Some good recipes, and the meal plans are very helpful for those needing to save money and stick to a budget.

An excellent collection of recipes for all, good money saving ideas

This was a fun little cookbook. I've read a lot of budget cookbooks - being a student and all - this one really impressed me. I didn't however, get the chance to try any of the recipes yet but they seem solid.

A really great book with a few excellent touches - I particular liked the substitute ingredient ideas, which are great if you are on a budget. Overall a good addition for any cook making healthy meals with less money.

Great for those of us who are bored of the same bland food associated with being on a budget.

As a student, create tasty meals on a budget can be incredibly difficult. However, with this I now have a few ideas that I can spread across the week. I like the fact that the book is spread out over a week so that you have five different recipes for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Thus meaning that I can interchange what I would like to cook. This has fuelled my passion for cooking even further whilst allowing my to stick to a tight budget!

This is a good recipe book. The book has simple, delicious looking recipes. A weekly meal plan and a shopping list. Easy to follow, easy to use. The setup is somewhat messy but not so much that it's a problem. The other downside is that for myself and possibly others the weekly meal plan would almost double my shopping budget.

Loved this book. great ideas. everyone loves anything to do on a budget so i think this book will be a huge hit.

The premise of this book is to empower readers to cook nutritious, simple food within a budget. That is very laudible and so I was interested in receiving a preview sample copy. In the sample I read there was a meal plan for a week and the food looked both delicious and simple to prepare, so far so good. Helpfully there is a shopping list which enables one to buy the ingredients needed to create that week's menus and this is further split so that time poor individuals like myself who don't have 30 mins in a morning to prepare a cooked breakfast but are quite happy with porridge or muesli can leave out the breakfast ingredients. This is where the premise breaks down...the shopping list is long and having just done a rough estimate I know that I would at least double my weekly food spend to fulfil it. So great food but wouldn't save me money!

I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. It contains the introduction and the first week of recipes, so unfortunately will be a limited review.

From what I had access to, I can say that this looks like an excellent book I would recommend to almost anyone who's somewhat new to cooking or living away from parents, but especially those on a limited budget.

I've checked out a few "student" cookbooks and budget recipes and they nearly always contain super expensive ingredients, hard to source ingredients, terrible recipes, or lack photos. Tiny Budget Cooking does none of those things.

Asmall begins with laying out a little groundwork. The aim of his book is to provide affordable recipes with a variety of flavours to ward off boredom, with a balance of healthy meals and the occasional treat. He states that the issues preventing many from cooking great meals each day are "money, time, confidence, and knowledge", which seems pretty accurate, and this book does manage to tackle each one of those aspects.

The Tiny Budget Tips section is invaluable, giving the reader some basic knowledge that many people aren't aware of. Things like comparing the price per kg to get the best deals, and pointing out that oftentimes the cheaper own brands are identical to the premium brands in all but packaging and price. These are really important things to learn when you're on a budget, or even if you'd just like to save a bit of money for extra treats.

Following this are four weekly mealplans. The sample contained only the first week, but it looked excellent. It began with the menu for the week, including recipes for all three meals, pointing out where lunches could be made from last night's leftovers. Then Asmall gives us a shopping list for the whole week, with quantities for two people, and a separate section for breakfast in case you don't want to cook and would rather eat cereal or something. I took one look at the list and scoffed--just the meat section included bacon, beef mince, chicken, smoked mackerel, and sausages, far more meat than I've ever been able to eat on any budget! This wasn't budget cooking! Grr!

I headed to the Asda online shopping section to check just how much this well-rounded and filling shopping list would cost, and I was floored ... I was totally wrong. Asmall's list came to just under £40, and I suspect he specified the ingredients based on Asda's stock knowing this. £20 per person per week is a pretty reasonable budget (although breakfast and non-food items would increase this cost), particularly considering the first week contains some initial outlays like spice purchasing, bulk lentils, potatoes, onions, etc that he will apparently use in later weeks, and many of which will last forever in your cupboard. For those on even tighter budgets, they might try purchasing many of the items at Aldi or Lidl, who generally sell pretty reasonable basic products and produce (it's their ready made food you might want to avoid).

The only issue that I see with this shopping list is that it would be hard to cut it in half for one person and maintain the budget aspect. You'd probably end up only making half the recipes in a week and eating them two days running, but there isn't much one can do about that. Being poor and living alone is pretty sucky.

Anyway, onto the recipes! There's a great variety of them here in the first week. Creamy sausage, mushroom, and spinach spaghetti, sweet potato breakfast hash, meatball marinara, and spiced cauliflower soup are just a few of the options.

Each is accompanied by a fabulous colour photograph that makes even the things I personally wouldn't like look delicious. The recipes are clearly written, attractively laid out, the best of all they're flexible. Asmall includes ingredients you could swap out in many cases, for instance allowing you to transform "honey-glazed beef noodles with green beans" into whatever meat you like with rice noodles, peppers and carrots, with oyster sauce. This is great for people who don't like a particular vegetable, for example, or for after you've worked your way through the month's worth of meals in the book and would like to shake it up (you would have to create your own shopping list for those).

Later sections of the book include "Big Batch Basics", an essential skill for the budget chef, and "Quick Breakfasts and Desserts". I can't speak to the content of those, but if they're produced with the same care as the rest of the book, I would be excited to read them.

I imagine by the time a nervous cook has made their way through this book, they'd be set up to continue on their own, knowing the costs of various ingredients, and a variety of techniques they might not otherwise have heard of but can experiment with. Potato hash, for instance is super cheap, simple to cook, filling, and endlessly variable. Asmall obviously put a lot of thought and work into this, and has clearly experienced being on an actual budget. If you're on a budget too, I think this would help.