50p a day til Christmas - healthily?! Weezl's next challenge...

spotdogkez

CW18 - have you tried adding breadcrumbs to your mince dishes. It was a tip I got from one of the forums on here. They soak up some of the liquid and flavours and you can't see them at all. I have now added breadcrumbs to a couple of different dishes and no-one (including DH who is very fussy) has noticed/mentioned any difference in the meal and they certainly help to stretch the mince.

cw18

not tried breadcrumbs in mince -- but I don't seem to be able to make them with any success I have some 'rescued' bread in the freezer at the moment to try again, but based on past results I'm at least half expecting it to end up with the birds :eek:

Lesley_Gaye

frugalswan wrote: »

Lesley Gaye - thank you so much for that!! I've had a bag of gram flour in my cupboard for ages (and it's now approaching the use by date), but now I can make something fantastic to put in my lunchbox for work

In other news, I haven't been very frugal today, but I did get my wedding dress.

I'm still using bags that have a use by date that I am too embarrassed to tell you and it is fine. I bought loads of it from an online site, have been searching to try and find the name of the site, but I can't find it and I can't quite remember what it was called. It was something like the Spice Club.

I have successfully used gram flour as a pastry case, make in the usual way, but you need to just press it into the tin as it is almost impossible to roll out. I have used it as a quiche base and baked it blind and filled it with sauted veg mixed with tandoori spice and a little fontina cheese - it was yummy. I have also successfully used it as a pancake flour.

Or finely slice some onions and mix with seasoned gram flour batter, shallow fry the mixture and you will have onion bhaji's - yum.

I used a lot of it at one time, hence the bulk buy, but then went off it for a while, hence the old use by date!

spotdogkez

cw18 wrote: »

not tried breadcrumbs in mince -- but I don't seem to be able to make them with any success I have some 'rescued' bread in the freezer at the moment to try again, but based on past results I'm at least half expecting it to end up with the birds :eek:

Admittedly, I do blitz the slices of bread either in my food processor or with my stick blender.

cw18

tried the food processor -- ended up with a doughy mess!! guessing it's probably the cheapy bread we normally use

Plum_Pie

Seakay wrote: »

Plum Pie, could you give us the recipe for your brown rice and coconut and currant flapjacks? They sound really good!

Hello Seakay,

Sorry, must be my bad punctuation!

I batch cooked brown rice AND THEN baked coconut and currant flapjacks.
I used a basic flapjack recipe and then added (approx) 2 dsp dessicated coconut, 1 extra dsp butter and 3 heaped dsp currants. No rice involved. I'm quite an off-hand cook unless baking bread and cakes!

I also discovered a jar of peanut butter with 2 teaspoons in the bottom of it at the back of a cupboard last night. The use by date was April 2008 and as the mould on peanuts is one of the most carcinogenic know to man, I chucked it out. (I couldn’t see any mould on it!) I then made mashed potatos including steaming the spuds with bay leaves, best before date… Dec 2007! I've been storing them in an air-tight jar though so they still have tons of flavour.

Re rising food prices. I find every time I go the supermarket, certain normal items will be yellow-stickered as customers won't pay the increased price so I don't feel too squeezed yet. (Although I don't eat a large quantities meat or dairy, I supposed if I did I would notice!)

Did anyone hear the item on the Today programme about Fresh-and-Low milk? Basically Tesco is reducing by 10p this type of milk ('low' refers to fat content) but their spokeswoman wouldn't say if Tesco or the dairy Robert Wiseman or the farmers would bear this cost or if it would be a permanent reduction.

Plum_Pie

cw18 wrote: »

tried the food processor -- ended up with a doughy mess!! guessing it's probably the cheapy bread we normally use

Try half-toasting it to dry it out a bit? That's what I do.

naturally_2

I think I've hard that stale bread makes the best breadcrumbs? perhaps it could be the water content in the ones you are using, maybe toasting them first would help?

I made batches 2 and 3 of the disasterous fudge saga yesterday. Can't remember if I posted about the first - it was a cross between fudge and toffee, I followed the Nestle instructions, which didn't tell me to beat it so I ended up with a crossbreed! last night same recipe but with white not brown sugar and I whisked the resulting gloop, and its done the opposite - too crumbly! :rolleyes: Can't win, but I think this lot is ok enough to do into a gift for my dad's birthday, as long as I treat it gently (mind you, its going through the post!!)

I halved the batch and put some vanilla essence in one half and, weirdly, a 9p packed of chocolate angel delight care of Mr S basics (weeerl, thought it might work and I don't have any use for cocoa powder so it would have been a waste of money buying a tub of that for a lot more pennies!):rotfl:
... the chocolate one is very chocolatey and really really yummy!! total cost for (the successful) batch of fudge was £1.96:T

cw18

Plum_Pie wrote: »

Try half-toasting it to dry it out a bit? That's what I do.

Will give that a try, thanks for the tip

Herewegoagain

Hiya guys,
Back quicker so as not to get so far behind.
I have used breadcrumbs to bulk out the mince, but also when my boys were younger they hated carrots so used to buy the cheap tinned carrots and mash em down they disappeared in the meal and no one was the wiser, mince went farther and they go more veg also used powdered mash which worked well and cheaper/energy saving.
Boys hated eggs too so they went in the mash pots, they make it taste great,;)
HWGA xx