Bit of a lapse from grace to report. Two restaurant meals in the past 48 hours. Maybe it's the realisation we're due back in England next week and will no longer be able to sit in the sun pretending it's June.Neither meal was wantonly extravagant. The first was at what is basically a seafood caff called Chez Loulou which serves some of the most brilliantly fresh shellfish and fish I've ever eaten. The second was at a restaurant that overlooks the oyster beds at Bouzigues.I'm not going to tell you the name because it's a mercifully Brit-free zone which is becoming increasingly rare in this part...
Friday, 29 February 2008
Tuesday, 26 February 2008
All-in-one roast veggies
What would you do with a kilo of pigs' liver? No, don't answer that - I'm not sure I'm up to it but it's so cheap in our local French supermarket at the moment - 2 euros (£1.50) a kilo - that I feel I should be.As it was I wimped out and bought a coil of Toulouse sausage for just over 5 euros (£4) plus a whole load of veg to make one of my favourite recipes, a tray of roast veggies.It's an infinitely flexible dish that you can vary depending on what you have available. The French, as I've noted before, don't do root veg in a big way so I had to make it with out of season Mediterranean veg which...
Monday, 25 February 2008
Two vegetable minestrone
Today is one of those rare days when the weather is worse in France than it is in England. It's simply chucking it down. Cue soup for lunch.A quick raid on the fridge reveals some outer leek leaves I'd felt moved to save for an occasion like this, some celery (with a lot of leaves which is good) and some chopped serrano ham (like bacon bits or lardons). That looked a bit insubstantial so I also unearthed a large tin of flageolet beans thinking I could use half for the soup and half with tonight's supper of leftover roast lamb.I simply fried the serrano ham in olive oil for a few minutes (could...
Sunday, 24 February 2008
Cheap steak
I posted on steak a couple of days ago but Blogger wiped the lot for some unfathomable reason when I pressed the Publish button and I was so cross it's taken a full couple of days to resume.Anyway, to start again, people think that steak is expensive but it needn't be if you use cheaper cuts. Here in France we have bavette, onglet and aiguillette. Back home there's minute steak and skirt (if you ask the butcher). All should be cut thinly so you really don't need that much (250-300g will easily serve 2)A favourite French recipe is bavette aux echalotes (skirt with shallots) which could equally...
Thursday, 21 February 2008
Open House!
I was going to write about low fat dairy (doesn't that phrase sound too depressing?) but happily a reader, Bob, came up with the following excellent idea:"Are you going to have a place for folks to make suggestions for your book? I've got a couple good ideas that have worked well for us."This sounds a lot more fun than my reluctant efforts at weight reduction - though low fat dairy is frugal, believe me. It's so dull that you don't want much of it . . .Anyway over to you, Bob, and anyone else who'd like to share their thoughts . ....
Tuesday, 19 February 2008
Delia's got a point
Much coverage in the papers over the last few days on Delia's new book 'How to Cheat at Cooking' a collection of recipes based on time-saving products.Now you might think that would make the recipes costlier than cooking them from scratch but that isn't inevitably so as I explain on my website www.beyondbakedbeans.com today.Last night was a case in point. Rooting around in the cupboards (it was a No Food Shopping Day) I found a jar of puttanesca sauce - not difficult to make, admittedly, but costly if you don't have olives, capers and anchovies already to hand.The trouble with ready made products...
Monday, 18 February 2008
Human Hoover Syndrome
Bad news from the scales. I have not only failed to lose the weight I put on over Christmas, I have acquired a couple of kilos more. Which makes me about four and a half kilos overweight in total.Where did it all come from? All too obvious, when you start to think about it. Bread, cheese and wine - the three things I love most to eat and drink.Working on any cookery book tends to pile on the pounds but acquiring a frugal mindset is even worse. You convince yourself that no ingredient must be wasted so you find a home for it. Human hoover syndrome . . .This is a dilemma I'm going to have to get...
Friday, 15 February 2008
The myth about 'cooking wine'
One of the things we're never short of in this household is leftover wine. Not because we're a couple of old soaks or, as the Government would have it, pernicious 'middle class wine drinkers' but because when I'm not writing about frugal cooking I'm writing about wine.This puts me, I know, in an enviably better position to reach for a bottle mid-recipe than most households, but - more importantly - reach for a drinkable bottle. There's a general idea that you can chuck in any old wine but it isn't so. On the 'rubbish in, rubbish out' principle if you add a wine that's been open for a fortnight...
A frugal fish stock
One of the interesting things about tracking the visitors to your blog (through the relatively easy to understand Google Analytics) is that you discover what they're looking for when they stumble upon you. Which this week included the intriguing phrase 'frugal fish stock'.I would have thought fish stock was by definition frugal. It's also really quite tricky and messy to make unless you're in the habit of hoarding fish heads. Let your liquid bubble away too fast or for too long and you get a rather unpleasant cloudy stock which tastes of glue. (Not that I'm in the habit of tasting - or smelling...
Wednesday, 13 February 2008
Life is too short to stuff a mussel
To paraphrase Shirley Conran . . . Last night I abandoned frugal cooking for the evening and bought in one of my favourite local dishes from the traiteur (basically an upmarket French takeaway which supplies home cooked dishes)Stuffed mussels are a bit of a delicacy here in the Languedoc - an odd surf'n'turf combination of giant mussels stuffed with minced pork served with a garlicky tomato sauce. They taste a bit like a faintly fishy meatball - nicer than it sounds to those to whom it doesn't sound that appealing.I justified it on the grounds that they weren't outrageously expensive - just over...
