A savvy mum has explained how she keeps costs down in the kitchen - and says her family meals only cost 57p per portion.
Lorna Cooper, 46, from Paisley, uses a meal hamper to prepare a range of hearty meals for two adults and two children on a tight budget.
Altogether, she cooks 25 dishes over five weeks - adding up to 100 meals in total.
Lorna purchased a Musclefood Value Hamper for £59 - which contains a total of 7.3kg of meat, such as beef mince, beef steak, pork sausages and chicken breasts.
Musclefood says this hamper can produce 66 meals - but Lorna used ingredients such as lentils, beans and vegetables to help bulk up the dishes, meaning she used less meat each time.
The meals included two lasagnes, which cost a total of £5.20, two cottage pies which cost a total of £4.58 and a sausage chilli which came to £4.80.
The Musclefood meat packages are available for £45 and £59 with a £1 delivery charge. The £45 hamper has 5.2kg of meat to make 44 meals.
We assess how the hamper compares with buying meat at mainstream supermarkets below - and there are ways to make even cheaper meals.
Lorna began finding ways to eat well for less when a back injury forced her to stop working.
She began experimenting with how to make the food shops go even further and has now amassed over 500,000 followers on her Facebook group named Feed Your Family.
Lorna said: “Good meat doesn’t need too much added flavour and the quality of the meats in Musclefood’s Value Hamper is incredible value for money.
“I often find that supermarket bought meats shrink a lot in size when cooked and they let off a lot of water - two signs that the meat is heavily processed.
“The meats from the value hamper were a great size and didn’t shrink at all when cooked - the chicken and sausages in particular were huge.
“So much bigger than the packs you can buy from shops.“
Lorna shares her tips and tricks on Facebook to help other families make their money and meals stretch further.
This includes free weekly meal plans for around £20 a week which she shares with her audience.
Lorna is also an author with her book Feed Your Family for £20 a Week becoming a best-seller.
The key to making the hamper stretch further, she said, is to bulk up dishes with things like vegetables, lentils and even oats.
When cooking up her cottage pie, Lorna added in porridge oats to thicken up the dish, meaning she was able to make the minced meat go even further.
“Adding oats to a dish is actually an old trick from our ancestors. It thickens up the meal and anyone who eats it will hardly tell the difference between the oats and the meat because they’re cooked together” said Lorna.
She added: “Another way to bulk up a meal is to actually cut the meat up. Bulk up a typical pasta dish by chopping up a few sausages.
“No one is going to know exactly how much is in there, visually it will look like a lot more has been added.
“It’s the same with chicken, I personally like to shred this and once it’s done, it looks like there’s so much of it. It’s perfect for using as a bulky sandwich filler!"
Lorna’s other top tips include batch cooking to save both time and the cost of utilities, as well as filling up the freezer to prevent food going off and to make the most of its running costs.
How does the cost of the hamper compare to supermarket meat prices?
The Mirror compared the price of the Musclefood hamper to the price of meat bought at regular supermarkets.
While there are no hamper options at mainstream grocery retailers, we added up the individual prices of the various meat products that come with the Musclefood hamper.
During the calculations, we kept the ratio of different meats as similar as possible to that of the hamper.
If you purchased the meats individually at other supermarkets, it will work out cheaper.
While the hamper includes 7.3kg of meat for £59, at Aldi, 7.46kg of similar meat products come to £38. At Asda, 7.39kg costs £45.
