Good food shouldn't cost a fortune.

Why this site exists

We started Budget Dinner Recipes because we kept hitting the same wall every other recipe site seemed to ignore: the price tag. Glossy cookbooks and food blogs are full of beautiful dishes that quietly assume you've got £40 to drop on Saturday night dinner. Most of us don't — certainly not five nights a week. And yet "budget" cooking online so often means the same beans-on-toast, jacket-potato playbook on repeat.

We thought there was room for something better: genuinely affordable cooking, drawn from every corner of the world, that doesn't compromise on flavour. A Malaysian laksa for under £1.50 a head. A Kenyan beef curry for £2 a serving. A Spanish ajo blanco for pennies. Turkish kebabs, Polish bigos, Caribbean callaloo, Japanese gohan — all on the same shelf as good old-fashioned bangers and mash.

How recipes get on the site

Budget Dinner Recipes is a public, community-led site. Most of what you see has been shared by home cooks like you — people who cooked something good, costed it against their own weekly shop, and thought others should have it too. We curate, format every submission consistently (ingredients listed in the order you'll use them, no pots wasted, method written for a tired parent at 6pm), and run the cost calculator over it. We cannot personally claim to have eaten every dish on the site — there are 366 of them and we are only one family — so we lean on you to share, like, and review the ones that work.

The cost-per-serving badge you see on every recipe is real, not a marketing flourish. It's calculated from a database of 331 live UK supermarket prices that we update as things change. When we say "£1.68 a serving", that's an actual estimate based on what the ingredients cost at Tesco, Asda or Iceland this month.

How to help. If you cook one of ours, drop a like or a review — that's how the recipes that actually work rise to the top. If you have a budget recipe of your own, share it. If something looks wrong (a price feels off, an instruction unclear), tell us; we read everything.

Who's behind it

Right now, the whole operation is run by Steven Tobin — founder, recipe developer, photographer, and chief washer-upper. The site is small but we're growing carefully, recipe by recipe, because we'd rather have 200 dishes you'll actually cook than 5,000 you'll never look at twice.

Family is at the heart of the kitchen here, in every sense. Recipes are tested at our own table; the rule of thumb is simple — if the kids ask for seconds, it goes on the site. If they push it around the plate, it doesn't.

What we believe

• Good food doesn't have to be expensive. Most of the world's best dishes were invented by people working with what they had, not what they wished they had.
• Recipes are for cooking, not collecting. The best recipe is the one that gets made again and again — not the one that sits unscrolled in a saved-for-later folder.
• Honesty about cost. If a recipe needs three jars of saffron and a sea bream the size of a small car, we'll tell you. We'd rather you skip a recipe than be surprised at the till.
• Cooking together matters. A meal made from scratch and eaten around a table is one of the cheapest, most reliable bits of joy available to any household. We just want to make that easier.

How we keep the lights on

The site is funded by Amazon affiliate links — when you click an ingredient and buy it on Amazon, we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. That's it. No paid placements, no sponsored recipes, no "this section brought to you by..." We pick recipes because they're good, never because someone paid us to feature them. There's a full affiliate disclosure if you want the details.

Get in touch

Got a recipe you'd love to see, a question, or feedback? Drop us a line. We read everything.