'Crab' and Rocket Linguine - under a fiver

When doing my meal plans this week, I came across a recipe for crab and rocket linguine. It looked delicious, promising a balance of sharp and sweet flavours. The problem is that even tinned crabmeat is out of my budget at the moment, so I decided to adapt the recipe to something more in my price range.

Just like the original recipe, this meal has a peppery kick from the rocket, a zing from the lemon zest, and the seafood sticks, tomatoes and creme fraiche add sweetness. All in all, it was delicious and certainly didn't taste 'budget'. Also contains 2 portions of your 5-a-day.

per person:
100g pasta - I used a mix of tagliatelle and spaghetti to finish off odd packets. (10p)
olive oil for cooking (10p)
1 large garlic clove, minced (5p)
2 tbsp half-fat creme fraiche (40p)
6ish seafood sticks, ripped into strips (30p)
handful of rocket, chopped roughly (30p)
zest from half a lemon (15p for half lemon)
5 cherry tomatoes, halved. (20p)
salt and pepper to season

Total: £1.50 per person (prices estimated from used percentage of item, costed at tesco, value range if available)
If you were making this for 4, you could use less garlic and lemon, and it'd definitely come in under a fiver.

cook pasta in water
cook minced garlic in olive oil until soft, then stir in the creme fraiche, tomatoes, rocket, zest and seafood sticks.
heat gently until warmed through. Drain the pasta and stir in.
Season with salt and pepper as necessary.
Garnish with a couple extra rocket leaves.

I also sprinkled Parmesan cheese over mine as I happened to have bought some for a risotto this week.

All in all, including chopping it took less than 15 mins and very little washing up (always a bonus!)

Worth noting that even with my substitutions, this is a 'luxury' dinner for me - creme fraiche and rocket are not usually on my shopping list, but I factored them into my mealplan, planning to use the rest of the packets elsewhere this week.

Whenever I use lemons, I try to get the most out of every part of it. Juice is squeezed and used or frozen to be used later and then the remaining outer pith and skin is quartered and used to de-scale my kettle (simply pop them in with a full kettle of water, boil and leave overnight). Lemon juice can be used for cleaning, but with pancake day approaching fast, I might just freeze the juice to use then.

One-pot Creole beans 'n' rice

Estimated price: £4.18 (£1.05 per person) or meat-free £2.79 (70p per person)
*priced at Sainsburys March 2014

Best thing about this meal, besides the price, is only one pot to wash up!!

Ingredients

Tin kidney beans (30p)
Tin chopped tomatoes (34p) or 5 chopped and peeled tomatoes (pennies if you grow your own)
mugful brown or white rice, uncooked (£1.50 for a bag, 60p for this recipe.)
2 stalks celery (90p per pack, 30p this recipe. Free if you regrow your own from scraps.)
1 red or green pepper (1.45 for pack of 4, 36p each. pennies if you grow your own)
onion (30p. free if you regrow your own)
2 cloves garlic (35p per head, 10p this recipe. free if you regrow your own. or, when in season use free foraged wild garlic chopped roughly.)
chicken or veg stock cube (90p for pack of 10. 9p each. free to make your own from chicken carcass or veg scraps)
Olive or vegetable oil for cooking (pennies)

Smoked sausage (£1.69) or another tin of beans (30p)

optional - few drops tabasco sauce. or a sliced chili

Seasoning - this is the tricky bit, because spices are an expensive up-front purchase, but if you use them sparingly they will last. You can buy Caribbean seasoning for £1, and use less than a tenth of it for this recipe at 10p. Or you can make your own Creole seasoning with the following :

2 garlic powder
2 oregano
2 basil
2 thyme
1 black pepper
3 salt
5 paprika
1 Cayenne pepper/chili powder - or more if you like it spicy.

The numbers refer to whatever measurement you are using. So if you are only making a little, each number can refer to half a teaspoon, so garlic powder would be 1tsp and paprika 2 1/2 tsp. you can mix up a batch of this and put it in a tub/jar for future recipes. Making it this way works out at less than 10p per portion, especially if you grow your own herbs.

Cooking

Firstly, cut the celery root off in one go and set aside to regrow. Voila, free celery for next time.

You can do the same with the onion:

Chop garlic, onion, celery and pepper and saute in oil until onion is tender. (optional sliced chili to be added at this point)

Add seasoning and sausage sliced and cook for a couple minutes.
Stir in the tomatoes, beans and stock and bring to the boil.

