Meatballs and tagliatelle are, without a doubt, one of my favourite meals in the world ever!
This is another very easy recipe for a mid-week dinner. It’s really filling; the kids can help make the meatballs, and you can have dinner on the table in around 30 minutes.
The cost of buying ready-made meatballs and sauce is £4.30 (plus I never knew that you could buy meatball sauce; surely it’s just tomato sauce?).
Making your own meatballs and sauce from scratch will mean you know what goes into the food you eat.
Having checked the back of a meatball pack, I can see it contains Sodium Metabisulphite, which, according to Wikipedia, is used as a disinfectant, antioxidant and preservative agent – nice!
So, avoid the chemicals and make your own food, which tastes better and works out cheaper too.
Budget Recipe: Meatballs and Tagliatelle
£10 sign up bonus: Earn easy cash by watching videos, playing games, and entering surveys.
Get a £10 sign up bonus when you join today.
Join Swagbucks here >>
Ingredients
Meatballs
- 500g minced beef
- 100g breadcrumbs
- 1 egg
- 1tsp mixed herbs
- pinch of salt and pepper
- 1tbsp oil
Tomato Sauce
- 1 onion, diced
- 1 clove of garlic, sliced
- 1 tin of chopped tomatoes
- 1tsp sugar
- 1 vegetable stock cube, dissolved in 300ml hot water
- 1tsp paprika
- Serve with 400g tagliatelle and a little grated parmesan
Instructions
- For the meatballs, put all the ingredients (except the oil) into a bowl and mix together until well combined.
- Form into small golf balls. You will get about 12.
- Add the oil to a pan and, when hot, add the meatballs.
- Once the meatball's edges have browned, start to make the tomoto sauce (in the same pan) by adding the onions and garlic.
- When the onions have started to soften, add the remainder of the sauce ingredients.
- Cook on a medium heat for 20 minutes, cooking the tagliatelle about 10 minutes before the end.
Each week I will be adding another recipe from the top 20 list of cheaters food to the site. Sign up here for the recipes to land straight in your inbox, or tweet me if you make your own meal from scratch to @skintdad
- £18 million in Tesco Clubcard vouchers about to expire – use them or lose them! - 12 November 2024
- Free Santa letter workshop at The Entertainer - 12 November 2024
- Watch out for these common coupon scams to keep your wallet safe - 8 November 2024
LydiaGrace says
You are such a brilliant dad. Your girls are being taught to cook and eat fresh, healthy food, as well as learning strong family values, and of course, some top budgeting skills. I know that a lot of people give you well-deserved compliments on your writing and your recipes, but I just wanted to say a huge well done for being motivated, being positive, and for being a brilliant dad.
Ricky Willis says
Hi Lydia, Wow! You’ve brought a lump to my throat. This is such a nice thing to say and I really do mean that. My girls mean the world to me and everything you see here or read is aimed at one thing. And that is providing them with a better life. I would give my life for them and I just hope I can make a real success of this and give them the life they deserve.
Thank you so much for your heartfelt message.
– Ricky
Dad in Training says
I love meatballs – but I usually cheat. If you take some sausages and open them up you can use the sausage meat to make meatballs. They’re pre-seasoned and ready to go so make for a super quick meal with the advantage that sausages tend to be pretty cheap in any case. It’s my go-to recipe when I need something on the table FAST.
Kate @ Money Propeller says
I love meatballs too! I should try this recipe for this weekend.
furbysmum says
What I really like about your budget recipes is that they appear to be largely “normal” mainstream food,nutritionally well-balanced and healthy, that most of us would really enjoy eating. They look good as well so I look at them and think I could eat them with pleasure.Some of the austerity blogs I’ve checked out recently feature rather weird dishes and concoctions which may be cheap but don’t look very appetising or tempting. I would not enjoy eating some of their creations on a regular basis.Some of these bloggers appear to be aiming to eat as cheaply as possible,rather than eating well as economically as possible. Buying “cheap” is not the same as getting good value.Personally one of my objectives is always to buy decent food of any kind at the best prices so that we eat well as inexpensively as possible. Perhaps there are people who need to eat on a shoe- string ( or perhaps like Laurel and Hardy need to eat a shoe-string as well as an old boot – I’m referring to a scene in one of their films when they were so hungry they did try to eat an old leather boot!) but I personally think that trying to provide good,tasty food should be a budgetary priority as it is the basis of long-term good health as well as one of the great pleasures of life.I think one needs to think very carefully whether it is really sensible to push the provision of good food low down the budgetary list of priorities unless one is so desperate that there is no alternative.We all have the right to spend our money in different ways but,for instance,even if you don’t want to make good /enough food a priority for yourself you owe it to your children or other members of the family to feed them well.
Anyway, there’s some fresh mince in my fridge (bought yesterday at half-price from Waitrose,dare I say) and I shall now plan with pleasure to try one of your recipes. Meatballs?Chilli con carne?Shepherd’s pie? What shall it be? There’s also pork chops and a medium chicken all at half-price,from Waitrose again plus a big bag of fruit and vegetables from a cheap market stall.
Ricky Willis says
If you don’t have basic store cupboard ingredients then all recipes do get expensive as you’ve got to buy everything for the first time.
What we try and do is buy a store cupboard basic each time we shop. This way it spreads the cost.
A jar of paprika or mixed herbs lasts for absolutely ages, so it’s not the kind of thing you’d need to use week in, week out. Plus they are versatile and you could use them to flavour many different dishes.