Under $8: How I’m saving money with retro dinners

This is part one of a two-part series on the money-saving family-friendly recipes that are saving both the food budget and the food ‘battles’ in Nicole’s household. Cheap, delicious and nutritious meals that both kids and adults enjoy.

When my partner and his kids visit, I have another five hungry mouths to feed. I would rather live on chocolate but containing the price of both my naughty and their nourishing food as the cost of living soars has become quite a challenge. So here I share my guaranteed dinner successes in terms of cost and – for fussy kids as well as adults – consumption.

Also by Nicole Pedersen-McKinnon:

• $456 a month: The loan that will slash your mortgage repayment

• Savings apps and hacks: How to slash costs with cash back

• 5.5% savings rate: Where to find the highest interest in 11 years

And for the first appetising instalment, step back in time with me to the 1970s and my Mum’s old, original Women’s Weekly Cookbook.

Cheap-as-chips tuna mornay

You may well have forgotten the cheesy, tuna-y tastiness of this retro winter warmer. While the cost-of-living squeeze means the price of most proteins are high right now, you can make a huge baking dish of the protein-laden classic with a mega-sized tin of the fish that costs just $5.

You basically simply drain, flake and toss the tuna with cooked pasta through a traditional white sauce. You need a proper recipe for the sauce, otherwise it can go horribly wrong.

The Women’s Weekly eight-step recipe version, doubled, evolved and updated to our taste, is:

1. In a saucepan on medium-low, melt 120 grams of butter.

2. The official recipe, at this stage, says to add and saute an onion, a green capsicum and 125 grams of mushrooms (all finely chopped). Or just leave out the – “Eww, what are they? Some are green!” – bits. So, back to the sauce we go…

3. Off the heat, slowly tip in 2/3 of a cup of plain flour (or rice flour if you’re gluten free, as are three of our regular customers) while stirring vigorously. Put the saucepan back on the medium-low element and keep the wooden-spoon pace up for two more minutes. You want it to bubble, without burning, and thicken noticeably.

4. To make this into the hero of the dish, now on low heat but still stirring, gradually add six cups of milk. That first cup needs to be added really slowly and stirred with gusto. You’ll need to relax and mix here for maybe 10 minutes, until the sauce starts to boil and thicken.

5. The Women’s Weekly recipe then calls for a teaspoon of dry mustard with your family’s favoured amount of salt and pepper. Just whisk in the same bottled Dijon, hot or seeded mustard.

6. The final sauce step is 250 grams of cheddar or whatever (that you have grated yourself to save money). Massage through until it melts.

7. Along with the 425-gram mega tin of tuna, this amount of sauce works with 500 grams of your pasta preference. Fold it all together and then tip into a big, greased baking dish. If you follow the official instructions and melt an extra 20 grams of butter in the microwave, toss through 1.5 cups of soft (possibly gluten-free) breadcrumbs and then spread that atop your cheap tuna triumph, the kids will be in heaven.

8. “Bake in a moderate oven for 25 minutes or until the casserole is well heated and the breadcrumbs browned,” the cooking bible finishes.

How cheap is the tuna triumph? This week, I bought all but tuna (that $5 deal was from Woolworth) from Aldi. The amounts and expense were:

$5.00: 425g tin of tuna

$0.99: 500gs of pasta shells

$2.70: 250gs of a 1kg cheese block

$1.73: 140gs of butter

$0.50: 2/3 of a cup of plain flour

$2.16: 6 cups of milk

$0.50: 2tsp of Dijon mustard

$0.10: Salt and pepper

$1.15: 8 slices white bread

Which means the total cost came in at $14.83. Given that my incarnation generally serves the six of us twice, that’s $7.42 for a crowd-favourite, filling meal.

And that means I can afford that bit of chocolate.

In part two of this two-part series on the family-friendly meals saving the budget and the food ‘battles’ in Nicole’s household, she shares her cut-price, quirky Carbonara recipe… under $8 and popular with under-8s.

Nicole Pedersen-McKinnon is the author of How to Get Mortgage-Free Like Me, available at www.nicolessmartmoney.com. Follow Nicole on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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