Best budget recipes for 50% or less: Sam’s perfect oven chips. Best homemade oven chips recipe
Danny has cut our potato bill from around £4 a week to 80p a week. Our cold dark barn is the perfect place to store spuds. He was horrified when he discovered how much that we were spending on potatoes. The price rose steeply last winter. The past warmer winters meant that most UK spuds were susceptible to blight – harvests were small and prices shot up. Since then he has been looking out for marked down spuds in the supermarkets. Generally he finds them for 40p for 2.5 kilos. They are hung in the dark barn in thick Hessian...
read moreSuperb food from great blogs: Chef at Large – Sid’s Meat and Oatmeal Stew
I found some Tesco Finest British 28 day matured beef rump steak at the weekend. It was half price in the condemned food counter. I was shopping with Seraphina and she goggled when I filled my basket with loads of root vegetables to pad it out and make a stew. However this didn’t really appeal when I returned home. The good thing about root vegetables is if they are stored at a low temperature they keep very well. Our lean to barn is perfect. So I hung the bags of vegetables in the barn as I’d decided to cook something completely...
read moreBest great budget recipes for 50% or less: Crispy fried sprats recipe
When I lived in London I often ordered whitebait as a starter. I thought that they had to be deep fried and would be a palaver to rustle up at home. Also I rarely found them in the shops. Eventually I discovered that they can be fried in a little oil and were fun to prepare shaken in a bag of seasoned flour. Danny sprang in through the front door brandishing a 450g bag of sprats last week. Reduced from £2.49 to just 36p. I have never tried sprats. It’s the sort of dish that I imagined Peggotty’s family would sit down to in their converted...
read moreGuest Spot: Sam Raithatha’s veggie lasagna recipe (without pasta!)
Do you remember that I wrote about Sam’s. The best fast food takeaway in Newmarket and maybe all of Britain (back at the end of November?) Sam’s spotless wagon serves only organic food and feeds the hundreds of tradesmen and a lot of other discerning visitors that just drive into Ridgeon’s car park to scoff his food. He also runs Queen’s the event company. Well it turns out that he’s also an enthusiastic vegetarian chef. I just had to have a ‘Sam fix’ yesterday lunchtime. Luckily I needed to buy paint so motored over to...
read moreDelicious budget meals for frugal yet scrumptious entertaining: Chicken and Romano Pepper Risotto
We have done very little entertaining over the past eighteen months. The major reason why we’ve slowed down is cost, and time. When I seriously thought about why we were not entertaining, I twigged that I was hung up on the cost rather than the time and the taste of the food. It’s taken all these months to realise there’s no need to spend a fortune or take a day off to cook. We eat well most nights. Why not open our door and share? You can entertain on a budget as long as the food is delicious. And there’s the rub. Entertaining on...
read moreHow to make the best chicken stock in your slow cooker
I’d written my post for tonight. Budget, delicious chicken risotto for 62p per portion when I realised that the main ingredient – the chicken stock hadn’t been blogged. A horse without the cart is no good for anyone who is travelling in foodie country. So here’s the cart. This stock works with cooked chicken bones or a fresh carcass. The latter makes better stock, I think. If you remember to remove the chicken when it is cooked (1-1.5 hours depending on size) you will have perfectly poached chicken to add to a multitude of other...
read moreBest great budget recipes for 50% or less: Che’s suggestion for great char grilled sirloin steaks recipe
This is the end of the first month of our 2009 challenge – Best great budget recipes for 50% or less. Danny has become an addict of the condemned food counter at Tesco. He drops by most evenings when he does the final post run in Newmarket. The clientele that are attracted to this mini mecca have gradually changed over the past few months. “There were a very smart couple picking through the shelves this evening. There wasn’t much left. The man turned to me and announced, ‘The wolves have already been.’ He clearly didn’t ...
read moreHalf roast chicken with a lemon, saffron and cream sauce recipe
“How about a poussin tonight, marinaded in lemon, thyme and olive oil?” D was enthusiastic. “That would be wonderful and quick to cook. It’s not really a proper roast is it?” Danny has been great about our “no Sunday roast for January” challenge and this seemed like a good compromise for the final Sunday. That was before I went shopping. The poussin were so miniscule that it took me a good ten minutes to spot them on the Tesco shelves. And they were £2.79 for a 450g bird (£6.20 a kilo). The Tesco Finest Corn-Fed Free Range...
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