Weezl's phase 1- recipe testing and frugalisation- come one, come all!

wyrdsister

Reporting back for Frugal Chickpea Curry
This was just for two of us since I didn't have many chickpeas, but it was plenty.

100g of finely sliced onions
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 teaspoon garlic puree
2 generous teaspoons of garam masala
1 400g can of chickpeas (220g drained)
1 400g can chopped tomatoes

Fried the onions and garlic in the oil until soft and golden. Then added in the garam masala, tomatoes and chickpeas and left to simmer for around 20 minutes. Result was surprisingly nice! I kept picking at it as it was cooking OH enjoyed it too, he said he would like to have it again anyway.

OH's comments: "Nicer than I thought it would be, with it having no meat in it" *roll eyes*

We had it with a portion of rice each, I calculated the cost earlier and I think it was around 70p (including rice) for both of us. I will do the math later when my brain feels less tired

homegrown_life

Also loving this thread and all the lovely people contributing to it in such a selfless way :kisses3:

I've been to Asda tonight and bought some SP beetroot, some pickled red cabbage, mustard powder and dried peas. Ready to do some testing now

The monthly meal planner looks great, might need to research what some of them are though!!! I am so plain with what I eat!

Regarding the corned beef hash and dumplings, there is a thread here about dumplings without suet, seems you can use marg instead so maybe not completely out of the budget?

Penelope_Penguin

weezl74 wrote: »

I want to start by saying that anyone who works advising people in debt is doing a phenomenal job:T:T:T:T, and I do not want to challenge that in any way. (This is me saying, Penny the work you do is brilliant, I am not at all critical of it.)

Health psychologists have estimated that the effect on health of a serious debt problem is equivalent to the person smoking 75-100 cigarettes daily.

If our family of 4 are allowed as ceridwen says £25 per person per week, then the 4 of them are spending £5214.20 per year on food.

If they could follow our plan they would save £4036.79

It could slice years off the payback time. Years saved of not smoking 75-100 cigarettes a day. That's got to add so much to their life expectancy.

I believe in that.

DH said something else last night which I thought was very interesting. If you gave this family 200-250 per month, and no cooking resources/recipes etc, and this has been proven socialogically, the majority reaction is to live on highly processed foods- microwaved smart price lasagne and oven chips/frying chips, for example, is easy quick and fits into that budget. It's what so many would do and do do when faced with hardship (another kind of Do-do!:rotfl:).

If you halve this budget, as we are doing, then there's simply not enough money for that! It's fresher, it's got more veg, it's cooked from scratch there are no trans fats

So I guess that's my answer to, why not just spend more and take longer to pay off the debt.

I hope it's not too controversial

Thanks for this weezl :T I'm broadly in agreement with your points.

I hope you don't mind me, in a spirit of "saying what I think", responding candidly to it. I'm really not knocking your experiment, and would love for many of my clients who spend upwards of £400/month on food, to have a go at some of it :j

However, many of them have serious mental health issues (as a contributory factor in their debt, or as a result of it; or both ). They often come from backgrounds where they haven;t been taught to cook, and have no facilities to do so (remember some of the families in Jamie Oliver;s experiment in South Yorks :(:( ). Getting themselves out of debt isn;t their main priority - getting through the day is

How do we get these people to see that this is the way forward - fresh, home cooked food, some exercise in the outdoors, giving up the fags and booze, and then paying off their debts :huh:

Do you have the ear of your MP, or local media, weezl

poohbear59

weezl74 wrote: »

another favour: would anyone be willing to look at the various lovely corned beef hash recipes on OS and pick one which could be adapted to fit the asda list and post the linkie for me? I'd be very grateful! I think Mrs Macawber's is very popular

I have corn beef has planned for Saturday night dinner. Have you thought of corned beef and potato pie? It means the tin of corned beef will do two meals.

System

weezl74 wrote: »

First question, if I made 2 batches of the carrot cake in post # 2 how much would I have left of it's ingredients as shown in the currentest Asda list?

Well, I was going to show my workings, but in the end I set all this up in a spreadsheet with multiple tables on multiple sheets, so it's a bit awkward to demonstrate. I have used the data from post 344 for the shopping list, and from post 60 for the carrot cake recipe. And I manually measured out garam masala and baking soda to get a conversion ratio from package weight into teaspoons.

After making two batches of the carrot cake, your store cupboard would look like this (with the ingredients used in the carrot cake highlighted manually):

Apples ... 1,800g
Oranges ... 10
Carrots ... 2260g
Beetroot ... 1,000g
Brown Onions ... 16,000g
Potatoes ... 10,000g
Salted Peanuts ... 400g
Raisins ... 3100g
Dried Peas ... 1,000g
Milk ... 9,080 ml
Eggs ... 22
Spread ... 2,000g
Cheddar ... 809g
Boneless Pork Leg Roast ... 700g
Beef Mince ... 1,600g
Turkey Drumsticks ... 2
Sausage Meat ... 908g
Green Beans ... 2,000g
Cauliflower Florets ... 3,628g
Peas ... 3,628g
Sweetcorn ... 3,628g
Sunflower Oil ... 300 ml
Garlic Puree ... 90g
Garam Masala ... 87.5g
Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce ... 15 tin
Peeled Plum Tomatoes in Tomato Juice ... 14 tin
Corned Beef ... 2 tin
Green Olives Anchovy Stuffed ... 1 tin
Red Cabbage in Vinegar ... 1 jar
Green Pesto ... 2 jar
English Mustard ... 200g
Stock Cubes ... 12
Wheat Bisks ... 48
Porridge Oats ... 3,000g
Self Raising Flour ... 2300g
Strong White Bread Flour ... 13,500g
Lemon Juice ... 250 ml
Bicarbonate of Soda ... 170g
Yeast ... 125g
Granulated Sugar ... 1300g
Pasta Shapes ... 2,500g
Long Grain Rice ... 5,000g
Chick Peas ... 2,000g
Tea Bags ... 80

