Day 58: Minimising Meat

In the past two months, and with the exception of the bacon bits (still on the same packet), I have cooked meat precisely three times.  The first was the bolognaise sauce I made from a pound of minced beef, a couple of portions of which are still in the freezer.  The second was the sausages I cooked for Friend Claire last week.  The third was a chicken pie cooked this evening.  Going past Lidl on the bus two days ago, I spotted that they had a special offer on chicken this weekend: two chopped chicken breasts for £1.49.  Turned into a pie with a load of mushrooms and some sweetcorn, and I've made 5 portions out of it.

As a young student I shared all my cooking with Friend Kim, who was a committed vegetarian.  Mostly we just ate the same thing, and the same thing was mostly the same thing: spaghetti with tomato sauce.  At least 3 times a week.  Sometimes I would ring the changes by adding a small tin of tuna.  Then, about twice a term, I would get cravings, usually for white fish or for bacon, and would cook up my own little feast.  I suspect that there was not quite enough iron or protein or something in my diet.  But despite such lapses, there is no doubt that living vegetarian saved me a tonne of money back then.

Being a farmer's daughter, I have never been tempted to go all the way down the vegetarian route.  Contemplating the conversation was just too painful: Sorry, Dad, but I reject your entire life's work as morally unsustainable.  Besides, while I respect those who make that decision, I don't think vegetarianism actually works logically: if I were convinced by the moral arguments, I would have to go entirely vegan.  My compromise has always been to try to by from local (i.e, Scottish)  producers, where the animal has at least had a good and fairly free-range life.  With beef, pork, and lamb, this isn't too difficult - I know firsthand how these are farmed in this country, and cows, pigs, and sheep all have a pretty nice life.  I also know that the regulations governing their treatment are very stringent.  Chicken is trickier though, I admit it, and the real free-range organic ones are horribly expensive, which puts them out of my reach no matter how much more ethical they are and how much nicer they taste.

Anyhow, necessity requires that whatever meat I buy will be in very small quantities, and will be made to go a long way.  The chicken pie whose recipe I have posted is one example of this.  But the truth is, it will be mainly vegetables for me.  Not so much for ethical reasons, but for sheer practicality.

Small savoy cabbages were on sale for 37p.  I bought one.


Total Expenditure: £12.15

Day 24: The Tyranny of the Use-By Date

My weeks are falling into a pattern.  I seem to be doing my main shopping on a Monday or Tuesday.  Therefore, at the beginning of the week, my fridge is delightfully full, and I have a free range as to what I cook and bake.

But then, by the following Sunday, things have become a little more constrained.  For the food which was purchased last week is now a week older, and so the imperative begins: the Food Which Must Be Eaten - now.

I read a magazine article once in which the writer bemoaned this tyranny.  Why must it be eaten? he asked.  Why must I obey my food?  Of all the things which demand our loyalty in this world, do we really have to do what our refrigerator tells us?

The short answer is Yes.  The Frugalist has no option.  The greatest sin of all is Waste.  And that is why the end of my weeks are taking on a regular pattern.  Sundays, I cook!

Accordingly, above this post, I am posting a number of recipes.  In particular, I had a pound of minced beef (bought for £1.50 in Lidl) sitting precisely on its Use-By date.  Of course, the great thing about cooking is that you thereby extend the expiry date by another three or four days, not to mention the freezing possibilities.  I also had some tomatoes going a little mushy, and a courgette going a little soft at one end.  Guess what I made!

The Return of the Cabbage

But I also have a confession.  Remember the savoy cabbage I bought in the first week?  Um ... well ... the thing is ... it is still there.  Or rather, one small wedge is still there.  And small though that wedge is, it packs a great deal of flavour, and it is a flavour that I do not particularly like.  I have been using it - honest!  But I just can't seem to get through it all.  And now it has gone limp, and is fit only for soup.  And I really don't want to eat it any more. 

I tell you, the cabbage is my nemesis.

Day 17: Flavours from the Near East

A couple of months ago now, I spent a working week in and round about Jerusalem.  It was an amazing week, an amazing city, and amazing land.  But I am not here to rhapsodise about that, although I certainly could.  I am here to rhapsodise about its food.

Everywhere we went, we ate pretty much the same thing: hummus, falafel, baba ghanoush, pitta breads, and all sorts of little dishes of this and that.  I lived on this stuff for a week,  and I never once got sick of it.  Even more importantly for present purposes, it was most wonderfully cheap. 

So what to do upon my return but try to recreate some of these dishes?  Hummus, for example.  It is ruinously expensive in the supermarkets - at least £1 for one little tub.  There has to be a cheaper way.

Now, I have actually made hummus before.  It was for a church social to which I had to bring along a savoury dish designed to feed four.  I followed a Jamie Oliver recipe that time, loading the required amount of dried chickpeas into my slow cooker and soaking them over night.

Disaster!  There must have been something wrong with the quantities listed, because the chickpeas swelled and overflowed (overflew??) my little slow cooker.  Twice.  The mass of them just kept swelling and growing and oozing across the kitchen counter like a monster from a 1950s horror movie.  I did finally succeed in cooking the chickpeas in a very large pot, after which I whizzed them (in about 10 batches) in the food processor, and then added the tahini, lemon juice, and garlic.  The result was unutterably bland.  At this point I knew for sure that the quantites were all messed up, and emptied an entire bottle of lemon juice into the mixture along with a full bulb of crushed garlic.  This resulted in a dish that was faintly flavoursome.  But it had to do.  Off to the church social I went with a portion that would have fed 12 hearty eaters, leaving at least the same proportion behind in my fridge.  It took me a fortnight to work my way through it.

