Frugal Fare Challenge Day 1: Saturday

Ready, set, and go...the challenge begins.

Breakfast: storecupboard muesli and some blackberries from fridge leftovers.

Lunch: Roast Chicken with baby courgettes, baby carrots and beetroot.

I'm happy to say that the veg were all participants from the fridge, eager to get involved and, most importantly, to get used. The meal proved a very colourful plateful, alongside my highly useful, very simple Roast Chicken. I'm not what you'd call a fancy, schmancy cook - I'm still just learning. And a chicken is, to me, one of the ultimate fares which can stretch 62 different ways. Forget credit cards, chickens are my flexible friends!

Requirements:
1 chicken - mine wasn't fancy, and I'm ashamed to say it wasn't organic either, so £2.75 it was.
Glug of olive oil, 2 cloves garlic chopped, a dollop of butter, salt and pepper

Lay the chicken breast up in a high-sided roasting tray, cut away the excess skin at its neck and bottom, pop a lemon up its backsie, smear some butter all over its chest, and down into the joints of the legs/wings. Scatter the chopped garlic over, glug the olive oil across, and whack in the oven (I'm afraid to say I use an Aga, so this just means 'top oven') for 20 minutes at high heat, till the fat is bubbling and getting talkative, and the skin is lightly golden. Baste the breast and legs with the hot fat, so that the chicken glistens tastily.

Then pop some foil across the top for protection, and put back in the oven for an hour at a slightly lower heat. Baste from time to time to keep the lovely juices soaking into the chicken. The chicken is done when you pull the leg away from the body and it is no longer pink, or if you stick a knife into the leg joint and the juices run clear.

Mademoiselle la Poule, in all her glistening glory. She was a beaut. Shame about the photographer. Hopefully I will start to improve...

(My) Gravy: remove the chicken from the roasting pan and onto a carving tray, and pop the tray back onto a heat ring. Scrape all the bits into the tray, and start to heat the fat until it bubbles. Add a teaspoon of flour so that the gravy thickens, and stir vigorously to mix in. Add a teaspoon of gravy granules for colouring, and season with some salt and pepper. Then slowly add in some of the vegetable juices to bulk up the gravy. I never end up with smooth gravy, but I loathe it gloopy, so you will have to sieve out the bits, but will have a lovely juicy sauce to top your meat and veg with.

I then quickly got to work on pulling the meat off the chicken, and sending it off to the fridge packed up in foil, ready and waiting for me to conjure up some further delight with it. It would not have to wait long...
The bones were made into a lovely, scrumptious chicken stock - all the bones and the carcass went into a large saucepan, along with a whole carrot, a couple of celery sticks, the top half of a leek, a peeled, halved onion, a peeled garlic clove, 8 peppercorns, a bay leaf and some parsley stalks, with a couple of litres of water to fill and several generous pinches of salt. About an hour of bubbling later, and I had my stock! It was dutifully drained of its by now rather sorry looking occupants (oh such use and abuse!), resulting in a tasty, glisteningly perfect, and highly useful stock. The champion of frugality methinks.

Dinner: Chicken Pilaff

There is something rather retro and 70s sounding about a pilaff. Am I the only one who thinks this? But it is such a simple storecupboard dish, that can be rustled up with a variety of different ingredients, and is perfect for me to hit the 'waste not, want not' objective. So it seems a great shame for me (or anyone) to sneer, just because it sounds old fashioned.

Leftovers: a generous handful of cold chicken roughly chopped - several ladles of chicken stock
The Fruit&Veg bowl/The Fridge: a clove garlic (chopped), an onion (diced), 2 sticks celery (diced), 1 small green pepper (diced), a large handful of baby tomatoes (halved), generous handful of chopped parsley
The Storecupboard: some fastcook long grain rice of a brand I shan't mention

Method:
In a shallow saucepan, gently sweat the garlic, onion, celery and pepper in a small amount of butter and oil. Once golden, add the tomatoes (add them too early and they will just disappear and go terribly mushy), and then add a cupful of the rice. Stir to mix and to coat the rice grains in some of the fat, and then add a two or three ladlefuls of the boiling stock. Rather like a risotto, only the pilaff will not become a creamy mass, but will retain its ricey origins. Now leave to simmer for as long as your rice packet tells you (mine was 10 minutes). Do not stir and fuss around, as this breaks up the rice grains and results in a big old mess. Should you notice that the liquid is becoming rather sparse, simply add another ladleful. The rice should, after the recommended period of time, have absorbed up the liquid, and be cooked whilst still retaining bite. Stir in your chicken and your parsley and heat the chicken for a few minutes, until hot through. Scatter with parsley and serve as is.

My picture does not nearly do the tastiness justice, but you will fast become used to this. I repeat: I am not a photographer, I am not a photographer. Maybe I'd do better if I just drew the food!

The Pilaff in all its retro glory - complete with apparently equally retro plate. What a perfect couple.

Day 1 - £2.75 actually spent, plus a smidgen of 'cheat items'. At the end of the week I will tot up what I actually spent where, to give you an accurate idea.

