Autumn is the perfect time to mix sweet and savoury with ripe fruits and vegetables. Get tips for what's good now and how to save on your food budget this season.

Seasonal goodies
Apart from the wide variety of English apples now coming onto the market, look out for English plums. You will find Victorias, Laxtons, Marjorie Seedlings, Czars and, of course, the delicious translucent greengages. Freshly harvested hazelnuts, or cobnuts, with their satiny shells and stiff pale green 'wings' offer a short-lived seasonal treat. Sweet and milky, they are excellent with English cheeses and new-season's apples. Blue cheeses are good in the autumn, and it is well worth trying some of the unfamiliar ones, as well as that old stand-by, Stilton. I have to say, my favourite supermarket cheese at the moment is Sainsbury's Taste the Difference Traditional Farmhouse Lancashire. It is creamy, sweet, nutty and ripe - the perfect cheese to accompany your finest red wines, in Tom's view.

Now that we are back to a month with an 'R', shellfish is back in season, especially native oysters of course. These are exquisite. And expensive. The mussel is a fraction of the price, yet adds a touch of luxury, even when cooking on a budget.
And on the subject of budgets, how to do it? How to manage on a fiver a day?

Budget cooking
Which are your favourite staples? Pasta? Rice? Potatoes? Try to buy in bulk, or when supermarkets sell products on promotion. For example, Sainsbury's were recently selling their own-label penne for 22p for 500g. That makes two meals for two people, allowing 125g a portion. If you like potatoes and you have a farmer's market nearby, or have access to one, you will almost certainly be able to negotiate to buy a sack of potatoes, which will be infinitely less expensive than buying 500g or 750g in a plastic box from the supermarket. And the stall-holder might even deliver to your door. Keep the potatoes in a cool dark place.

That just may not be practical advice if you live in a centrally heated flat. In which case think about rice. One year I had a 28kg sack of basmati rice on my landing. It looked a bit odd, but was well worth it! I cook vegetable curries at least once a week, and this provided an inexpensive source of the best rice.

Fruit and veg
Make the most of seasonal food. Chop fresh or poached fruit and mix with plain yoghurt and a little honey for fabulous desserts; in fact, whichever fruit is in season, prepare it this way. English plums and apples are just coming in, and then it will be time for Conference pears. Or you can heat the prepared fruit gently in a frying pan with a little butter and the juice of half an orange, pour on a tablespoon of rum or whatever (yes, I think you should allow yourself a favourite tipple too) and set it alight as you bring it to the table.

We often neglect our familiar vegetables, carrots, broccoli, cabbage, chard, in favour of the exotic baby corn, mangetout, and other miniature vegetables, or ready prepared vegetables. One pays for the preparation, miniaturisation and the vast distance much of this produce has travelled. Rather than just see them as an adjunct to our meat dishes, it is worth looking at carrots, celery, beetroot, cauliflower, broccoli, beans and all the other home-grown veggies as ingredients for warm, well-dressed salads, exquisite soups, both hot and cold, and delicious medleys to be cooked into curries, mixed with pasta, or used in risotto. A beetroot risotto is quite something, believe me, and one of our favourite summer soups is a smooth, mildly curried carrot soup, served chilled.

Cheap tips
If you are prepared to invest time rather than money in your ingredients, you can make delicious meals from the least expensive cuts of meat. Neck of lamb, belly pork, spare rib pork chops and shin of beef all require long, slow cooking, but yield succulent stews, which you can stretch by adding soaked pulses such as chick peas, black beans or cannellini beans, to make tagines, pork and baked beans or a spicy beef and black bean stew, Cuban-style.

Buy dried fruit, flour and oatmeal in bulk in health food stores where these products are sold loose, and you have the perfect breakfast, but also the ingredients for making fruit flapjacks, pancakes and tea breads.

Fish, on the whole has an expensive image, but some of the most nutritious fish is amongst the least expensive, such as sardine and mackerel. Sardines, scaled and gutted, bake in the oven very quickly, or you can flatten them out and grill them. Try flaking cooked sardines into cooked pasta, mixing with chopped fennel and topping with breadcrumbs, before baking under the grill for a few minutes to produce the classic Sicilian pasta con le sarde. Mackerel fillets, rubbed with a little mustard and sprinkled with breadcrumbs, grill in no time. And smoked mackerel is delicious too, with brown bread and a cucumber salad.

Above all, allow yourself the occasional bottle of wine. Tom says don't go for the cheapest, as that will give you a cheap headache. Look for promotions and bin-ends, and always pay just a little more than you think you can afford; the pleasure will far outweigh the minor extravagance.

September and October menu
Using seasonal ingredients, I have devised a versatile menu, offering dishes that can be stews, soups or salads, and which can be served in various combinations. All of them would be very good for a weekend lunch party. I would also serve a platter of British blue cheeses - Yorkshire Blue, Beenleigh, Harborn, Devon Blue, Lanarkshire Blue and Cashel Blue are just some from which to choose.

Tom's wine recommendations
Curry and shellfish both suggest fragrant wines, and Pinot Gris from Alsace is a good choice, as is its cousin Pinot Grigio from Italy. The Rulaender from Baden in southern Germany is the same grape, and this is an area producing soft, ripe, appealing wines. They would just as well accompany the vegetable stew and the chicken cobbler. For the same style of wine, you might also consider some of the English wine varietals, Ortega, Scheurebe and Muller-Thurgau in particular. Try them too with the blue cheeses.

If you are looking for a red wine, try a Chilean red, and look for Cabernet Sauvignon blended with Merlot or Cabernet Franc for a fresh liveliness. Or try a Spanish red or rose from Somontano, one of the newly famous wine growing regions, right in the foothills of the Pyrenees.