Welcome to my take on the Delhaize food challenge. This article hosts a fancy menu on a budget and is sponsored by Delhaize. You will find the recipes to the 3-course menu in this article.

Delhaize

Delhaize is collaborating with people who blog about food. I managed to become one of the people in Luxembourg who can participate in this project. Therefore I am very happy to present to you articles and recipes that are sponsored by Delhaize Luxembourg.

On a monthly basis, Delhaize hands out a food challenge, specifying the general outline of what has to be done this particular month. This could be the ingredients, a theme or similar things. But also the budget or which brand to use (e.g. the house brand).

Unlike many other companies, I like how they freshen up their brand (It was founded in 1867!) by participating in current trends. Collaborating with bloggers is one thing, but they also have a great client magazine. This magazine, of course, is marketing material, but the information you can gather there, about products in general and Delhaize products in particular, is amazing. What’s even better is that they have great and interesting recipes as a part of the magazine, too. The quality of those free recipes is much higher than in many dedicated food magazines. There you have plenty of advertisements, too, and on top of that, you pay for regular magazines.

Delhaize Food Challenge

Please note that this series of articles has been published in collaboration with Delhaize. They sponsored almost the entire stock of ingredients used in my recipes. They set up a challenge every month, outlining a few guidelines. For the June 2016 challenge, the given theme was “Summer“. Furthermore, they ask to mainly use products of their home brand and set a budget. In this case, I had a maximum of EUR 25,– and I’m free to use this amount freely within the guidelines.

How to Plan a Menu on a Budget

When I received the guidelines for the June challenge I wanted to do something big and fancy to hit it off right away. A budget of 25 EUR isn’t that much if you want to be fancy. So I thought about it and quickly realised that I wanted to go ahead as I saw an interesting challenge for myself in this idea.

That’s how I ended up working on a fancy 3-course menu on a budget. Next, I decided that it should be not only fancy for me but also my fiancée. So I imagined a menu with a starter, a main dish and dessert, that you can do for date night and all you need is 25 EUR and a few basic items in your kitchen. Considering that a date night in a restaurant in Luxembourg easily goes beyond a limit of 12,5 EUR/person (well, you can, of course, get a pizza and a glass of water for that money), I thought this was a veritable challenge.

Keep in mind that when you work on a menu, you have to have several things present:

• you need to carefully plan every dish itself,
• find a way to link them in one way or another

and on top of those, you have to be chef, service and date at the same time, which means that:

• you have to make it easy and rely on mise en place.

To stay within the limits of your budget you can do three things:

1. use lots of vegetables and fruits for your menu,
2. use what’s in season and
3. use as little meat as possible.

Fancy Menu on a Budget

That’s exactly what I did! After having worked out a few ideas (and re-worked them several times), I had my menu on a budget written down on paper. Then I bought the ingredients at one of the Delhaize stores in Luxembourg. Have a look what I got for less than 25 EUR:

Groceries – Menu on a Budget

Enough about that. You’re probably (hopefully!) curious to see what my menu looks like. Here it is:

As a starter, I present my spicy melon tomato skewers:

Spicy melon tomato skewers

followed by the main course, a delicious salmon with summer vegetables and a cauliflower couscous:

Salmon with Summer vegetables and cauliflower couscous

and as finishing touches my dessert, a crunchy yoghurt with raspberries:

Crunchy yoghurt with raspberries

Aftermath

Some of the ingredients were gone by the time we finished the menu. As I carefully planned and made sure to only cook what I needed, I had no leftovers of the meal.

That being said, there’s still plenty of unused vegetables, fruits, yoghurt and cookies. Of course, they wouldn’t go to waste. You can re-make the dessert by swapping the raspberries with melon (wich you simply make a purée of) or you make a melon lassi with those ingredients. The remaining vegetables can be cut into pieces and pan-fried. Just season them and have a great and light lunch! Out of the carrots, you can make a delicious soup. The cookies that remain after the desserts with the melon are done, can be eaten as a snack in between or make an easy high-fiber breakfast.

As you see, with the allotted budget I wasn’t only able to have a fancy dinner with my fiancée, but also able to plan ahead plenty of great meals for the following days.

I really hope you enjoyed the recipes and found my tips useful. I would love to see your takes on my menu, including your thoughts about it!