Add rice (dry), cover and simmer for 20 mins or until rice is cooked.

Add tabasco or chili to spice it up if you want.

Making it cheaper/go further

You can make this cheaper by omitting the celery and pepper, although it will be a lot less healthy. Alternatively, you can switch the celery and pepper for whatever other veg you have on hand. I used carrot in these pictures.

You can omit the seasoning mix and instead simply use salt, pepper and tabasco sauce or chili powder.

Garlic and onions can be bought in bulk for cheaper and stored, hanging in an old pair of tights, in a dark, cool place, like a garden shed or pantry cupboard. Both can be regrown from scraps, firstly in water in the kitchen and then planted out in the garden, windowbox or a pot in the kitchen.

If you cook a whole chicken earlier in the week, you can simmer the carcass and scraps in water with a small amount of chopped onion and some herbs to make cheap homemade stock. Stock cubes are only 9p each, though, so this might be more hassle than it's worth.

You can change the rice:everything else ratio to make the sausage and beans etc go further. Chop the sausage into small cubes instead of slices to spread them further through the mix.

You can make this meal in bulk and freeze individual portions in tupperware or freezerbags.

You can make this meal with or without the sausage in smaller portions and stuff into peppers or large mushrooms, then bake, making the expensive meaty part go further.

Meals under a fiver

*Resuscitates blog*

BBC's mini-series Famous, Rich and Hungry, for Comic Relief got me thinking. It was a series of two shows about food poverty in the UK. Now I've never been in that situation, but there have been brief periods where I've had to watch my money - while I was a student and while I was out of work on welfare benefits. The program showed that eating healthily on a budget is damn hard. So much easier to buy tinned soup or baked beans.

So I'm going to try my hand at posting a few recipes which can feed a family of 4 for under a fiver, and some will have an option to be even cheaper by cutting out an ingredient or two.

I'm pricing these when I write up the recipe and some of the prices will be based on bulk-buying and splitting up.

Landshare/Garden Update

Oh it's been a while, hasn't it? I'm rubbish at this blogging-regularly thing. Half the time I take the pictures, then forget to write it up.

Anyway, as it's now nearing the end of August, it's time for an update on my landshare experience and garden.

Landshare

Well the potatoes came up nicely, then they started wilting horribly - I think they were being eaten by slugs. We've also had strange weather - it's been either really hot or really wet, so I don't think that has helped much.  Only one of the leeks that were planted survived (well, one and a half) and the carrots didn't do very well, probably because the soil is hard and it's been so dry.

It was strange because it wasn't my vegetable patch - it was J and K's, so while I would have liked to put down some (organic) pest control, they didn't, and it wasn't really my place to interfere. Despite all the problems, there were a few mini-harvests, which looked like this:

 This is right out of the ground - no cleaning. Which shows how dry the ground was. The carrots were tiny and a lot of them had been eaten by something (ants maybe??), so I just ate the remainder raw and they were very sweet and delicious. The potatoes were also really tasty. Onions were small and mainly ended up in salads.

J+K came round a couple of weeks ago with a bit of a bombshell - J had been offered a job elsewhere in the country, so they were leaving. =( Bit of a shame as they were nice, but ah well. They've left me the last surviving leek.

There's another, baby, one too and I'm not sure if it'll grow or just die, but at least this one looks healthy.

I've decided that I'm going to give the veg garden a bit of a go myself, now, so I'm not reoffering my garden on landshare just yet. We'll see how I cope alone!


Herb Garden

The herb garden has been doing really well. The fennel is huge, the parsley and sage are both doing really well as well. The coriander bolted quite quickly, as it was so hot, so I let it go to seed and have been drying it out, hoping to plant some of the seed.

As well as the planted bed, I also have two large pots of mint (I dug those out of the ground and into pots as I'd heard they would take over everything). One large pot of oregano and a pot of feverfew.

Vegetables

My step-grandad   gave me some veg when I went to visit him - a tomato plant and two squash/courgette plants. I shoved them in a grow bag on the patio and here's how they are doing now:

I had the first tomato today as one lone one had ripened - it was really tasty. Lots more on the plant which are startin to ripen now.

