I couldn't cook when I left home – but these easy £2.50 recipes became my go-to
Mia Jones, a former university student who initially lacked cooking skills, learned to prepare affordable meals to reduce her weekly food expenses. By switching from ready-made meals to simple recipes costing under £2.50 each, she saved approximately £20 per week and improved her energy levels. She now shares these budget-friendly recipes online to help other students manage their finances and nutrition.
- ▪Mia Jones reduced her weekly grocery bill by £20 after learning to cook from scratch instead of buying ready meals.
- ▪The featured recipes require a starter store cupboard costing under £13, with each additional meal costing less than £2.50.
- ▪Ingredient prices were calculated using average pre-promotion data from major UK supermarkets including Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda, and Morrisons.
- ▪Other students, such as physiotherapy student Jayda Otuo-Mensah, also adopted cooking to ensure healthy and cost-effective meals during their studies.
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| Original publisher | BBC News — Business |
| Canonical URL | https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgjqgjn3n2wo?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=rss |
| Publication time | Mon, 21 Sep 2026 23:41:20 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-21T23:43:51.481Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-21T23:43:51.481Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
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| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
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| Cluster | dJFJlYez9zOf · 1 stories |
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| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
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| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
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I couldn't cook when I left home – but these easy £2.50 recipes became my go-toImage source, Mia JonesImage caption, Mia says she saved £20 a week on her grocery shop when she started cooking from scratchByEmily DoughtyPublished2 minutes agoWhen Mia Jones left her home in Anglesey to go to university in London, she couldn't cook "whatsoever" - but quickly realised this had to change."I couldn't live off pasta for the rest of my life," she says - and all the ready meals and pot noodles were starting to add up."I'd be spending £45 a week on food," says the 22-year-old. "That wasn't viable."So she started buying fresh ingredients. "Then I realised, 'Oh, I need to learn how to cook now'." She started following social media videos for tips and recipes, swapping out foods she didn't like.
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