The French Paradox
Most of you will, I guess, be familiar with the French Paradox: the strange situation where the French have a lower rate of heart disease than the rest of the western world while knocking back vast quantities of wine, cheese, charcuterie and other foods rich in saturated fats.I must say it surprises me. The classic French diet is veggie lite as we're discovering to our cost. A typical day's eating is baguette for breakfast, some kind of meat for lunch, rarely served with veg other than as a superfluous garnish and a couple of oeufs a la plat (fried eggs with yet more baguette) or occasionally...
Monday, 11 February 2008
Lidl-land
Thwarted in our desire to support our local shops by the fact that they all seem close on a Monday afternoon (and at lunchtime, of course) we headed off to the recently opened local Lidl.Lidls and Nettos are popping up all over the place in the south of France. Hopefully they won't take business from the local shops but the dreary Intermarché and Hyper U.As in the UK, the Lidl experience was a strange mixture of the gross and the really quite interesting. Some pretty horrible cheap meat. A wide and well-priced range of cheese. Some astonishingly cheap Earl Grey tea at .89€ (66p) a pack, some even...
Sunday, 10 February 2008
Croutons and crostini
Bread is central to our life here in France. Like the French we buy it every day which means endless bits to use up. The village baker makes really great sourdough baguettes* which I slice at the end of the day and put in the freezer. When I have a big batch I make croutons or crostini.The difference between the two is that crostini - bases for patés or spreads - need to be crunchy whereas croutons need to be baked hard, especially if they're going in a soup. Otherwise you get soggy bits of bread floating around. So the croutons are best baked plain and unadorned (at about 180°C/Gas 4 for 15-20...
Friday, 8 February 2008
Chicken stock rules!
Any of you who have been in a professional kitchen will know that most chefs have a pan of stock or demi-glace sauce on hand to deglaze their pans. Well, you can do the same just as effectively with chicken stock.The carcass of the chicken I bought a couple of days ago has made the most fabulously rich, jellied stock which I was saving for a soup or risotto. But the Toulouse sausages I was frying for lunch today produced such great stuck-on pan juices I had to prise them off somehow* and the stock was conveniently at hand. Two or three ladlefuls and I had some really intense rich pan juices that...
Thursday, 7 February 2008
When not to follow a recipe
One of the things I've been thinking about a lot lately is how important recipes are. Or rather aren't. Basically they're a set of guidelines. Too often we take them as gospel.Certainly I did when I first learnt to cook. Unless you're shown how to cook you tend to take instructions literally. If a recipe says 2 large eggs and you only have medium eggs you go out and buy some. If it says a pinch of cayenne and you only have chilli powder or hot paprika you don't know you can use those perfectly well.Frugal cooking is about making use of what you've got rather than continually buying new ingredients,...
Wednesday, 6 February 2008
A crisp, healthy winter salad
Yesterday's shopping trip wasn't wildly exciting but yielded some good bargains. 2 kilos of oranges (11 in total) for €1.99 (£1.48), a kilo of endive or chicory for €1.39 (£1.04) and a huge bunch of fresh flat leaf parsley for 78p. That'll last all week.I don't know why chicory is so much cheaper in France. You'd be lucky to get two heads in England for the price I paid. We'll bake some tonight with the 'Label Rouge' chicken we bought (also reasonable value at €6.53 or £4.86) and probably have some tomorrow wrapped in ham topped with cheese sauce but today I used two to make a simple salad together...
Tuesday, 5 February 2008
How much do sell-by dates matter?
I've done a lot of chucking out in the last 24 hours. Three pieces of cheese from mother-in-law's fridge, one from my own.A couple of them were well over the hill (oldies are hopeless about sell-by dates) but mine, a piece of Comté that officially expired on the 28th of January didn't look too bad. I remember when I was a child my mum would have simply cut away the mould and cheerfully served up the rest but if I advised you to do that the health police would be down on me like a ton of bricks. So out it went.What I should of course have done before going away was grate it and freeze it then...
Monday, 4 February 2008
Vive la frugalité!
Like many Brits these days we split our time between England and France. We have elderly mums in both countries both of whom like us to spend as much time as possible with them. This month it's my French-based mother-in-law's turn.So the frugal eating experiment moves to France. It'll be interesting to see how much cheaper it is. Unfortunately the exchange rate isn't too great at the moment but food generally costs less than in the UK.Vive la frugali...
Friday, 1 February 2008
The perils of brown food
One of the problems about using leftovers is that everything can end up looking sludgy. I fell into that trap last night with my pheasant and mushroom pilaf. Good though it tasted it looked unrelievedly brown.In my defence I should say that I deliberately didn't buy any fresh herbs which would have immediately made the dish look - and taste - more appealing. We're off to France on Monday and I'm trying to run the fridge stocks down instead of chucking away a bin bag full of unused food. Parsley would have done but coriander would have been better. And even a few finely chopped mint leavesOther...
Town vs country
Yesterday I bought a pheasant. It cost £5 which isn't bad if you compare the cost with a free-range chicken but I hesitated because it feels to me like a luxury ingredient.That's very much an urban point of view. If I was living in a country village then I might well have been able to get a brace for that price or, indeed have traded something I'd grown or produced for a free bird from a neighbour. Game is cheap in the country. If I was thinking of making a curry on the other hand I would probably pay far more for my ingredients than I would in a large city. So you can't be absolute about which...
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