Been having problems getting the courgettes to pollinate. I've tried hand-pollinating, but so far only have one successful courgett growing:

Nearly ready to eat this one =D

I've been regrowing celery scraps as well, which seems to be going well. Maybe I'll blog about that later when I have a successfully grown one!

So, the plan is to dig over/weed the landshare plot and maybe plant some winter crops.

Strawberry and Apple Jam with Scones

The thing with strawberries, is they look delicious, but you blink and they're going soft and then mouldy. Well this time I decided to preempt that disaster by making the rest of my strawberries into home-made jam. This is the first time I've made jam, so I didn't want to make a huge batch.

I searched for a few recipes online. I wanted to keep this simple, so ended up taking a basic recipe of strawberries, apple (which provides natural jelling), sugar and some lemon juice. I added a little honey and vanilla essence to mine as well.

 Cut strawberries and grated apple in the pan.

 With the sugar added and starting to cook.

At this point I thought 'oooh it would be nice to make some scones to go with the jam!' so I quickly knocked together a scone mixture using what I had, which turned out to include no eggs and no milk (self-raising flour, pinch of salt, sugar, powdered milk, water, vanilla essence, lemon juice, butter).

 Just 4 as there's only me. =)

Once the jam had simmered for a good while and thickened, I decanted into a couple of jars. Could have put it all in the big one, but I decided to do a little jar for a friend who made me some lovely plum jam last summer. (I did taste it first to make sure it was edible, lol, and it's very nice, although also very sweet. When I make this again, I'll use less sugar).

 yummy scones. =) I'm not a big fan of cream, so I just have mine with butter and, of course, the jam.

A very British tea. Served with Earl Grey tea, of course. ;)

Making my herb garden

I've been dreaming of a herb garden since I moved into my house and with J&K growing vegetables in my garden now, I was inspired to stop dreaming and get on with it lol.

I'd booked a week off work, and planned to spend some of that doing this. Day one was sunny, warm and the ground was dry and hard as nails lol. I dug about half of the patch and then had to stop for the day.

Day two was drizzling, but I was determined to carry on, and actually the moisture seemed to make the digging easier and I got the rest of it dug up. The ground here is very clay-y, with flint and chalk stones. So after I'd dug the patch out and de-turfed it, I spent a good couple of hours going through it with a fork, trying to break up all of the chunks of clay.

Finally, I got to a point where it was manageable. Still quite lumpy, but I was running out of energy. I dug in a few buckets of compost.

I could do with some edging, but I'm trying to re-use and make-do rather than buying new things and I'd already spent money on the herbs. Hopefully I can get hold of some wood from somewhere. =)

Herbs planted. There's a bit of space for the oregano to go once the cuttings have taken root (hopefully lol).

Top row is spearmint, garden mint, chives (2 lots), coriander (2 lots). Middle row is lavender, fennel, thyme, basil (2 lots, one is very very tiny). Bottom row is rosemary (2 lots, larger one looking a bit worse for wear, I'm hoping it will pick up now it has more space to grow), sage (1 purple, 1 green) and parsley (1 curly at the top and 1 italian flat).

I also potted up some wild strawberries. I went to visit my grandad yesterday, and he and his wife gave me a tomato plant and two squash/courgette (they weren't sure which was which) plants, so I'm planning to just get a grow-bag on the patio to stick those in.

Don't think my body will be able to handle anymore digging anytime soon. I have Rheumatoid Arthritis and the day after I'd finished the herb patch, my right hand was pretty seized up and the fingers swollen. Worth it though. I'm very proud of my efforts and hopefully the oregano will just finish it off nicely. =D

Stuffed Mushrooms

Back on the boxes this week.

When I get large portobello mushrooms, I like to stuff them. Very easy to make a delicious meal that way.

mushrooms
Spring onions
wet garlic
3 herb and pork sausages skinned.
rice

I'd usually add some stock or seasoning too, but as these sausages were already very herby and the wet garlic and onions strong, it really didn't need it.

As the top picture, I hollow out the mushrooms, chopping up the flesh I've dug out and mixing it with (in this case) chopped wet garlic and spring onions.

Generally, I just chop up whatever I have lying around, mix it with the sausagemeat, stock and some cooked rice.

Then I pile it into the hollowed-out mushrooms, put them on an oiled baking tray and bake in the oven for 15ish minutes at gas mark 4 or 5 until the mushrooms are hot through and slightly softened.