Day two – lunch
Posted: April 28, 2015 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: budget, dandelion, foraging, frugal, Live Below the Line, pickled onions, potatoes, red cabbage, split peas, Vegan, vegetarian Leave a commentYesterday I opened my little tin of tomato purée. You can’t keep food in the tin once it’s open (not sure why, but I know it’s a bad idea!) so I set about decanting the rest of it after I’d used a spoonful for my soup. I thought it would fit into a handy small glass jar I’d saved from something else but it turned out there was about a tablespoon left over in the can that wouldn’t fit, so I thought I’d see if it made a difference to some quick-bread.
I filled the purée can almost to the top with water and stirred so the leftover tomato paste reconstituted nicely and then added that to 100g SR flour and about 1/8 teaspoon salt. Turns out there was too much liquid so had to add another 50g or so of flour to make a rollable dough. I rolled it out to a couple of cm thick and baked it in a hottish oven (around 200 degrees) for about 18 minutes. I had a chunk for breakfast but about 2/3 went towards my lunch:
I was quite pleased with this, it reminded me of a ploughman’s lunch. The tomato flavour is quite subtle, but it makes the bread a lot tastier, and to go with the bread I have red-cabbage slaw, dandelion leaves, a mustardy split-pea dip/spread (cooked split peas with pickle liquid, mustard, pinch of salt and water to thin, smushed with a hand-blender), a cold baked potato and a pickled onion.
I know I said I wouldn’t break down the cost of each meal, but just for the sake of curiosity I did it this time:
100g slaw – 5.6p
200g cooked split peas 9.4p
15g mustard (would reduce to 10g next time, it was just a bit too hot!) 2p
30g pickle liquid/an onion 2p
baked potato approx 200g – 11.6p
approx 100g flour’s worth of bread 3p
approx 15g tomato puree 2.11p
Total 35.7p
Day 1 – breakfast and lunch
Posted: April 27, 2015 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: cleavers, dandelion, foraging, frugal, Live Below the Line, pickled onions, red cabbage, soup, split peas 2 CommentsMaybe it helps that I’ve got hayfever at the moment so I’m not tasting things as much as I could be, but I don’t think the 20p-for-40-teabags tea is as bad as people have been making out! It’s certainly a huge improvement on having to go through caffeine withdrawal! I had four cups this morning.
Having said I’m not a breakfast person, I woke up peckish so I had 25g dry cornflakes in the privacy of my own home.
I ate the 6 snack crackers I took to work throughout the morning along with my cups of tea, then went into town on the never-ending quest for affordable potatoes. Nothing doing in Leicester Market, they had 1kg potatoes for £1.10 (I’ve got £1.17 left from the fiver, I could spend it all on potatoes, but I was hoping to get something else for flavouring as well, like a bulb of garlic), or some people were selling bowlfuls for £1 but lesser quantities did not seem to be on offer. Marks & Spencer didn’t have any for less than £1.75 a kilo. There’s an ‘International Supermarket’ (smallish grocery shop selling some fresh produce) on Granby Street, and they had 2 kilo bags of potatoes for £1, but they were outside in the full sun in an orange-toned plastic bag and I didn’t trust them not to be green once the bag was opened.
Empty handed I started for home, but on my walk back I saw some cleavers peeking through a hedge on New Walk so I gathered a small handful of those, they’re supposed to be a good spring tonic.
When I got home I made a very simple bannock from 100g self-raising flour, a pinch of salt and enough water to make a soft dough, rolled out a bit into a circle and baked in a hot oven until it had puffed up and just picked up a tinge of brown on top. I ate half of this with soup made from 150g split peas, 15g tomato purée, 25g chopped carrot, the cleavers and 2 dandelion leaves finely chopped, salt, and water to cover, simmered until the carrot was tender. I topped this with a couple of spoonfuls of the cabbage cooked with pickled onions that I made last night.
The soup was… functional? It wasn’t bad, and the dandelions stopped it from tasting too boring by making it very slightly bitter, but it would have benefited from some spices and a squirt of lemon.
The other half of the bannock I had as a sandwich with 50g coleslaw and 5g mustard. This was good, I will make something similar again.
I calculate I’ve had around 885 calories and 32g protein so far, which isn’t too shabby. I’m about to take a walk to Morrisons now to see what I can come up with for that final £1.17.
Last of the advance prep
Posted: April 26, 2015 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: budget, dandelion, food, Live Below the Line, red cabbage, split peas, Vegan, vegetarian Leave a commentI have now made the crackers for the actual challenge, using 200g flour and 100g peanut butter. It came out to 40 crackers this time (I must have rolled them slightly thinner) so I can have 8 crackers a day which I reckon totals about 280 calories and 9 g protein per day. I’ve packed up 6 to take to work, so I can have 2 as an after-work snack as well. I also bagged up 8 teabags from the packet of 40 bought for 20p. I don’t know what they’ll taste like, but they smelled like tea!
Before I made the coleslaw I peeled the outer leaves off the cabbage, but apart from a couple of spots they were perfectly fine, so I thought it’d be a shame to compost them, and instead I chopped then cooked them up with some of the onions, pickling liquid and some salt. I added a bit extra to make it up to 340g cabbage (12p) to which I added 45g pickled onions & 15g pickling juice (4p) and 3g salt (I’m not even going to bother costing this), plus about 3 tablespoons of water. Brought it up to a simmer in a pan then turned the heat down and left to slowly cook with the lid on for about 15 minutes. The leaves were beginning to tenderise but still had plenty of crunch, and I’ve put that away in a 700ml container in the fridge. The amount almost filled the container – I’ll be able to have a good 2-3 spoonfuls per day for a total of 16p or just over 3p a day.
