Love that reduced asile!

Again a delay in posting but my computer died - it was sad but they do this sometimes. So had to source a new motherboard that would work with what I did have so that I wouldn't have to ditch the whole thing. This took some time and then of course delivery, someone to put it together (as I'm not that good!), etc. So needless to say it's been a few months of no computer.

Anyway, I am off this week so it gives me some time to sort out the computer as I upgraded to Windows 7. I'm not sure that was a good idea but one has to move on and it was about time to move up with the times.

My other piece of news is that finally I have bought myself a digital camera - a proper one! I won a gift certificate for a competition I entered which shocked me completely as I never win so now I have to stop saying that! I've kept the certificate as I wasn't sure what to get, what I wanted that badly, etc. I'm rather like that with just about anything - the Boots card has a bunch of points on it, the Sainsburys card is also the same. It's a habit! So new camera to get to grips with and while it is an easier one (I bought it just for its ease) it still takes time to get used to how it works, etc.

Today I went out to do my usual and look for any bargains that are to be had. I was getting towards the end of my spree down the High Street and sadly I had little to show for my hard work. It wasn't that I couldn't find anything - I could - just not at a price I was willing to pay.

So sadly, I called it a day and went to the grocery store for the few things I needed. It was about half five or so and it began bleak - no reduced veg to be had! I then hit the meat aisle where they have any fresh meat/fish that's reduced. Well at least this aisle did not let me down as you can see from below!

I was just super lucky - everything was organic (bar the plaice and wild salmon) but what didn't get into the picture was a leg of lamb. I'll write about that tomorrow as that will be our dinner. I was so pleased to finally get some good bargains.

As you can see most items were under the £2.00 limit. Since most of my meals are for two I try to find things that way. Although there was more there at the store - as my friend say - God doesn't like greedy! I got what I knew I could use, freeze and have for dinner. The rest I left for someone else to get a bargain.

The sausages I split into lots of two with 3 sausages each in the freeze. These are great for my quick work-week meals of cooked breakfast. The Brits have what they call the full English - eggs, mushrooms, fried tomatoes, sausages and/or bacon, fried toast and tea/coffee. I do something similar for us except we eat it for dinner instead of breakfast. BTW, I don't make fried bread - never had it as it's a piece of bread fried in oil but I do occasionally have toast with jam.

The fish will be saved for many a week night supper - I sometimes just bake it or lately I've taken to putting it in a frying pan with a small knob of butter and cooking it that way so the skin gets crispy. The frying steak will make some great fajitas. So for £7.82 I will get 8 meals out of the above picture. I think that's rather good!

I forgot to take a picture of all the dairy I got as well. I wanted to get it into the fridge but got milk (organic 1%) for £0.55p, some lovely strawberry yoghurt (£0.65p), some mature cheddar (£1.35) and some more organic whole milk (£0.22p). If I remember I'll try to get a shot of that tomorrow.

More later about the leg of lamb and some pictures I took of my poppyseed bread (just the prep bit). Enjoy!

Christmas on a budget...

Well again more delays in not posting but honestly life is to be lived and time for posting is all but gone when I am working. I have a number of projects which are taking up my time and that leaves me with little time to go on the computer much less document it with pictures. I see so many great blogs that I figure one more won't make or break life one tiny bit.

First, I'll include a picture or two of our snowy day about one week ago - naturally all BEFORE Christmas! The first picture is from our living room that over looks the main drag here in Southend - the dreaded A13! This photo was snapped after about 1/2 an hour of the white stuff beginning - you can see it just came down!

This next photo is from the kitchen over looking the roundabout. Normally you can see to the pier and beyond (which is Kent) but not this day! The drops on the window I hadn't noticed until I looked at the photos but it's a good contrast considering this is my mobile phone doing the pictures! I am working on getting a better camera to have better pictures...so as they say watch this space!

