People ask me what cooking for one actually costs when you plan it properly. So I put a real week together from the recipes on the site, one shop on Monday, and costed it the way the planner does. Seven dinners came to about £16.
How much does a week of dinners for one cost?
This one comes to about £16.25 for seven dinners, roughly £2.30 each. That’s at typical UK supermarket prices, so treat it as a guide: your shop and your week will move it a bit either way.
Fresh food is counted in whole packs, because that’s what you pay for at the till. Dry goods, cheese and spices are counted as the share the week uses. I’ve assumed the basics are already in the cupboard: salt, pepper, oil, flour, sugar, chilli flakes, cumin and paprika. If you’re starting from an empty cupboard, the first shop costs more, because you buy the whole bag of lentils and the whole jar of caraway.
The week
- Monday: Hungarian beef goulash (£5.70). The dear one, so it goes first while the steak is freshest.
- Tuesday: Egyptian koshari (90p). Lentils, rice and pasta, and it opens the tin of tomatoes.
- Wednesday: Vegetable stew (£1). More of the tin, half the courgette and half a red pepper.
- Thursday: Boerewors with pap and chakalaka (£3). Finishes the tomatoes. Good pork sausages work if you can’t find boerewors.
- Friday: Cacio e pepe (70p). A cupboard night: pasta, pecorino, butter and pepper.
- Saturday: Cajun sausage and pepper traybake (£2.10). Opens the sausages.
- Sunday: Polish sausage and sauerkraut skillet (£1.80). Finishes them.
What goes on the shopping list?
Here’s the shop, as the planner lists it for this week:
- Meat: 230g beef rump steak, 5 pork sausages, 150g boerewors (or 2 more pork sausages)
- Veg: 2 red peppers, 1 other pepper, 1 courgette, 3 onions, 1 red onion, 2 potatoes, 1 carrot, 3 cloves of garlic
- Chilled: 40g pecorino, butter
- Tins and jars: a 400g tin of chopped tomatoes, 150g sauerkraut, baked beans, beef stock, tomato purée, Dijon mustard, red wine vinegar
- Dry: 100g spaghetti, 50g brown lentils, 50g rice, 30g small pasta, 60g quick-cook polenta
- Spices: sweet paprika, Cajun seasoning, caraway seeds, curry powder, mixed herbs
How do you make one shop last seven dinners?
You let the packs decide the week. The tin of tomatoes goes 150g into the koshari, 150g into the stew and the last 100g into the chakalaka, all inside three days, so none of it sits in the fridge going fizzy. The two red peppers are shared across the goulash, the stew and the chakalaka. Five sausages make two dinners. Onions turn up in nearly everything, half at a time.
The order matters too. The steak goes first, the tin is opened and finished midweek, and the cupboard night sits on Friday in case you end up out. At the end of the week there’s half a courgette and half a red pepper left: an omelette, or the start of next week.
That’s the whole idea behind Solo Supper: every recipe is written for one, and every one ends with “Use up the rest”, the dinners that finish what it leaves over. You can build a week like this by hand from those. Pro can do it for you, picking dinners that share their packs.
Make it yours
The button below puts these seven dinners straight into the planner with the shopping list made. Swap any you don’t fancy and the list changes with it. If you don’t eat meat, the budget dinners and vegetarian dinners for one are good places to start a different week.
Neil