Another meal for under £2 - Butternut Squash Soup and Chick Pea Bread

This is another cheap recipe that I posted on the Netmums thread, with the challenge of making a meal for under £2 for 4 people. The prices are from mysupermarket.co.uk and are accurate at time of pressing 'publish'. I used Sainsbury's as my example since the items ended up cheapest there.

• 100g of dried chick peas, soaked and mashed (19p)
• 250mls water
• 2 tbsp mild curry paste (I used 2 tsp tikka masala powder)
• 3 tsp black onion seeds (I used 3 tbsps because I read this wrong) 
• 1 tsp coriander seeds (which I omitted)
• 1 tsp cumin seeds (for which I used powdered cumin)
• 1.5 tsp salt
• 425g white flour (17p)
• 2 tsp sugar
• 1 sachet fast action yeast (8p)

• 1 pint whole milk (from a 6 pint bottle - 29p)
• 1 butternut squash (£1.10)
• Half a garlic bulb (12p, Basics)
• Vegetable stock cube (1p, Basics)
• Water
• Onion (17.1p)

This ends up costing £2.13. I'm allowing myself the 13p because the Onion might not be that big and the yeast is cheaper if you use a can of the Allinson stuff from Tesco and use a teaspoon and a half instead. You could cut it down even more by using other sweet veg for the soup - like parsnips, or a swede.

Many of you may remember the above recipe from an earlier post. The only difference is the state of the chick-peas, so to speak. In the previous recipe write-up, I used canned and to be honest, I think canned make a nicer bread. They just cost a lot, lot more. Anyway, to make, I throw the bread ingredients in the bread machine on the white loaf setting. While that's cooking, I boil the squash, onion and whole cloves of garlic in the milk and water with the stock cube. When the squash is soft, blend the lot.

With 4 people, you end up eating the whole loaf of bread, and to be honest, we usually use about half a pack of butter on it too... :S If you can show restraint with your spreading, or sub the squash for a cheaper veg then this comes in on cost.