Shopped!

Buy it if you dare!

My veg box!!!

My dining room smelled like a greengrocers!  I hadn't realised just how, errr, sanitised, supermarket produce is.  Lacking in both smell and flavour.  

I finally feel re-inspired about cooking and have made some delicious food, with ingredients that I'd normally pass over....such as roasted beetroot with toasted cumin seeds and lemon.  I have also been forced to use up all of the veg instead of 'not fancying that tonight' and letting it go all limp in the fridge.  

Other lovely meals we've had include, roasted butternut squash and coconut soup with homemade cheesy garlic bread, stir  fried vegetables in oyster sauce with spicy cocnut shrimp fried rice, Baked potatoes with bacon and wild rocket salad, lamb shank curry with pilau rice, wholewheat spaghetti with spring greens, roasted tomatoes and sausages, spaghetti with buutternut squash and crispy bacon.

I have yet to cook the chicken (it's in the freezer still) as we went away for the weekend, and such a deserving piece of meat needs a sunday afternoon to do it justice....along with crispy roasties and lots of vegetables and lashings of gravy...mmmmm.....

Organic Food

Many years back (gosh, I'm actually old enough to say that!) I used to only buy organic.  The older two children were only babies still so didn't eat much, which is what you need to be able to feed a family organic food on a budget.  Not only is it more expensive, but the portions are much smaller.  I had to get used to not being able to afford it as they got older and other things took priority financially.  But it has never been far from my mind - every time I watch a program about how our chickens/pigs/eggs/milk are made/treated I start to calculate how I could afford to feed my family of four (now five) a diet of higher welfare, if not organic, food, before giving up when I realise that my shopping bill would increase by almost double.

So, I started to look recently, at how I could introduce organic elements into our diets and have decided that our meat, poultry and dairy should be the first to be 'converted'. And I have finally found a company that I am happy to give over my hard earned cash to provide us with local, organic or higher welfare meat and dairy, as well as vegetables.  Now, I have done veg box schemes before when I lived in Leicester.  And when we first moved to Oxfordshire I did one again for a short while.  My downfall is that I like to cook such a variety of food, that there isn't a box out there that can provide everything I need for a week that would be anywhere near affordable.  So I end up going to the supermarket for the rest - and then I spend more money on other things that happen to look good.... or are on offer.  And my hard earned cash dwindles yet further..... I am going to have to be very strict with myself, therefore, and plan my week's meals around the contents of the veg box.  The only things I will just have to buy extra are staples like garlic, ginger, chillies and onions if they aren't in that week's box. I will still buy our fruit from the local market or supermarket though.

Blog of note: I love the idea of food 'cycles' as mentioned in these blog posts.  It's something that I have done for years, but never to that extent.....I shall be definitely looking to find new ways of eeking out as many meals from the food I buy from A&C.

But, I am going to give it another go.  This time I will use Abel & Cole.  Not only because their boxes seem to offer the best value and quality for money, but also because they offer meat and poultry that, whilst not strictly organic (in that they don't have the official certification), are reared to the same standard as organic meat and are free range.   Their chickens also come with giblets - something which has all but completely disappeared from the supermarkets.  No more little bag inside the cavity that you could roast and use to make wonderfully rich, delicious gravy..... I want giblets!  I am already envisioning the lovely stocks I'm going to make :-)
I'm also going to try some of their buffalo mince and a large veg box.  If I commit to at least 4 boxes, the 4th will be free - I do love a freebie!

Slow roasted 5 spice pork

It was so yummy I had to take 3 photos!

I got a really nice piece of belly pork from the local butchers (on the bone) and let it marinate overnight in the fridge in some five spice powder, a few crushed pieces of star anise, salt and Ketjap Manis.  I then slow cooked it for approx 4 hours in the oven, on a bed of crushed garlic and ginger.  After the four hours was up I  removed the skin to make crackling (YUM!), then glazed the top with oyster sauce, before popping it under the grill to caramelise.

We ate it with stir fried pak choi (done simply with just some fresh ginger), some steamed rice and a pickled salad.  Ben, who is no way near as fussy as he used to be for a while, loved it so much he polished off two helpings :-)  We then had the leftovers the next day, shredded and stir fried with beansprouts and rice noodles.

By the way, I did have a little help with this dish - Jasmine washed and sliced the pak choi all by herself, and then made the dressing for the salad too..... a keen little helper in the kitchen she is!

Onion Bhajis

Yummy, scrummy and so easy (and cheap) to make.

