Being slightly out of the loop over in France the latest round of supermarket price cuts had passed me by so thanks to regular contributor career misfit for dropping me a line to point them out.At one level it's obviously good news that the big four are reacting to the low prices being charged by Lidl and Aldi but canny shoppers will need to be careful. In my experience what supermarkets offer with one hand (usually at the expense of their suppliers) they take with another so for every bargain you spot watch out for a price rise. As I pointed out recently it wasn't so long ago that Tesco, to take...
Monday, 30 June 2008
Thursday, 26 June 2008
Mineral vs tap water
I know anyone frugally-minded would opt for tap over mineral water but I do have 'issues', as they say, with tap water. Common sense tells you that however much you process and filter it it must have picked up a fair amount of baggage on the way to your glass, most worryingly traces of prescription drugs. But the cynicism of British retailers and restaurants when it comes to exploiting this unease is just breathtaking. Today we stopped twice en route to France, once at an English service station, once at a French one. At the English one they were selling 75cl sports bottles of Evian for £1.99...
Wednesday, 25 June 2008
Toast water: the new green tea?
I’ve just been experimenting with what must be the most frugal drink of all: toast water which is, exactly as described, water infused with a slice of toast. It’s actually rather nicer than it sounds - it has a faint caramelly flavour which I think I’d want to accentuate by infusing two slices of toast in the recommended amount of water but that would obviously be rather less thrifty. I found out about it from my son Will's business partner Huw Gott who masterminds the menus at their four bars and restaurants which include Hawksmoor, The Marquess Tavern and Green and Red (quick opportunity for...
Monday, 23 June 2008
Three cheers for chipolatas!
Frantically trying to finish the book before I go away so just a quick tip. Buy chipolatas instead of standard-sized sausages and buy them loose so you can calculate exactly how many you need.Last week, on the infamous Waitrose expedition I'm still trying to justify, I bought four decent-sized lamb and herb chipolatas for £1.22 which we had with couscous forked through with stir-fried grated courgette and a green salad. They weren't particularly nice with that unpleasant flavour of dried mint but that's another issue. (Far better to stick to plain ones)For some reason you feel that you're getting...
Saturday, 21 June 2008
A gorgeous cheese
When it comes to frugal eating cheese is my achilles heel. I already mentioned I'd gone a bit mad in Waitrose this week. Now I've bought a whole cheese in the Whiteladies Road farmers' market.The thing is this. The cheesemaker, who was there in person, was selling these big beautiful goats cheeses off for £5 each because he had too many of them. You can see from the picture above it had some pretty scary mould on it which would put a lot of people off. But if cheesaholics like me don't buy them there's a danger that small cheesemakers like him will go out of business.We had some for lunch (along...
Thursday, 19 June 2008
Spiced mackerel in cider
Since I've finished the recipe sections of the book I have the luxury of delving into my cookery books to decide what to cook. I was looking for some ideas of what to do with yesterday's mackerel haul and came up with this recipe from Rick Stein's Taste of the Sea which was first published in 1995 - 13 years ago!I didn’t have any pickling spice so just substituted a few ingredients from the storecupboard and it worked out fine. Not hugely popular with my other half though who wasn't terribly taken with the idea of cold fish.Stein remarks how cheap the recipe is but I suppose had the luxury of...
Wednesday, 18 June 2008
You can put stuff back . . .
Strayed temporarily from the path of righteousness by visiting Waitrose this afternoon, not a store I would normally look for bargains but my neighbour had told me they were selling packs of frozen mackerel fillets for £4.99 which sounded a good deal. Needless to say it wasn't the only thing I bought . . .On the credit side I picked up a couple of pork chops for tonight's supper for just £2.12 and a fresh fruit salad reduced from £3.36 to £1.39, enough for two meals. On the debit side I couldn't resist two gorgeous cheeses including an interesting Cornish Brie I hadn't seen before which came to...
Tuesday, 17 June 2008
Four days eating from one chicken
Our local butcher was selling organic chickens at half price at the end of last week so we’ve had a real chicken fest over the weekend. I bought a 2.2kg (roughly 4 3/4 lb) bird for just £7.82 instead of £15.64 which has so far yielded a generous 10 servings. And there’s still some superb stock left for a soup. On Friday I roasted it with garlic and herbs and served it with a salad and broad beans in parsley sauceOn Saturday we had a salad of chicken, asparagus and crispy bacon with tarragon mayo.On Sunday I stripped the carcass and made stock with it. I used the remaining meat, along with some...
Monday, 16 June 2008
Viva la frugalista!
Goodness, it’s getting so hip to be frugal. You could hardly open a paper over the weekend without getting a pageful of budgeting advice. The Guardian and Observer are running a pull-out series on How to Save Money (which mentioned Beyond Baked Beans). The Times Cook Jill Dupleix offered some cheap fish recipes in the Sunday Times (delicious, but not that cheap. The recipes came in at roughly a tenner for four which isn’t frugal in my book) And the Indy ran a big feature on the new ‘frugalistas’ which inevitably included celebs wittering on about how fabulous it is growing vegetables and rearing...
