Aldi £25 Weekly Meal Plan- Week 2

Welcome to a new year and a whole new budget meal plan! We're starting with a 4-week dinner meal plan full of easy family recipes that require few ingredients but deliver in the flavour department!

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This week's meal plan comes in at £23.65 ($29.29 USD) Most of this week's recipes are vegetarian, but I've added notes on how you can add some meat or plant protein in if you want to.

Cooking on a budget shouldn't mean boring tasteless meals or the same dinner over and over. My meal plans include easy pasta recipes, one-pot meals, and simple slow cooker classics. But the one thing they all have in common is that they are budget-friendly and keep the ingredient list to a minimum. Cheap meals can be exciting, full of bold flavour, and still be nutritious and easy to make.

Dinner is on me! For the next 4 weeks, while these meal plans roll out I'll be giving away a £25 Aldi gift card each week to help get dinner on your table! *See bottom of post for details.

For the next 4 weeks, you'll be able to make 5 easy, healthy, and delicious dinners that you can make on a budget of £25.

Here's what's included:

1. Meal plan with 5 costed recipes for the week.
2. Itemised shopping list so you can check off what you have, so you just get the ingredients you need and don't forget anything.
3. Prep guide with quick tips to get ahead and how to store and reheat leftovers.

As with all my previous meal plans, these are completely free and will always be free.

You may want to make all five recipes and have leftovers for lunches, or you may pick just a couple and add them to your weekly rotation. Either way, these recipes are designed to fit into your life and make budgeting easier.

Week 2 Recipes

Dinner 1- Smoky 5 bean chilli Recipe cost- £4.54 (easily makes 6 portions)

Hearty, comforting, and really healthy. This is a vegetarian chilli, but you can add in some chicken, beef, or Quorn mince if you want to. Just brown it before adding it to the chilli to make sure you get as much flavour as possible.

*This makes a big enough batch for you have leftovers for lunch or freeze for another day.

Dinner 2- One pot tomato mascarpone sauce Recipe cost £2.80

All you need is one pot and a few ingredients for this one. It's a 30-minute dream dinner. This is a one-pot pasta so do measure the liquid accurately. You can add in some grilled chicken to this pasta and also use frozen spinach as a quick shortcut.

Dinner 3- Homemade chicken nachos Recipe cost- £6.38

So, not the healthiest dinner I've ever served you on Savvy Bites, but sometimes January just makes you have a deep need for fajita spiced chicken nachos. Easy and quick to make, you definitely won't have to fight with the kids to eat these! These homemade nachos are definitely "Friday Night Food".

Dinner 4- Easy rice stuffed peppers Recipe cost- £4.65

As mentioned on the shopping list and the recipe notes- this week you can buy a big bag of wonky peppers to use in all the recipes. It works out much cheaper than buying the "pretty" ones. The only note is to try and avoid the packs with lots of green peppers and go for the ones that have mostly yellow, orange or red. They're much sweeter.

*Buy a bag of ready-made rice for these stuffed peppers or make some fresh using the bag of basmati from last week's meal plan.

Dinner 5- All in one sausage tray bake Recipe cost- £5.28

Use any kind of sausage in this easy recipe. I prefer a Cumberland but a red onion and pork would be a great choice too. You can use a bag of baby potatoes (this recipe is costed using them) or to shave off a few pence you can get a larger bag of Maris piper and bake them to have with the 5 bean chilli. Just be sure to cut them small enough that they roast along with the other vegetables.

How did you cost the recipes?

Each recipe has been costed individually so you can decide which dinners you want to make based on how much each one cost.

Each recipe has been calculated adding the costs of each ingredient used, in the amount used, rather than adding the full price of items purchased. Some argue that you can’t just buy 2 tablespoons of olive oil or soy sauce, so the recipe actually costs more to make.

The counterargument to that is that you don’t buy an entire bottle of oil or sauce every time you make a recipe, nor do I consider an ingredient “free” if I already have it in my cupboards and didn’t need to buy it for that recipe. Both methods have their caveats, but I find the method used here to be the most representative of the recipe’s true cost.

Pantry staples

This meal plan was designed to use the least amount of ingredients possible to keep costs down, but to use them in unique combinations. So, you'll see alot of the same ingredients over and over. This not only keeps costs low but reduces waste. Below are the ingredients that you will see repeated.

• olive oil 
• vegetable oil 
• salt
• pepper
• dried herbs and spices

How to get me to buy you dinner?

For the next 4 weeks, I'll be giving away a £25 Aldi gift card! 

How to enter

To enter this promotion, visit Instagram and do the following:

1. Follow Savvy Bites (@savvy.bites)  on Instagram; and

2. Like the post and tag at least one friend in the comments section of the Savvy Bites £25 Week One Instagram post advertising the prize draw.

One winner will be randomly selected using a computer process on 22/01/2023