I drained and weighed the split peas. 500g dried made 1128g cooked, so I can eat 225g peas a day if I wish. I’m beginning to think it’s a good thing I won’t be sharing a bedroom with anyone during the week, I fear this amount of pulses, cabbage and onions may lead to some pungency! 225g cooked split peas provides 256cal, 18g protein, 2.9mg iron, 31.5mg calcium and 18g dietary fibre (according to Google’s nutrition data. I have no idea how accurate that is, but I guess it’s some idea). I decided against making a big pot of soup after all, instead I’ve refrigerated the cooked peas and will see what I feel like eating for lunch tomorrow. I spotted some nice big dandelions in the garden so thinking about using those somehow (I think weeds are fair game since I could gather these from common ground and nobody would object). I believe they’re full of calcium and other good stuff.
Prep for next week, part 3 – peanutty red cabbage slaw (recipe)
Posted: April 26, 2015 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: budget, carrots, frugal, Live Below the Line, mustard, peanut butter, red cabbage, split peas, Vegan, vegetables, vegetarian Leave a commentI thought it’d be a good idea to prep a lot of my food, so it’s ready to portion out as needed over the week.
I’m going to cook all of the split peas in one go after soaking them (which is happening right now), then turn half of them into soup (with tomato purée and carrots) and the other half into a hummus-type dip flavoured with mustard and pickled onion. The packets always say “no need to soak” or something similar, but then tell you they’ll take 45 minutes to cook. Well, they won’t take that long if they’re soaked, so you don’t have to steam your windows up as much or spend so much money on fuel if you can just spare a few hours to soak the dried peas in some water. I’m also going to combine soaking with my other favourite way of saving money, which is to bring them to the boil for a few minutes and then turn the heat off and leave them to finish cooking with a lid on in the residual heat. Works like a charm!
I’ve already trialled the following coleslaw recipe a couple of weeks back, except I used spirit vinegar because I’d not yet bought the pickled onions. I’m tempted to chop some onions into the slaw as well, but I might see how many I need to use elsewhere before I do that, as I don’t want to run out of one of my few strongly-flavoured ingredients.
Red cabbage slaw with peanut-butter mustard dressing:
550g grated red cabbage(19.5p)
150g grated carrot (8.1p)
2 Tablespoons (60g) chunky peanut butter (10.9p)
1 Tablespoon (15g) everyday value mustard (2p)
2 Tablespoons pickling liquid from a jar of pickled onions (2p)
1 Tablespoon water.
Method:
Put the cabbage and carrot into a storage container, mix the rest of the ingredients together in a small bowl then add to the veg and mix well. You could add another spoonful of water to the dressing bowl and use that to eke out the remains of the dressing and pour that over as well, as it’s quite thick and difficult to scrape out. Store in fridge. Leave flavours to meld for at least an hour before tasting for seasoning. Add more mustard/vinegar or a dash of salt if needed.
This is going to give me 5 servings of approximately 140g at a cost of 8.5p each, and it’ll go a long way to covering my vitamin C and A needs (I would say it’ll cover them entirely, but I’m not sure how much loss will occur over the days it’ll sit in the fridge).
Starting the split peas (November ninety, day 12)
Posted: November 12, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: butternut squash, frugal, Leicester, Leicester Market, November Ninety, soup, split peas, Vegan 3 CommentsAfter quailing at the task of making 2 kg of yellow dried split peas taste delicious, I have made a pretty good start and am quite pleased with the results so far.
I soaked about 500g/just over 1lb dried split peas yesterday for a few hours then heated them up to boiling point for a few minutes before following my now routine method for cooking this kind of thing – i.e. putting on a lid, turning off the heat and leaving them to soften using the residual heat. After fifty minutes they were stil quite firm, but I correctly assumed that since they’d either be heated up again, or blended, they were done enough.
I also processed the remains of the first butternut squash as it had been cut open for a few days and I didn’t know how much longer it would last. That was simply cut into slices then peeled with a potato peeler, cut into cubes and added to a pan of sautéed onion with a splash of water and some bouillon powder. I thought this could be used in a few different ways, including maybe a savoury pumpkin-pie-type-thing.
Today’s lunch has been an amalgamation of both of these components. I fried up another onion with a couple of teaspoons of punch pooran spice mix, added half the cooked split peas, water just to cover then brought to the boil with a stock cube. I put my last remaining can of tomatoes in the blender, along with the final red chilli, a clove of garlic, some ginger powder, then I added about 1/3 cup peanuts and half the split-pea mixture, whizzed it all up (had to add some water), returned to the pan, added some diced potatoes, brought back up to simmering point and cooked until the potatoes were done. I didn’t want to add all the squash mix to the soup mix, because there was a large amount of each, and added together would probably be six or more servings, which would get boring after a while, so I just heated up a ladleful of squash mix with a bit of water in a small pan, then added a ladleful of soup to that once the potatoes were done. Garnished with fresh mint from the garden and with some toast on the side, this was a very satisfying and tasty lunch. So, the secret to cooking with split peas seems to be just throw a bunch of highly-flavoured stuff into the pot and keep going until it masks the pea taste! 😉
Spend for the month now stands at £32.46, as I bought a lemon for 25p at the market earlier today. I plan to use this with the rest of the split peas and the last cloves of garlic to make hummus-alike.
dropscone 
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