As long as the basic shopping list doesn't change too much (there are a lot of automatic cross-references which might get difficult to check if I have to add/remove lots of records), I should be able to add recipes to the various worksheets to produce a running total of various menu combinations, and it should (I hope) be fairly quick and easy to do. Just point me at the post with the final version of each recipe, and tell me how many batches you want to make of it. And if you edit a recipe or change the shopping list, please let me know, or everything else will go skeewhiff because the stock control sheet depends on everything else being up to date.

I've been thinking about the wastage-in-preparation issue, and it could be quite tricky to resolve. Probably the easiest solution for everyone (including eventual users of the menu plan) is to specify in the ingredients list the gross weight of the item, prior to preparation. So the 320g of carrots in the carrot cake recipe would refer to the weight prior to peeling and trimming. Does this mean the family might be slightly short-changed on the F&V count of each dish? Probably, but only by a small percentage, and not many items on the shopping list are affected. I thought I had figures on standard wastage levels somewhere, but I can't find them. Anyway, I think it is probably worth ignoring that issue for the moment, as it can always be tweaked further down the line.

Fire_Fox

Penelope_Penguin wrote: »

However, many of them have serious mental health issues (as a contributory factor in their debt, or as a result of it; or both ). They often come from backgrounds where they haven;t been taught to cook, and have no facilities to do so (remember some of the families in Jamie Oliver;s experiment in South Yorks :(:( ). Getting themselves out of debt isn;t their main priority - getting through the day is

Speaking as someone who was on IB for two years (depression, stress, insomnia) I found learning about healthy eating, shopping for groceries and cooking really helped me get through the day! However I knew the basics of cooking and I did have a shared kitchen.

We have a new Jamie Oliver Ministry of Food 'shop' here, and I went in for a chat a few days ago. They have ten groups learning to cook and three years of funding. :j It's a brilliant initiative and I am hoping to volunteer for them (probably just tidying and washing up) as I am presently unemployed. Hopefully it will help some of the many people around here in debt or with disorders of mental health.

Sian_the_Green

I should be able to add recipes to the various worksheets to produce a running total of various menu combinations, and it should (I hope) be fairly quick and easy to do. Just point me at the post with the final version of each recipe, and tell me how many batches you want to make of it. And if you edit a recipe or change the shopping list, please let me know, or everything else will go skeewhiff because the stock control sheet depends on everything else being up to date.

AMAZING!!!!! :T:j:T:j:T

weezl74

Sian_the_Green wrote: »

AMAZING!!!!! :T:j:T:j:T
[/INDENT]

agreed I'm in awe. Avocet you have put a lot of hard work into that I can tell. I feel most humbled and inspired by how hard people are working towards this goal.

Can anyone see any where in the main meals that a portion of mushy peas might work?

Or shall I stick to lunchtime soups with the marrowfats?

Any other uses for marrowfat peas?

Sian_the_Green

weezl74 wrote: »

n meals that a portion of mushy peas might work?

Or shall I stick to lunchtime soups with the marrowfats?

Any other uses for marrowfat peas?

Mushy peas to me scream chips or pies! lol, naughty Sianey
Peas in the onion tart? Or with the rice for the curry? In the risotto?
Pea soup is pretty yummy

weezl74

Penelope_Penguin wrote: »

They often come from backgrounds where they haven;t been taught to cook, and have no facilities to do so (remember some of the families in Jamie Oliver;s experiment in South Yorks :(:( ). Getting themselves out of debt isn;t their main priority - getting through the day is

How do we get these people to see that this is the way forward - fresh, home cooked food, some exercise in the outdoors, giving up the fags and booze, and then paying off their debts :huh:

Do you have the ear of your MP, or local media, weezl

Yes. That experiment was very sobering. People couldn't take on what Jamie was trying to teach. I think he partly pitched it a tad too cheffy, and it required social confidence to teach someone else a recipe which was clearly daunting for some of the participants. But no, you're right, it failed for a reason, and we need to be mindful of that.

So I agree it's a lobbying issue really as well as a 'come up with a neat little list of recipes' solution.

In the second world war, what happened to the people like the clients you're describing Penny? Because rationing meant that people HAD to cook from scratch. What else could they do?


So what are we asking government for?

• Compulsory home economics involving basics like baking bread at school.
• Weighted food taxation against processed foods and a vat remission on products which encourage home baking? ie bag of plain flour 10% VAT, smartprice microwave lasagne 18% vat? (seems to punish Penny's clients before it makes a substantial difference for the better.)
• Part of all means tested benefits to be given as vouchers towards healthy goods?

None of it seems to work

I will think further..... Thank you for your post