What we eat in a week | Day 1 - Monday 17th October 2022 - Tomato & bean cassoulet, fish, hasselback potatoes and salad.

If you follow my YouTube channel you may already know that I've decided to start a new series on there called 'What we eat in a week' where I'll document the food we eat through the week as a homesteading family. We are a family of 4 during the week and we have an additional 3 to feed on some weekends, the majority of what we cook though is for 4 adult portions (though they are children or 'pre-teens', they have the same portion as us adults these days) 

On YouTube you find a round up of each week uploaded at the end of each week, here on the blog though you will find a combination of day by day posts or posts that combine 2 or 3 days with an end of the week round up. 

The idea of this series is to share with you the sorts of meals we eat as a family and also to document it for us to be able to look back on and see how things change with our tastes, cooking habits and financially. I'm sure most if not all of you are aware that the UK at the moment is going through a financial crisis and things are getting tougher day by day with rising costs. Not just of food but energy and everything else. This means that we are looking at ways we can reduce our outgoings in all areas. What we eat is one of the few things we have a little control over and so we are going to try and eat healthily, whilst on a budget and enjoying the food too. The aim is for us to grow as much of the core staples in our diet as possible and build meals around those fruits, vegetables and salads if we can. 

It will likely be that i only document the main family meal, the one we have in the evening. Sometimes i might also document the kids packed lunches or the lunch I take to work but the focus will be on our family meal. Where I can I will attempt to calculate the cost too. We meal plan on a Sunday for the week ahead, meal planning is important for us so we can keep on track and ensure we are using what we have rather than buying in goods and letting other items go to waste. 

Alongside documenting this all on my YouTube channel I'm going to try and also document it here. 

Day 1 - Monday 17th October 2022 
Tomato & bean cassoulet, fish, hasselback potatoes and salad. 

We made a tomato & bean mix, something we refer to as cassoulet, to use as a base for the white fish which we served with potatoes and salad. We call these potatoes 'hasselback' however I'm not sure if that is a widely used term or not. Essentially we slice them, spritz with oil and sprinkle with herbs before putting in the over or air fryer. 

Unfortunately the lettuce and cucumbers we were growing in the garden have now all been used up, so the salad is mainly purchased, apart from the radish which we did grow ourselves. 

Tomato & bean cassoulet, fish, hasselback potatoes and salad. 
In this dish we used:

Tomatoes (Homegrown) | Free

Onions x 2  | 20p 

Tin of cannellini beans | 60p 

Passata | 40p 

(I've calculated the above as the cost of all the ingredients, however this made 8 servings. 4 of which we used in this dish and 4 which will be used on Wednesday when we use the leftover sauce as a base for another dish ) 

4 x White fish fillets | £2.28

10 small / medium potatoes | 40p 
1/2 Iceberg lettuce | 29p 

3 Radish (homegrown) | Free

1 Pepper | 23p 

1/4 Cucumber | 16p 
+ seasonings and homegrown dried herbs. 

£4.56 total cost

£1.14 per person cost 
This will also leave us with the tomato sauce base for Wednesdays meal which will of course reduce costs for Wednesday. 

The fish in this dish is what brings the cost up, there may well be alternatives out there cheaper, this is just what we had available in the freezer at the time. We all enjoyed the meal and I would say it is quite healthy too.