This time I am hoping for a more limited success, but tahini is proving difficult to find, and so the hummus is on hold until I track some down.  However, I did turn an aubergine into baba ghanoush this evening.  Ideally it should contain tahini too, but the BBC recipe didn't list it.  It should have.  The end result was passable, but nothing like the wonderful delicacy I ate in Jerusalem - so I think I will have to keep experimenting there.  Once I perfect the recipe, I will post it.  I am also soaking a small quantity of chickpeas, with the aim of trying my hand tomorrow at falafel.

In terms of cost, I spent a half hour in Tesco's recently, darting excitedly around their World Foods aisle.  For this is what I discovered:

That there are in this world people like me who dabble in a little Indian or Middle Eastern cooking here and there.  They can pick up a Tesco's own 500g bag of dried chick peas for 78p.  But if you actually are Indian or Middle Eastern, then chances are that a wee 500g bag of chick peas isn't going to take you very far.  So Tesco has introduced in its World Foods aisle a whopping great 2kg bag of chickpeas for only £2.39.  That is a saving of 73p!  Granted, it will probably keep me in falafels for an entire year, but that's okay.  What's more, the World Food aisle also has massive bags of spices, such as a 400g bag of paprika for only £1.69.  You would have to buy 8 jars of Tescos own paprika to equal that, at a total cost of £5.52.  I am not sure that I would ever use such a quantity of paprika, but it might be worth sharing out among friends, for example.  Because I resent these wee jars! 

So anyway, there's my frugal tip for the day: check out Tesco's World Food aisle.  And maybe other World Food aisles in other supermarkets.  While chickpeas take over my kitchen.

Total Expenditure: £12.21 (on enough food to last me for a fortnight or, in the case of the chickpeas, for a year.)

Day 2: Birthday!

NB: I didn't have internet access last night, so I wrote this then, and am posting today.

It's my birthday!

I may start to make this a frugal principle, that where possible, celebrations should be doubled up.  Just as my graduation meal counted as a birthday celebration for my family, so my birthday today has been combined with a little housewarming for the new flat.  Three for the price of two - in other words, a bargain!

In the event, I just invited round a couple of friends for some frugal food.  Not very festive, perhaps, but homely and welcoming nevertheless.  So this morning, armed with Delia's "Thick Winter Soup" recipe, I set out to explore the shops of my new environment.  And made the most amazing discovery.

LIDL!

Quite seriously, why doesn't everyone shop here?  I managed to buy a savoy cabbage, sunflower spread, 4 organic onions, one courgette, a tube of tomato puree, and a whole 1lb of "bacon misshapes" for £3.97.  The only things they didn't have were a leek and some haricot beans.  I tracked down a leek in Tesco's, where they only had huge ones for sale and it cost me a painful £1.04.  But no haricot beans.  I thought of getting in the car and heading for a large supermarket, but then decided that that would rather defeat the object of the exercise.  But I did have some pearl barley in the cupboard ...

So here is a soup-come-stew of my own invention, which owes as much to my mother's farmhouse cooking as it does to Delia.  I actually halved Delia's quantities in her similar recipe, which was meant to serve 6-8, and it still served 6-8.  That means I now have 4 portions of soup in my freezer for future lunches. All this - 8 meals! - for a total of around £1.50.  Now that is frugal :)

And even if I say so myself, it turned out totally fabulous.   Guests thought so too.  No choking down of cabbage required.

Thick Vegetable Soup  (serves 6-8)

100g pearl barley

1 large carrot

1 medium courgette

1/4 small savoy cabbage

1 small leek

1 medium onion

50g bacon bits

3 pints vegetable stock (I made it with Marigold Organic Vegetable Bouillon)

Method

This can all be made in a slow cooker, if you have one.  Otherwise, on a very low and long heat.

1) Wash the pearl barley and put in pot with half the stock.  Cover, and allow to simmer very gently for around one and a half hours.

2) Grate 1/2 the carrot and roughly chop the rest.  (Grating the veg is my mother's old trick for thickening soup.  It works best if you hand-grate it, as it squishes the vegetable more than a food processor does.)
3) Grate the courgette, chop the onion, and shred the cabbage.  Chop any cabbage stalk very finely.  Cut the leek into rings, using right to the dry ends.  (It's soup, after all!)

4) Finely cube the bacon.

5) Add all the vegetables and bacon to the soup, and top up with the rest of the stock.  (You can fry off the bacon first, if you want, but it isn't really necessary, and used another pot.)  Cover and simmer for at least another hour, and even longer if wanted.

6) A Delia trick now!  Take out about 3-4 ladlefuls of soup, making sure you include plenty of barley.  Now blend this portion with a hand held blender, and return to the soup.  This thickens things up considerably!

I served this with some quick girdle scones, which I made as my guests were arriving and chatting.

Girdle Scones   Serves 3-4

1 cup plain flour

1/2 tsp bicarb of soda

1/4 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

milk to mix

Mix together the dry ingredients.  Pour in a very little milk and mix to a soft, but not sticky dough (I used my hand to do the mixing).  You should be able to knead this a little.  

Heat an oiled heavy frying pan or girdle (griddle) to hot.

With a floured rolling pin, roll out onto a floured surface to make a round of about 2cm thick.  Place on the frying pan and cook for around 4 minutes on either side.  

Remove from the heat and slice into 3 or 4 triangles.  Serve hot with butter.

Day's Expenditure

Food shopping: £6.57

Travel: £6.40

Total = £12.97