A week's worth of meals for £35?

One of the many ways in which I find recipes is through a magazine published by the BBC called "Olive". It's like a less daunting version of "Good Food", and in fact the two publications share a lot of content.

A regular feature that they run is "7 meals for £35" and a couple of weeks ago we decided to test this claim - could you really get all that food for such a low price, and if we did, would it taste any good? We experimented with the July 2011 article.

Spicy salmon with tomato and mint salad

While it wasn't without fault, we rather liked the results. There's a good variety in there: some vegetarian, fish, chicken and meat; Thai, English, Italian. It even got me eating some dill, which some of you will know as my nemesis. (I may do an article on Russian cuisine at some point, which will contain recipes such as soup with dill, chicken kievs with dill, beef stroganoff with dill, blini with dill, salad with dill, chips with dill and sour cream with dill.) By judicious use of the contents of the freezer, we were able to supply most of the ingredients with some minor substitutions for £36.14 from a mainstream supermarket. It's not £35, but it's pretty damned good.

Some things that didn't go so well: it turns out that making ciabatta dough (from a mix, I'm not a baker) is a messy business. When both hands are covered in something that looks like half-dried Copydex and your dinner is stuck fast to the worktop it's tricky to do anything except stand and giggle. I did manage to extricate myself eventually, but not before it looked like I'd been doing Robert Englund's makeup in the kitchen.

I've also got a fridge full of half-used packs of herbs, a bin full of spinach that had gone off before I could cook it and some suitable guilt about the food miles of the out-of-season vegetables required. However, so successful was it that we've gone back to an old edition and done the same thing this week. Pictured in this article are two of the creations - spiced salmon with a tomato and mint salad (couscous added for purposes of filling bellies) and broccoli and goats cheese tart, which we served with new potatoes from the market.

Broccoli and goats cheese tart

My questions for you today - should I freeze the random herbs? How long will they last for? How can I make spinach last more than 3 days? How did that dough get behind the radio on the windowsill?