With heating prices, national insurance and food prices on the rise, many families are finding it difficult to budget while keeping their loved ones warm and fed.
But, while many of us are reevaluating how and where we shop, one mum has revealed how she manages to create entire meals for free, by foraging for ingredients along with her three-year-old daughter.
Eszter Balogh says she first started foraging as a child with her family and has continued the tradition with her daughter, Dora.
The 33-year-old works as a professional photographer and in her spare time she loves foraging for ingredients and cooking for her family. During spring and summer, she is often able to make entire meals for free for her family, including husband Thomas, 35.
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"We've made loads of things, most recent some pine needle shortbread with pine needles we foraged. Another one is a mushroom burger made from Maitake mushrooms, with three cornered leek and elderberry glaze," Eszter, from Oxford, said.
"We also made nettle and raspberry pancakes, which Dora loved because they were so colourful. I'm a photographer so I pride myself on how good the food looks."
Thanks to her wonderful ingredients and photography skills, Eszter manages to capture stunning photos of her creations, which look more like 5* restaurant meals than home-cooked recipes with free ingredients.
She tends to go foraging once a week for around four hours, and mainly collects mushrooms on her trips out.
She said: "Recently I've been getting things like oyster mushrooms, crow garlic, and leeks. I especially love using wild garlic in my cooking.
"I use the ingredients to make things like salads as well as jams and preserves. They're all my own recipes, some of them I've adapted from other people to incorporate my own foraged ingredients."
She revealed that her daughter, Dora, particularly loves foraging and cooking together.
Eszter said: "She loves coming out with me, so I always try and take her when I'm going foraging. She loves to help me cook with what we've found as well.
"She's still at the stage where she's copying everything I do in the kitchen. I think it's very important that we teach children how special nature is, and they learn so much by experiencing nature themselves."
While many people find the concept of foraging rather unusual, the mum-of-one revealed that she gets fantastic reactions from friends about her foraging.
She said: "They all think it's amazing, especially when I've been able to feed my family for free. I've had lots of people get in touch saying they want me to teach them how, because of course foraging can be dangerous if you don't know what you're doing.
"There are lots of poisonous mushrooms in the UK, and you need to be able to identify them all."
Eszter says that she has been foraging for decades after first being introduced to it while living in Ukraine.
She added: I've been going out foraging ever since I was little when my grandparents would take me. I stopped for a while as a teenager, when I had other things going on, but now I've got back into it so I can teach my daughter, Dora.
"I think it's so important to teach children about nature and to respectful."
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