What's your favourite, cheapest home-made meal?

I like to visit the local fruit market towards packing up time and buy the fruit that is in big bundles - things like 4 big mangos for £1, big bags of apples / pears / plums or whatever is in season. Bruised fruit is also good as you will cook it straight away.

Take it home, clean it, boil it up in a big pot until everything softens - sweeten to taste and this is great to freeze in batches for later and use either as a topping or as a dessert on its own. Full of fibre, vitamins and natural sugars.

I like to add Greek yogurt - having this as a biggish dessert means I only bother with a starter beforehand.

Iain said:

4 big mangos for £1

Gosh, wish I lived there. Mangoes are always expensive here.

Iain said:

4 big mangos for £1

Gosh, wish I lived there. Mangoes are always expensive here.

What an amazing looking plant!  I think in the uk eating healthily on a budget is a lot harder now - there are so few genuinely cheap foods in the supermarkets. I’m sure markets are cheaper but the local markets to me are not great.

I used to love going to the market around packing up time, there were so many bargains, like a sack of carrots for a pound, and boxes of mushrooms.

A lot of markets have closed down, pitches have becom really expensive, some councils have come under so much pressure form supermarkets threatening to pull out of town centres that the councils shut or limit the numbers of stalls, what they can sell and stuff like that. We used to have a good market here, every thursday and saturday and a friday one in Bangor, I don't think there they exist anymore on the island and the one in Bangor is a shadow of it's former self with only a very small Asian veg stall.

When I was in London there were lots of markets that had fruit & veg stands that did this sort of thing - especially for the end of day.

When I lived near Tower Bridge in London, Watney Market was my favourite - it had a big Bangladeshi population in the area and they got a lot of fruit from that region so when in season the mangoes from that region were hard to find elsewhere but were awesome. Not fiberous like normal mangoes but meltingly smooth and sweet.

Where I live now (Sao Paulo) there is a local fruit and veg market with (I kid you not) about 120 stalls selling such a range of stuff that I get to try new stuff every week even after being here for years.

Prices are in the broad range of £1 for a bowl of fruit, and less at the end of day or when the fruit is really in season.

My seasonal favourite is jaboticaba- looks lind of like a big blueberry but has a really tough skin with a creamy soft fleshy centre with a hard seed. You pop it in your mouth, pop it and suck out the insides and swallow it (not the skin though), stone and all (the stone is pea sized but quite attached to the flesh).

It grows straight from the trunk of the tree which is a bit odd.

The flavour is hard to describe - somewere between a lychee, grape and blueberry.