Anniversary dinner for under £10!

I am a member of the Collective Bias® Social Fabric® Community. This shop has been compensated as part of a social shopper insights study for Collective Bias and their client.

Last week my husband and I celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary. I was challenged by the Collective Bias team to cook a meal for £10. This was made more difficult by the fact that my daughter broke our oven last Tuesday so we are oven-less for the foreseeable future. Also added into the equation was the fact that I'd had my wisdom teeth taken out four days before, so the meal needed to be soft!

I looked online for recipes but couldn't find exactly the right one, so I adapted one. Some of the ingredients were already in my fridge, so luckily I only needed to buy the following from ASDA:

Salmon £3.50

Strawberries £2.00

Olive oil £2.00

Orange chocolate £1.00

Mange Tout and Sugarsnaps £1.00

Sweet potato £0.68

Total: £10.18

Sorry, over budget by 18p! If I hadn't needed olive oil then I would have been under budget! To see the Google+ album of what I bought, click here.

I melted the orange chocolate and got the children to help me cover the strawberries. I got them to take their tops off because I knew this would be incredibly messy! They had a blast covering the strawberries and eating chocolate at the same time. The whole punnet of strawberries disappeared incredibly quickly!

Next I mixed together 1 teaspoon of garlic, 1 tablespoon of ginger, two tablespoons of soy sauce, one tablespoon of olive oil and one tablespoon of honey. Then I drizzled it on the salmon and left it in the fridge to marinate for an hour.

Next I peeled the sweet potato and chopped it up and then put it on the hob to boil. I knew this would take around thirty minutes. I washed and prepared the mange tout and sugar snaps and left them in a pan in water but didn't turn them on yet.

Ten minutes later I popped the George Foreman grill on and let it warm up for five minutes. Then I put the heat on the sugarsnaps and brought them to the boil. I popped both salmon fillets on to the George Foreman grill and shut the lid. I turned them once after about four minutes and they were ready in eight minutes.

Whilst they were cooking I mashed the sweet potato and added a tablespoon of parsley, a tablespoon of creme fraiche and one teaspoon of chopped garlic and mixed it all together.

Then dinner was served. We ate with the children because I was going out that night to a 40th birthday party. I have to admit that the meal was delicious. The sweet potato mash was really yummy and I wouldn't have thought of putting garlic in the mash before.

The children shared the chocolate covered strawberries. My husband had chosen orange flavoured chocolate and it made an interesting mix. I have never seen my daughter eat so many strawberries!