I didn't have any gram flour (not so easy to find in a little town like ours) so I substituted for plain. Anyway, here's what I did:

Ingredients:
plain flour
chilli powder
turmeric
ground coriander
ground cumin
ground ginger
black pepper
salt
pinch of baking powder
1 large spanish onion, chopped
water
vegetable oil for frying

Method:
1. using approx 1/2 - 1tsp of all each of the spices and seasonings, add everything to a bowl except for the flour and water.
2. stir to coat the onions, then add approx 4 tbs flour
3. add small amounts of water gradually until you have a thick, sticky batter.  If it gets too wet, just add more flour - that's the great thing about this recipe, it's almost impossible to get wrong.
4. heat some oil in a pan (about 3 inches or so deep) and fry dollops of the mixture until golden on all sides.

Serve! (I served with some yoghurt and mint)

For our main, we had a quick potato and pea curry with boiled basmati rice.

Food Challenge - FAIL

Ok, so I knew from the outset that this challenge was nigh on impossible, but nevertheless, I am still disappointed to have failed.  Mostly because I know that with more prep and less emotional buying, I could have actually done it.  But various events and factors collided to make it just too tough.  I had unexpected guests, went shopping on the busiest day of the week (saturday) at the busiest time which was also the time when I should have been preparing that evening's meal, and on an empty stomach with a baby in tow who, although very quiet and happy enough, I was aware would need feeding and changing real soon.  Then came half-term holidays and I had even more unexpected (though very welcome) guests......I cannot have people in my house and not feed them.  I am a feeder I admit it!  So the food challeneg has filed.  But I have learned some very valuable lessons.  Here they are, not in any particular order...:

1. When I stuck to the budget, by the end of the week the cupboards and the fridge were bare.  But no-one had gone hungry and very little food was wasted.  When I went over budget, food was wasted and I still had food in the fridge at the end of the week that I then needed to find ways to use up without us getting too bored of eating the same things over and over.
2. £100 is too low a budget.  In order to make it succeed, you would actually need to do a 'store cupboard' shop probably once a quarter (or more often if you don't have the storage capacity) I found that I went over budget when I completely ran out of items such as olive oil (ok, I could have just used vegetable, but I just can't bear to cook certain cuisines without it!), flour, butter, sugar, tea bags....basically your basic grocery items.
3. The more food I had as a result of going over budget, the less organised I was in terms of menu planning and the less inspiration I had - hence the waste.

Overall though, despite the overspend, my shopping bill was approximately HALF what it normally is - even with the guests and holiday.  I'm therefore going to take the lessons I learned and try to be more organised with meal planning and when I go shopping, in order to keep my food shopping expense lower.  Why? Well, because this month I got to splash out on some really cool retro lunch tins for the kids, a cabinet from IKEA, and a few lunch dates (once I'd already blown the budget mind), not to mention hair cuts, cinema and Macdonalds trips for the kids and some beautiful baby clothes - all stuff I normally don't do too often because my food bill eats into my budget!

chicken, vegetable and rice noodle soup

This was basically a meal I made by winging it - but it was actually really tasty, and healthy to boot.  Also it's very cheap as I used only one chicken breast (on the bone) that I'd saved from a whole chicken I'd cut up.  I was pleased to see Ken Hom on This Morning talking about how chinese food is healthy because they use such little meat in comparison to the typical western diet.  Well I'm certainly sold on this concept and regularly use as little as one chicken breast to make a dish that feeds all 4 of us comfortably.

Anyway, I digress, here's roughly what I did:

Ingredients:
spring greens
1 chicken breast on the bone
chopped fresh mint and coriander
thumb sized piece of ginger
2 large cloves of garlic
a couple of carrots
a broccoli stalk (no waste on this challenge!)
pinch of 5 spice powder
soy sauce
salt

Method:

1. simmer the chicken breast in water with some salt until just cooked
2. meanwhile shred the spring greens, trim and thinly slice the carrot, ginger, garlic cloves and broccoli stalk
3. remove the chicken and shred the meat from the bone and reserve
4. add the sliced vegetables to the stock and continue to simmer, meanwhile heat some oil in a pan and fry the shredded chicken with a good pinch of 5 spice powder and soy sauce.
5. add the rice noodles to the stock and vegetables, then add the fresh herbs (in my case I had previously chopped and frozen them, but it makes no difference) and a good glug of soy sauce
6. ladle the soup and noodles into a bowl and top with some chicken
7. serve!

NB. If I wasn't also cooking for the children I would have also added some fresh, sliced chillies.....