Yesterday My Other Half was on cooking duty. "Shall we have pizza?" he asked.Actually that wasn't a total cop-out. He always doctors them in such a way that they taste home-made. And how many of us have time to make pizza from scratch - apart from occasionally, at the weekend with kids and that's entertainment, not just meal preparation. I mean you can't start beating yourself up about pizza.He found a good bargain at our local Waitrose, not necessarily the best place to go for bargains - a giant Vegetable Fajita Pizza for £3.99 instead of £4.99. Maybe that was one innovation too far, even for...
Thursday, 31 January 2008
Wednesday, 30 January 2008
Who buys a pressure cooker these days?
The world and his wife, it seems. And I'm wondering whether I should too.Will I actually use it, however? I don't normally ask this kind of question where gadgets are concerned, just plunge in, use them every day for a month or so, leave them lying around for the rest of the year then pack them away. But in new frugal mode this sort of profligacy is out of order.My food writer colleagues on the forum I belong to are loud in their praises. Some of them have had their pressure cookers for 30 years. I probably would too if I hadn't taken against them as a child when the smell of cooking dog meat...
Tuesday, 29 January 2008
A Baldrick moment
Yesterday would have been a successful No Food Shopping Day if I hadn't had a Baldrick moment and succumbed to a few turnips to go with the leftover lamb. They weren't cheap either - £1.34 for three. I remember turnips going for pence. But they were good.I cut them into large cubes, melted a bit of butter and oil in a pan, added a pinch of one of my regular standbys, Marigold organic vegetable bouillon powder (powdered stock) and a couple of tablespoons of water, put a lid on the pan and virtually steamed them for about 12 minutes. Much better than boiling them. (Carrots are good done the same...
Monday, 28 January 2008
Can you be frugal and ethical?
Heated discussion over the lunchtable yesterday as to whether you can be frugal and ethical? I.e. if you're on the breadline you're not going to be fussy about whether your food comes from. It's been raised in connection with the Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall/Jamie Oliver chicken debate and I can see it applies here too.Most people who are on a truly frugal lifestyle have a budget to stick to and don't go buying organic shoulders of lamb, even if they use every bit of it. Point taken. If I'm serious about this book - and this blog - we'll have to spend a week on a genuinely tight budget. No eating...
Saturday, 26 January 2008
In praise of smoked haddock
Phew! I was so busy planning and shopping and cooking yesterday I didn't have time to post. A productive day, though.First, I managed to restrain my natural instinct to stock up as if it were Christmas when we have friends round. Or rather when the neighbours do. I'm just providing the main course. I decided what it should be in advance (slow roast shoulder of lamb) and stuck to it. A good buy - for organic meat - at £14.82. A similar sized leg of lamb would have been at least £10 more expensiveI also bought two large fillets of smoked haddock from the local fish shop (Fishworks) to experiment...
Friday, 25 January 2008
Cutting the cost of eating out
Tonight was supposed to be the first frugal meal of a well-planned weekend's eating but . . . er . . . it didn't quite work out that way. I worked flat out all day and didn't finish till 7. The temptation to go out was too great to resist.Feeling guilty I decided we should go somewhere reasonably cheap so we headed for the tapas bar down the road. We ordered five dishes* instead of our usual six and two glasses of wine in total rather than two each. Result a bill of £30 rather than the £40 we usually spend.It was actually pretty painless. I was thinking about other ways to cut the cost of eating...
Thursday, 24 January 2008
One up to 'im indoors!
Back from London to find my other half beaming smugly. "Our dinner tonight cost 73p" he said.He'd been to the organic butcher down the road and found ox liver selling at a knock-down price. Only it wasn't ox liver, according to the girl behind the counter but vastly superior calves' liver which they couldn't call calves' liver because it came from an animal four days too old to be called a calf.He found a cos lettuce (or rather Sweet Romaine, as they insist on calling them these days) in the fridge and made a green salad from it so that didn't cost anything out of today's budget.It took 5 minutes...
Wednesday, 23 January 2008
I manage a No Food Shopping Day
The main thing that stands in the way of my becoming a Frugal Cook is that I adore food shopping. Any excuse. And I'm incapable of coming away empty-handed.This obviously has to change and yesterday it did. We were out with friends last night and there was food in the cupboard and fridge so I didn't need to buy anything for lunch. We had spaghetti aglio, olio e peperoncino (a punchy spaghetti with oil, garlic and chillies) and a green salad.Later I managed to walk past our local food shops (we are lucky enough to have some at the end of the road) without dropping in. So I turned my back on some...
Monday, 21 January 2008
How to stop your soup looking sludgy
The problem with making soup from leftovers is that they invariably look murky. Yesterday's parsnips actually made a very good soup, along with some fried up onion, carrot and celery - and a generous sprinkling of cumin and coriander but it didn't look pretty. But you need to liquidise it to make it taste good.The answer, I think, is not to put too much green and red or green and orange into a soup which, as you'll remember from nursery school, makes brown. The proportions I used - 1 onion, 1 carrot and two sticks of celery - along with around 350g of cooked parsnip, I would guess (about 1 1/2...
Sunday, 20 January 2008
All about offal
"You will include lots of offal, won't you?" said my publisher. "You've got to use every part of the animal" "Hmmmm". I said, thinking of tongues, trotters and tripe, none of them great favourites. "I don't think people are that much into offal these days""But this book is called The Frugal Cook" "Tell you what" I said rashly. I'll go down the road and look in my local butcher. "If they sell them, I'll include them." Good news and bad news. They don't appear to sell tripe but they do sell trotters, hearts and tongues. And kidneys and liver, of course. I decided to postpone the tongue challenge...
Saturday, 19 January 2008
What - and who - is The Frugal Cook?
Welcome to The Frugal Cook! I guess there's a lot of us out there but the reason I'm blogging is to create a day-to-day (well, more or less) record of a book I've been commissioned to write by my publisher, Absolute Press (to be published in hardback in September 2008 at the amazingly frugal price of £12.99. More details to follow.)Frugal cooking may mean different things to you than it does to me. It's not just about cheap meals and ingredients, it's about making the maximum use of everything you buy. Not - for those of us who are meat-eaters - insisting solely on using the most expensive cuts...
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