Sadly we are now without the snow - it melted within about a week. We've had a few days of flurries but nothing that stuck. The temperatures however, have been quite low and I'm sure the rest of England is still digging out. News reports now show the Eastern Seaboard of the US is getting hammered. No rest for the wicked!

Now, onto some cooking. Every year for Christmas we have our annual 'hunt' for dinner. I say hunt but do not mean literally I go out hunting with a gun but rather my credit card! Each year since I have moved here I go out to the stores on Christmas Eve to find something for Christmas Day dinner.

In years past we have had just about everything you can imagine from ham to duck. One year I got an organic/free-range goose and when preparing it found all this fat in the cavity. I didn't know what to do with it - well thankfully Julia Child had covered this in her Mastering the Art of French Cooking - which I did have. I rendered all the fat down (and trust me there was plenty!) that I had enough fat for the whole year for my roasties!

So anyway, back to my Christmas hunt. We went out on the 23rd and bought our 'just in case' dinner (meaning if we found nothing this would be our main course). In addition to that we found our Christmas Eve dinner which really wasn't cooked by my standards but ended up being quick and as always thrifty!
So the store Gods left me some salmon fish cakes, some courgettes, which I just plainly grilled in the grill pan and I made my sour cream and lemon pasta (basically pasta with sour cream added and some lemon juice, garlic, salt and pepper to make a cream sauce for the pasta).
As you can see - the fish cakes cost me £0.69p and the courgettes cost me £1.09 but they were organic and I had already used one of them for a previous meal (coincidently on that day they had normal courgettes reduced too - same price so I opted for the organic kind as always) . The pasta I already had but it's just the quill kind so was about £0.25p for the 500 gram bag of which I only cooked 125 grams for our dinner. The sour cream/fresh lemon I already had and always have this stuff on hand so minimal amount of money. If you want to even count in the cost of fuel to cook the dinner, etc. we could go as high as £4.00 for the whole meal for us two. I dare say that for us is about our usual in cost as I'm very fond of going to the store two to three times a week just to get my veg and find the reduced bargains.

I also found some organic chicken livers reduced from £2.99 to £0.99p. Now I'm not a pate kind of gal but J loves the stuff so I got the livers for him and put aside some to put in my roast chickens but the rest I decided to make him some pate. I've never made it and didn't have any recipe to hand but just made something up which I thought sounded good.

I took an onion and which I fried in a pan with some olive oil. They got a bit of colour on them (not much) and I then added the chicken livers and seasoned with some salt and pepper. I cooked them until just pinky inside and added a clove of garlic (minced) and cooked for about another minute. I then added some brandy which made a nice sauce and continued for about another minute. I then put it all in the food processor and whizzed up until it looked like pate. Decanted into a jar I had saved and topped it off with some ghee that I melted. This picture I took when I had put it into the fridge and the ghee stuck to the top of the lid so I did a repair job on it but it was probably just too full to begin with. Anyway, verdict is that it's pretty good for a first time at pate!
OK - so now for the final Christmas dinner - what did we have? Well normally we go to two or even three different stores it really just depends on my mood and if we find anything. This year we went to the Co-op which is literally just around the corner from the flat. We went just shortly after 4pm as we've learned from past experience - don't leave it too late or you'll end up with nothing.

So we arrived there and began to scope it out. We found our favourite custard there reduced which I had nothing made to go with it but got because it's the only one I'll eat and just couldn't resist it. Continuing down we found some yoghurt reduced - nothing to rock your world but for us yoghurt is a dessert in this house.

Then we rounded the next aisle where the meat was and as luck would have it - it was full of those lovely orange reduced stickers. It is amazing how you can train your eye for these stickers. Each store has their own colour so in the Co-op it's orange, Sainsbury's and Tesco it is yellow/white, Morrison's it is yellow, and Waitrose it is red. I'm like a tuning fork - I hum these frequencies!

