+ What's the cookbook about?

This cookbook contains over 100 budget specific recipes, 4 weekly price-checked mealplans (that you can now use in any order), 100's of useful tips and a really clever Swappable Ingredient section for each recipe. So if you don't have an ingredient you can simply swap it for one of our suggestions and it will still taste delicious. Oh, and the weekly food budget? It's about £21.00 per person for lunches and dinners (£3.00 /day), and a little bit more for a delicious variety of cooked breakfasts each week.

P.s With this cookbook you can now choose whether to follow the 3 meal a day plan, or simply make some toast, granola, cereal, porridge etc for breakfast and let us take care of the lunches and dinners).

+ I'm super busy each day, does this book work for me?

One of the best improvements we made is to make each recipe suitable for people who need to eat well within a limited time. What this means is that 85/100 recipes take just 15-30 minutes, and many even shorter. The 15 longer recipes are massive crowd pleasers such as the succulent Roast Chicken with Boulangere Potatoes, Middle Eastern Tagines, melt in the mouth Beef Stews and One Tray Bakes which have minmimal prep time with longer cooking times, (and totally worth it!).

+ I'm not home to follow a 7-day mealplan, can your cookbook help me?

Sure, it can absolutely help you to eat well on a small budget. A good place to start is by choosing your favourite recipes to cook during the days you are home and simply shopping for those. Just knowing what you're going to eat each week will stop those late trips to the local store, (and from ordering expensive take-aways), and you'll no longer have to play the 'what's for dinner?' game - freeing up more time each evening!

There's also plenty of recipes that you can cook and store in the fridge for a couple of days or freeze for later. It's important to note that if you follow the principles and tips throughout the cookbook you will more than likely reduce your weekly spend whilst enjoying a variety of delcious meals.

+ What's the social giving the plan?

We're thrilled to tell you we've managed to convince our publisher to get on board with a fantastic buy one give one model! This means that for every print book you buy during the first print run - we'll gift a digital edition to someone living on a low-income and facing food poverty. So tell your friends and help us set-up someone for a lifetime of good food!

We're looking to distribute these digital cookbooks via a new partner, so if you know of one that would be keen to get involved please drop us a line.

+ Back to the food. We're talking meat though, right?

Yes, plenty of succulent meat dishes, and non-meat dishes too. We show you how to cut and cook meat to make it go further, and how to plan meals around one or two meats per week. There are recipes which use chicken, pork, beef, bacon and chorizo, (but not at the same time!).

+ I live in Europe can your cookbook help me? Also applies to the rest of the world

We're from the UK, and you're from .......somewhere else. Yes, it can help you, and thanks to the internet we can share our recipes and principles with a wide audience, digitally via Amazon. Whilst the ingredients may vary from country to country, the approach to shopping and cooking will remain the same. It's totally flexible, and with the Swappable Ingredients section, you can tweak our recipes to suit the availability of ingredients in your neighbourhood.

+ I don't eat meat / certain types of food

As above, the recipes can be tweaked to suit your dietary requirements. Lim was a vegetarian for 19 years and so tries to cater for you too. There are plenty of veggie recipes, and where possible we suggest how to adapt each recipe to make it meat free. There are no gluten/dairy free options yet, but if you shout loud enough it just might happen.

We've had tons of requests for a vegetarian cookbook too. Is this something you'd be interested in buying?

+ Do you provide price per portion?

This one baffles me. Per meal cost is a fairly useless measure for home budgeting as most ingredients will be used in more than one meal. To illustrate this point, let's imagine a recipe uses 3 ingredients.

1 tbsp Olive Oil

1 Chicken Thigh

1 Cup Rice

We could say the meal is going to cost 52p in total. That's amazing right?! (4p for the olive oil, 38p for the chicken and 10p for the rice). It sounds amazing, but in reality, to get this price, you have to buy 750ml Olive Oil at £2, a pack of 7 Chicken Thighs at £2.65, and 1 kilo of Rice for £40p.

So that's £5.05 total, for a 52p meal.

The point is that per meal prices are completely misleading. The trick is to move away from per meal cost and work with a weekly budget. (Do the mealplans sound interesting yet?)

+ Do you provide nutritional information

Generally, we adopt an 80:20 rule, where 80% of what we cook is healthy, nutritious and balanced, and the other 20%, well let's just say sometimes we need to eat a pizza, or a bowl of crispy roast potatoes. We haven't included specific nutritional information as this is a flexible guide and we encourage you to adapt the recipes. But if you are cooking a varied selection from this cookbook you should be on the right track.

+ How can I print the shopping lists?

Ah, excellent question. If you head to this link you can dowload each week's shopping list, and print or take it on your phone to the supermarket. Eventually we'd love to link these shopping lists directly to supermarkets so you can go shop online and have the ingredients delviered direct from your local superstore. Sneaky eh?

+ I have another question

Sure thing, always happy to hear from you and help when we can. Drop us a line at limahl@tinybudgetcooking.com and we'll get back to you as soon as we can.