Friday, 13 June 2008
Why skin broad beans?
Broad beans (fava beans in the US), in season right now, are one of my favourite vegetables. They're also one of the most wasteful since chefs collectively decided that we must not only pod them but skin them. It's true that the greyish, wrinkly skin doesn't look particularly attractive. But it's tasty and not too tough unless you're dealing with the last beans of the season. True, too, that the tiny jewel-like emerald green beans inside are prettier in salads and dishes like risotto. But there are many dishes such as the rustic one below, from my book Meat and Two Veg, where they're absolutely...
Wednesday, 11 June 2008
Half price but how good a saving is it?
There's a full page ad in the Guardian (and probably other papers) today showing the massive savings that Sainsbury's is offering on fresh fruit. Save £2, it trumpets, on strawberries which are down from £3.99 to £1.99 this week or £1.69 on nectarines down from £3.39 to £1.69.Now don't get me wrong, Sainsbury's if you're reading this. I'm sure these fruits have been on sale at the higher price over the last few weeks. In fact the small print at the bottom of the page tells you exactly when those prices were charged. The question is was that a reasonable amount to charge at the time for fruit that...
Tuesday, 10 June 2008
A lovely fruit salad
This really simple idea came to me the other day when I was wondering what to do with a tin of apricots - a real bargain in Somerfield at 24p. Perhaps, I thought, they could be combined with strawberries which would make them taste fresher and more delicious but cut down the cost of the dish. And maybe you could add a bit of orange juice and mint.It worked. Here it is!Strawberry and apricot fruit salad with orange and mintServes 4250g fresh strawberries with the stalks removed1 tsp caster sugar1 x 400g apricot halves in apple juice1 orange4-6 mint leaves (optional)Slice the strawberries into a...
Monday, 9 June 2008
Spam, Spam, Spam . . .
No, not the endless stream of emails about cut-price Viagra, making yourself utterly irresistible in bed or requests for donations to dodgy Nigerian banks but the luncheon meat variety which is apparently undergoing a massive boom as a result of the economic downturn. According to the Independent on Sunday yesterday sales are up 10% in the States which is a lot of extra Spam.Actually Spam isn't that cheap. I checked in Somerfield yesterday and it was £1.86 for a 340g can compared to only £1.47 for 340g of corned beef. You can buy a pound of sausages for that which are rather nicer to eat cold.Is...
Saturday, 7 June 2008
Are recipes redundant?
Unwelcome news from a publisher's press release. A book's coming out this autumn called Recipes to Know by Heart. I discussed a book with almost exactly the same title a couple years ago with a journalist friend. The idea was that I'd come up with the master recipes and he, as an amateur cook, would test them. We got as far as floating it informally with a publisher but because I was working on another book at the time I let it drift. So my fault entirely but it's maddening to find we've now been pipped at the post.In fact cooking without recipes, or at least exact measurements, has become a...
Thursday, 5 June 2008
Chocolate rice pudding
More puddings. Not having a terribly sweet tooth I do struggle with them but I found this recipe in the Guardian last Saturday and thought that it looked a great way to make rice pudding.According to its creator, Dan Lepard, you bring the milk and rice to the boil then take it off the heat, put a lid on the pan and let it rest for an hour then it should only take 15 minutes to cook. But mine took a full hour, like it normally does.I also varied the recipe by replacing the cocoa with 25g of milk chocolate I had left over from making an icing the other day (yes, I'm that disinterested in chocolate!)....
Wednesday, 4 June 2008
Queen of Puddings
One of the stranger things about writing a cookbook is having to test recipes at odd times of day or year. Like making Christmas pudding in July. (Well, odd for us in the UK anyway. Obviously not for Australians though they have to road test barbecue recipes in the middle of winter)So it was at six o'clock on a Tuesday evening - not a time of the week I think of eating puddings, let alone making them - that I found myself baking this traditional British recipe Queen of Puddings. Based on breadcrumbs, eggs and jam it's thriftiness personified but unexpectedly airy and delicious. I thought it might...
Tuesday, 3 June 2008
Food blogging is better than Facebook!
Having been a food writer for some 18 years now I've got to know a lot of my fellow professionals. Very nice people they are too. I belong to a couple of good forums which are incredibly useful if you want to find out, for instance, in what respect English flour differs from American flour and the impact that will have on a recipe. People are more than generous with their adviceBut frankly it doesn't compare with the heady sensation of joining the blogging community and finding out what people are cooking and eating on a daily basis. There's a joyous lack of inhibition about blogging, a manic...
Monday, 2 June 2008
Cut-price cheese/basil plants
I have to confess I'm a bit of a cheese snob so I wouldn't normally buy a supermarket's cheapest range of cheeses. But in the interests of research into how much you can save on cheese I bought a couple from the Sainsbury's Basics range - a ball of mozzarella for 57p rather than 75p for the standard mozzarella and a wedge of brie for 74p for 200g instead of 95p for 135g (i.e. £3.70 a kg instead of £7.04)And you know what? They were perfectly fine. Only by paying quite a bit more for the premium lines would you get a better product.Having some left-over tomatoes and olives, I made a tomato, mozzarella...
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