I know if we hadn't gotten anything the previous day for our dinner we would have been hard pressed to find anything so of course now that we were prepared it was a feast before us! All manner of roasts were reduced, pork roasts from £1.50, turkey crowns from £3.00 and lamb from £7.50. After evaluating what we already had at home and what was on offer that we would like to eat we decided to get the leg of lamb. Mainly because we already had some ham at home for our 'planned' dinner and we love our lamb! I also got some wild Alaskan salmon fillets for £1.50 for another meal - those went into the freeze.

So lamb it was - normally it was £15.00 but we got it for just slightly over £7.00 for 1.5 kgs! I already had potatoes at home so that would work, and we had peas in the freeze so that was our veg done. So there was my dinner and then some because it was big enough for left-overs for at least one other meal if not two.

So how did I prepare this lamb? Well I kept it in the container it was sold in and added some freshly squeezed lemon juice (about two lemons) with some olive oil and loads of minced garlic. I let it set out for about 2-3 hours marinating in this concoction and every time I was in the kitchen I just turned the leg over to get all the juices into the meat.

I then pan roasted some herbs de Provence, coriander seeds. When fragrant I put them into my mortar and pestle and added pepper and salt and ground them up with a few kaffir lime leaves. I then plastered this all over the leg of lamb and added some more garlic to give it a nice coating.
Into the oven for an hour to roast at which point I took it out and added some cut up potatoes which I then doused in olive oil, some more lemon juice and salt and pepper. Back into the oven for another hour or so until done.
No, those potatoes are not rotten - they are some of the leftovers from yet another reduced purchase earlier in the month that I got - purple potatoes. They were just lovely and the colour - well I don't know how to say this but the colour was all the way through and it really did make you do a double-take on what you were eating. Here is the final picture of the roast as it came out of the oven.
And then here is the plate of it along with my annual egg nog that I make each year but I do vary the recipe in as much as I don't use the alcohol called for but use dark rum instead. I'm not sure why I prefer it to the others which I have tried - it's just how I like it.
So there you have it - dinner on a budget but really it wasn't difficult nor did it break the bank. I used the left overs on Boxing day. All I did was cut up an onion and add some olive oil. I sautéed that for about a minute then added the potatoes chopped up into cubes. I left that to cook for a few minutes while I chopped up the meat and again added that. Cooked it until warmed through and that with some glazed carrots was another meal. I still had enough to make a lunch meal and saved the bone to throw into a thing I call garbage soup...yet another posting as this one is so long! So do stop by for another adventure in culinary dining on a budget!

Winter comfort foods

There is something about winter and making comfort foods. I tend to always cook and bake more in the winter months than the summer ones. Not that I don't bake or cook in the summer time but I tend to make stews and soups much more now than in summer. Summer is about enjoying the weather and in England it changes so quickly you have to enjoy all the sunshine you can get!

Over the weekend I made some split pea soup - lovely. The chunks of carrots and potatoes made it more like a chunky feast that needed a fork rather than a spoon. I also made a loaf of bread which went nicely. J usually likes cream crackers with his soups but with my home made ones he doesn't use them - doesn't want to adulterate them! Awwww, how sweet.

Now a bit more about the reduced aisle. Unfortunately, the nearest thing you can find reduced in America is when it's on sale. Over here in the UK when something is coming close to its sell by date the store staff reduce the item's price by usually half if not more depending on what it is and does it sell.

I am quite lucky and find a lot of things that I continually use reduced. I also go through these phases where I find the same things consistently reduced. For instance, I love hummus and I might go through a few weeks of always finding this reduced then it will be organic produce, or something similar. I try to shop at least three sometimes four times a week for my fresh vegetables and fruit so this provides me with ample opportunity to scour the usual reduced aisles.

I'm not sure what others do but for me and J this provides plenty of variety of what I might find but also allows me to try new recipes without having to get numerous ingredients at top prices. I usually have a well stocked larder and pantry so the basics and staples are almost always there and available. It also is economical as I am not making a mint in money and have to make it stretch.

Do you buy reduced? Is there anything that you wouldn't buy on the reduced aisle? I don't think there's much I wouldn't buy except for things that look off or I know are well off.