On the last day of the experiment I couldn’t decide what I wanted to make. I found some mackerel at about £5.40 per kilo. This seemed cheap for fish, so I thought I should include it in the experiment, but I eventually succumbed to my craving for pancakes.

I bought the mackerel anyway and decided to do an extra student recipe with it the following night. It had been years since I had eaten it and I could barely remember what it tasted like. There were a few recipes with mackerel and various citrus fruits on the web, so in the end I tried out mackerel and orange fishcakes.

Yes, I know it sounds strange, but it works - trust me! I would do it again. Sharp flavours go well with mackerel. Only a little orange juice and rind should go into the fishcakes so that the orange doesn’t dominate. If you have curry powder around, a little of this can go in too.

I accompanied the fishcakes with rice tossed with chopped coriander, which a lot of Indian shops sell very cheaply. I had peas too, but spinach would probably have been better. The ingredients for 6 fishcakes came to £3.14. That is anough for 3 normal meals or 2 huge ones. The breakdown of the cost is as follows.

£2.60 for mackerel
£0.20 for 300g potato.
£0.09 for half an orange.
£0.05 on curry powder
£0.14 on an egg
£0.06 on 3 slices bread.
Rice will be about 7p per person and frozen spinach would be about 11p. So that makes it £1.23 for a normal portion or £1.74 if you are really hungry. The eggs and bread were leftovers anyway! The full recipe is here.

Now I have had enough of all this cheapness! What am I going to do with all the money I saved? Probably go to Borough Market and buy Ostrich!