat 75g each day instead of my usual 50g.  It was way too much for me, so some was saved to be used the next day in a slightly different way and I stuck to 50g for the rest of the week.

As I am not usually a big fruit eater and yet I wanted to keep this challenge as healthy as possible, I decided that rather than make myself eat an apple a day I would simply cook up all six of the little apples that I bought from Aldi. I do love stewed apple/apple sauce and I thought it would be a brilliant addition to my morning porridge each day.

On the worktop in the kitchen were these sorry looking specimens that had fallen off the tree in the garden the day before so I decided rather than waste them I would peel, chop and add them to the Aldi apples.

Dinner - Banana and Coffee

After all the chopping and sampling of the stewed apple I just wasn't that hungry at dinner time, so I simply had one of the bananas and a cup of coffee. 

The makings of a good old vegetable stew, with lentils for a bit of added protein.

Almost ready on the hob, but it looked sadly lacking in 'green'.

So you might think this is cheating a bit, but I went to the vegetable bed in the garden and picked three of our spring onions.  We have so many left and I do want to try and use them before the first frost gets to them.

The green tops went into the stew pan and the white ends were saved to be used in another recipe.

Tea - Vegetable Stew

I pulled out two portions of stew and then whizzed up the rest of the pan to make almost a litre of vegetable soup.

TUESDAY

The leftover porridge from the day before had been popped into the fridge overnight, but rather than just reheating it I decided to try frying it.

Breakfast - Porridge Patties and Stewed Apple

It didn't work very well, usually I would have added a spoonful of flour to bind it better but I didn't have any, yes I could potentially have whizzed up some of the oats to make oat flour but we are talking about 7.30 in the morning here!! 😄

It was tasty in it's own way and the apple sauce was delicious.

Lunch - Vegetable Soup

Lunch was half of the soup made on Monday ... yes I forgot to take a photo!!

Straight after lunch I started making the dahl for my tea.  Dahl is always best when cooked slowly and left to stand before eating.

It doesn't look much in my large pan but it made a lot.

Tea - Dahl and Rice

Four more single-serve sized pots of dahl went into the fridge, and two others were put straight into the freezer along with six portions of rice.

My £1 challenge ready meals at their best. 😁 

I always find that it's good to get ahead and make large portions of things at the start of the week before my enthusiasm begins to run out ... and of course it makes for less washing of pots later in the week too.

I'll be back with more days worth of food next time.

Any questions just ask away in the comments, but to nip any portion size comments in the bud, I have made all the portions that I am eating this week to suit me and my usual meal sizes.  If I had wanted bigger portions I could easily have had more porridge oats and a lot more rice, but I cannot physically manage any more than is photographed in these pictures.

Sue xx

Can You Eat 3 Meals a Day for £1 in 2026?

Those of you who know me well, will have realised that blogging the other week about the trend that has recently popped up, mainly on YouTube this time, of asking the question 'Is it possible to eat for £1 a day in 2026?' the way so many of us in blogland did it quite a few years back ... would set me off on a mission to see if it was actually possible.

So I decided to do it last week.

My food buying has gotten very erratic recently, what with buying enough food for both me and Alan to eat together at dinner and teatime while he is so busy renovating our bungalow, so I thought that taking a break to concentrate on something like this while still making Alan good but simple meals of his choosing would be a way around things.

I made plans, checked the pricing out online on both the Aldi and Sainsbury's websites and then I visited them both armed with just £7, to see if I could actually manage it with what was available in our small branches.  I had to do a mixture of both supermarkets as Aldi sell very few things loose, whereas in Sainsbury's I could weigh out produce to fit exactly into my budget.  I did get the baking potatoes from Aldi as there they are priced individually and I could choose the largest ones possible at just 24p each.

The Aldi shopping and my receipt are above.

This is what I managed to pick up from Sainsbury's.

The receipt.

Here is my basic menu plan, the prices of the food and my workings out for the calories, protein and '5 a day' information.  I thought that 1282 calories, 50g of protein and 4 of my '5 a day' per day were all quite reasonable for what was going to be just one week of eating.

I wrote out the ingredients list for my very basic recipes, soup, stew, dahl, carrot soup ...

... pizza sauce, lentil soup and slaw.

I decided that I would allow myself the use of minimal amounts of oil for cooking, and anything I needed from my stash of saved sachets ... and of course to keep my sanity intact over the course of the week, and to try and keep myself as human as possible there was always going to be instant coffee allowed.

Then there was only one thing for it ... time to get stuck in and actually eat the food that I had purchased over the next seven days.

I'll be back next time with a round up of the food that I ate and the leftovers ... yes, unbelievably there were leftovers!!

Sue xx

A Busy Year, A Busy Weekend

 

September from my 2026 Lucy Almey Calendar 

It's been such a busy year and my calendar has seen lots of fillings in over the last nine months.  Fillings in with times and names, and then ticks as each job round at the bungalow is done by the professionals.  We don't keep tabs of all the work that Alan has done ... his poor old knees are telling the story all by themselves.  😐

Art by C.  Burnett

There has been a lot of reading going on this month.  The darker nights and slower mornings are very conducive to it, and I'm into a really good book at the moment.

I can't believe there are only three months left of this year, this past week has really flown by with a very busy weekend at the end of it. We've been selling on Facebook Marketplace, there have been visits to us by ex-family members that we bumped into in town, and visits by us to see Mum.

It's been nice to have a quieter start to the week.

Sue xx