In today's Bite: Eating well on a budget

Roast chicken thighs and zucchini with orange salad. Photo / Bite magazine

Find all your favourite bits from today's Bite magazine online. Follow the hyperlinks in Jo Elwin's editor's letter and lose yourself in bite.co.nz.

Efficiencies are well rewarded in the Bite kitchen. The boss loves them because they help the company budget and we love them because they help with our food budgets at home too. Who doesn't feel good when they've made a chicken go five meals (yes, five might be pushing it at bit) or incorporated a couple of leftover sausages from the weekend's barbecue into a midweek salad?

My favourite are dinner dishes that impress but cost very little per head thanks to the garden bounty and in-store specials that week. You can find recipes to help with such efficiencies on bite.co.nz this week. They are the sort of recipes that students and flatties or any cook that has to keep a careful eye on the budget will thank you for.

From left: Sausage pie, vegetable curry and self-saucing chocolate pudding. Photos / Bite magazine

Be sure to share Geoff Scott's recipes for sausage pie, super easy vegetable curry and microwave chocolate self-saucing pudding with them.

Megan May's raw, vegetarian summer lasagna may not fall in to the budget category but once you have some of those basics it is made up of on in-season veg that should be well-priced. It is Allyson Gofton's olive cake that is top of my to-cook list. So easy and efficiencies can be applied by using up leftover ends of cheese and wine. You could leave out the prosciutto and almonds, but only if you need to. I recommend you splash out and then make it go five meals.

But first, Ray McVinnie has a very tasty chicken salad for dinner tonight.

From left: Raw summer lasagna and Allyson Gofton's olive cake. Photo / Bite magazine

Also in Bite this week:

• Sid and Zoya Sahrawat make fish burgers

• Peter Gordon cures fish

• Louise Thompson has a glass half full