Could this be October's BEST budget meal?

Soup in a pumpkin

 I was feeling rather guilty that on two occassions in the past week, we had resorted to eating out unplanned! A combination of severe backache, some difficult days homeschooling and various other factors had conspired against me cooking, so I knew I had to find a way of getting the food budget back on track...meet the virtually zero cost meal we made.

Take a pumpkin (grown from the seed of a previous years pumpkin we grew). Cost: £0

Make a yummy scrummy pumpkin soup. I used abel & cole's recipe for 'Soup in a pumpkin'. Look under the letter P in their recipe section (we tweaked the recipe to use only a splash of cider and more stock instead to make it more family friendly). The few additional ingredients needed were store cupboard ingredients and would not have cost very much.

Now if I had been organised enough, I could have added a few ingredients into the breadmaker and made our own bread to go with it, but instead bought a baguette from the supermarket to eat with it.

What better to enjoy on a cold autumn day in late October than a warming seasonal soup that fed the whole family and cost next to nothing.

Now what to do with the rest of this years bumper crop?