Introduction to affordable eating
A quick look at the car-related pages on this site will tell you that I'm tight with money. I prefer to think of it as "frugal." Richard Hall puts it best on his Bangernomics site when he says, "Even if you aren't that poor, following the Bangernomics philosophy will leave you with more money for the fun things in life - foreign holidays, smart clothes, single malt whisky, or whatever."
I hope to bring this same approach to food.
The difference with food, though, is that we don't have to do the culinary equivalent of driving old bangers; eating cheaply also means eating healthily and well.
We live in a world where food is increasingly becoming something pre-packaged and pre-processed, where ready meals are popular and - according to recent surveys - we waste one third of the food we buy. By following my approach - of buying ingredients and cooking from scratch every day - you will cut out all of that processed food which contains who-knows-what and save money into the bargain.
This blog will contain recipes, tips and tricks and advice. I hope it will be useful to students and people on low incomes. Even if you're not poor, it's a useful life skill to know how to eat cheaply; you can put the money towards something nice instead.
So, here's the first tip: never pass up a bargain. Before the Easter break my local butcher was having a bit of a clearout so I managed to buy one of his trade packs of bacon - containing about 40 rashers - for six quid. I seperated it out into packs of four rashers and chucked the lot on the freezer. The local shop was doing something similar, so I was also able to pick up five packets of five pitta breads for a quid - that's my weekend lunches for the next few weekends sorted!
This weekend, I went out to Lewes and discovered a food market that I hadn't known about before. There was a butcher there with some interesting cuts, and I couldn't resist some pigeon - 4.25 for six breasts (pigeon breasts are small compared to chickens, so I reckon that's enough for three meals).
I hadn't decided what to do with my pigeon until I got it home. I had a vague recollection of seeing pigeon and bacon recipes so I pulled one of my packs of bacon out of the freezer. Then I had a poke about in the fridge and found some veg that needed using up. So here's what I did:
Cut up the pigeon and bacon (I used two of the pigeon breasts and froze the rest)
Chop up half a leek, some mushrooms and some tomatoes.
Peel a few garlic cloves
Chop up some chives
Fry the pigeon and bacon, quite hot but not for too long. Then turn the heat down a little (you don't want to burn anything) and chuck in the leeks and mushrooms. Keep turning everything around, like you do with stir-fry.
Chuck in the garlic cloves - this is all about big bold flavours so I reckon some whole cloves work better than crushed garlic here.
When everything's almost done, throw in the tomatoes and chives, and liberally splash everything with balsamic vinegar (looks like an expensive ingredient, but I know a shop in Brighton which sells it for less than two quid a bottle).
Serve with brown rice. (That bit traditionally goes at the end of recipes, but I always think it's weird - brown rice takes half an hour to cook so you'll start that cooking before you do anything else. Who am I to argue with tradition though?)
Enjoy!