The Official New Theme/Challenge: Frugal Food

My previous post should give some enlightenment as to my personal circumstances, and why exactly I have this overwhelming obsession with frugal food. It seems like a lot (if not all) of my posts (bar the restaurant reviews, where I have been lucky enough to be taken out by a host of wonderful friends/family) have been detailing ways of getting more bangers for your buck, of stretching your ingredients just as far as they'll go, and occasionally reverting to using odd (yet delicious!) insides to get a cheap meal. Whilst I'll admit that a lot of this is due to the fact that I'm hardly what you'd call rolling in dosh at the moment, coupled with the fact that I think the theme is highly relevant in a time where people are starting to feel the financial strain of the recession, this is not the only reason I'm interested in frugal food. I'm interested because, well, I'm not by nature a wasteful person. I like the concept of simple living, of more frugality and less extravagent waste. Less materialism, more productivity. Cooking can very quickly and easily become a highly expensive past-time, unless you use your noggin. And it's this sort of brainy cooking that I like - creatively and cleverly using your ingredients to the max. BUT - the results must be tasty, not all weird and wonderful, like say kidney beans with...erm...(she racks brain trying to think of something really truly odd to mix with kidney beans)...cauliflower.

So over the next couple of weeks, as I'm left home alone in a big house, with just a big kitchen and a computer to keep me company, I am starting an official experiment. I'm going to try to feed myself healthily, nutritiously, deliciously and colourfully for under £30.00 in a week. I should warn you right at the beginning, I am going to cheat a little, as I have to go up to London at the end of the week, to remind myself what a social life is like, and to see some real, live people. I've heard rumours they're still out there.

To be slightly more exact then, this week I will be detailing my food frolics between yesterday (Saturday) and Thursday. 6 days - well counted.

There are some more conditions, and you can decide for yourselves whether you think this is just stretching things:

1. There is a storecupboard/pantry in the kitchen, which is full of lots of lovely basics - flour, tinned tomatoes, tinned - olives, capers, pulses, pasta, rice, etc. - I intend to exploit this for all it is worth. Expect details of some 'storecupboard meals'The Storecupboard: my first photo but I thought I would give it a shot. Not least because I am so proud at how tidy this is post a tidy-up session yesterday. Helping Ma Pea to generally get the house in order - this was a task I set my organisational skills to. I know, it's official. I AM A GEEK. (Lydia at The Perfect Pantry would be proud!)
   
2. The fridge has a friendly smattering of bits and bobs - cheese, bacon, ham, some vegetables and some cheese - left over from when Ma Pea vacated premises for her fancy holiday, and I fully intend to use these up/come up with innovative ways of getting them involved in any way shape or form. Think of it as social food, and giving them an excuse to join in the fun.
   
3. It is necessary to bear in mind that I am based from home, and not currently juggling a job at the same time (bar all my mini creative projects, which I may start to upload details of soon, if I can figure it out), therefore breakfast, lunch AND dinner can and will be cooked and eaten at home - something which would never, ever happen when I was back in the big smoke.
   
4. We have apple trees, and intend to use 'em. I already have my eye on a recipe by Hopie, flagged and tagged by Psychgrad at Equal Opportunity Kitchen - keep your eyes/apples peeled ('scuse the pun) for that one.

I'm intrigued to know whether anyone else is as interested in eating frugally as me, and if so what your success stories have been - what you've managed to stretch out the most into multiple lunches and dinners, how you've used apparently discarded parsley stalks in stocks, that sort of thing. If you stumble upon me, do share hints, tips and/or encouragement!

Simple Sustaining Supper

With barely a moment’s breather between soup and main, Ma Pea and I got cooking the next course, a very satisfying Haddock Kedgeree. The recipe is one we’ve used in the family for a long while, but which initially came from dear ol’ Delia. I refer to her with such affection because well, we all know and love her don’t we, us Brits. She’s held many a hand through a Roast Lunch or entire Christmas dinner, and taught many a novice how to boil an egg.  All of this recent hoo ha about her new cheats aside (seriously, who is so lazy that they use pre-packed chopped onion?!), her old classics really do methodically demonstrate to the novice cook how to yield results in the kitchen, confidently and efficiently, 100% of the time. 

So, let's talk Kedgeree.

Buttery Haddock Kedgeree
Serves 4 generously portioned suppers

Ingredients
Butter
1 onion
1 teaspoon curry powder
8fl oz long-grained white rice
16fl oz water
1.5 lb smoked haddock fillets
2 hard-boiled eggs, peeled and chopped
3 heaped tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
1 tablespoon lemon juice
salt, pepper

Place the haddock in a pan with the water, bringing them to the boil and simmering gently for 8 minutes. Drain off the water into a measuring jug. Transfer the haddock into another dish and cover with foil.
In the same saucepan, melt a generous knob of butter, and soften the onion in it for 5 minutes. Stir in the curry powder, cook for half a minute and then stir in the measured rice and 16 fl oz of Haddock water. When simmering, cover with a tight-fitting lid and cook very gently for 15 minutes or until the rice is tender.
Remove the fish skin and flake the meat. When the rice mixture is ready fork in the flaked fish, hard-boiled eggs, parsley, lemon juice and the remaining couple ounces of butter. Season and serve.

Again, another tres simple, cheap and simple supper. Stellar.