Cheap recipes - free downloadable books

Eyeore

Just wanted to pop in and say a big thank you to Greying Pilgrim for the pictures and for trialling the recipes - fantastic! I hope to try some over the next month.

Greying_Pilgrim

Hello Dear Reader :wave:

Eyeore - thank you so much for your kind words and encouragement. In truth, Leanne has made it easy to use her recipes for a challenge/experiment, as many are so simple, and yet so tasty

Tonight I needed a 'tea in a hurry' and something that would not need half the kitchen space and create 3 sinks worth of washing up So I went for Leanne's 'Lightly Curried Butternut Squash Soup' the recipe for which can be found on pg 40 of Good and Cheap.

I substituted celery for green bell pepper, as I had no bell peppers of any colour I also used coconut powder in the soup, rather than coconut milk - simply because I have it in my store cupboard - either work I should add too, that I got my butternut squash from Ald* several weeks ago, it wasn't huge, but cost about 49p? iirc, so this can be a relatively inexpensive dish to make - I got 2 'main course' sized bowls of soup out of it.

I think that the soup was OK - not sure that it is the 'best' BNS soup I have ever eaten, but it was good, and a very simple recipe, both in terms of ingredients and method. It's probably worth putting on the 'keeper' pile My only *observation* would be that if you are not necessarily used to making spicy dishes, or are wary of using chilli, I would say that I was a bit surprised at the 1 tsp of Cayenne pepper given in the recipe. If your pepper is fresh, it can be quite fiery. Better to add 1/4 or 1/2 a tsp at a time, imho

And I hadn't any 'interesting' toppings, so I just satisfied myself with making a batch of wheaten soda farls - based on THIS recipe to which I had pressed some pumpkin seeds into the top. I cooked the pumpkin seeded top last, so that the seeds wouldn't burn.

Pic here;



Greying

Greying_Pilgrim

Hello Dear Reader :wave:

Dinner this evening? Well, well, well. Miss Leanne has been, gorn & dunnit again! She has managed to make a recipe - that previously (long-time since) had tripped me up - accessible :j

Tonight I made Leanne's Broccoli and Mozarella Calzone from pg 80 of Good and Cheap I actually made the 'fast' pizza dough recipe (From Scratch pg 45) from last Friday night to make these - but it varies very little from the recipe that Leanne gives. I used mrM frozen broccoli in place of the broccoli rabe that Leanne uses. Broccoli rabe is very like PSB, but all green. I used mrA smartiepricie Mozzarella - x2 so 86p. The result? LUSH



I couldn't get them to brown as much as Leanne proposed (I blame my oven), certainly not in 6-8 mins, but those on the plate were actually quite crispy and the 2 that got left in the oven whilst we ate got better colour;



All I did differently to the recipe was use a little red onion in addition to the garlic, chilli flakes, broccoli and cheese. The cheese was oozy, the broccoli tasty and the dough crispy YUM! Certainly filling. We will see what the 2 other calzones taste like cold. Those are m&$ YS'd potatoes with the calzones, and a chilled glass of soave compliments the pic

I will definitely keep that recipe in my collection. It may well inspire me to experiment with tomato based calzone too (my previous attempt was tomato based, but I think that I didn't roll the dough thinly enough, and my oven at the time, was too cool). Edit: in writing up this recipe to my index, I forgot to say that I omitted the anchovies that are in the original recipe. We don't eat fish, and it would simply add another layer of cost to the dish.


Greying

Upsidedown_Bear

I am, as always, hungry after reading your posts.

Greying_Pilgrim

Ha ha, Upsidedownbear, you always have the best smilies and graphics collection

Greying

Greying_Pilgrim

Hello Dear Reader :wave:

For dinner last night, I made Leanne's baked beans from pg 101 of Good and Cheap (her version, not her dad's) and teamed them with baked potatoes (last of the M&$ YS'd) and sprinkled some cheese over.



I used some frozen black beans and frozen haricots with a tin of red kidney beans for my bean combo. The haricots were a little overcooked in the first place, so they have thickened the sauce a little more than if all your beans were whole. I used a spoonful of Dijon mustard and a spoonful of wholegrain mustard. The chilli was provided by some chipotle powder. I blitzed a tin of chopped tomatoes (as per the recipe) and worried that they were going to make the dish a very light pink, however, they quickly darkened with cooking.

The beans were OK, I thought that they were going to be too sweet at one point, but they seemed to even out with the addition of chilli. They taste (as you'll appreciate) like no commercially produced baked beans you have ever tasted (for me this is a plus ) so I suspect children will view them with suspicion........ :rotfl: In addition, I wouldn't have thought that they were any cheaper than a tin of BB's off the supermercado shelf. A reasonable recipe though and a good standby for a quick supper. But if your family are wedded to the manufacturer of '57 varieties', then this probably isn't the recipe for you

Just to follow up on the calzones; we had one cold for lunch yesterday. They were OK, but I think that I prefer cold pizza. However, I did wonder whether the fact that the filling was broccoli - never that appealing cold - swayed my opinion a bit. Perhaps if I had made mozzarella and tomato calzone, I would have thought them lush, hot or cold?

Greying

Greying_Pilgrim

Hello Dear Reader :wave:

Tonight's dinner, was, again, courtesy of Leanne Brown's Good and Cheap - I had a bash at the Vegetable Jambalaya on pg 97. I thought that it was a good dish. Perhaps not as good as the Jambalaya from the blog that moneyistooshorttomention introduced me to, but again, in terms of simplicity of recipe and simplicity of ingredients, Leanne has nailed it, and I think that it is probably a keeper of a recipe for those two factors alone Picture here;



The recipe calls for 3/4 cup of rice, which works out to about 140g. Now, it is supposed to feed 6.... but as I generally tend to allow 75g (dry weight) rice per person in a meal, it made 2 adult, main meal portions for our dinner. We were satisfied, not stuffed and we had been physically active all day, so it fulfilled our needs.

I filled the other side of the plate with shredded cabbage - one that I bought YS'd in mrW more at the start of the month, so it needed using up I did add in some fried mushrooms (YS'd) to the Jambalaya, as I need to keep my last 2 veggie sausages for the dish for tomorrow night's dinner, and we had beans in our lunch, so I didn't really want to use them again in our evening meal.


Greying

Greying_Pilgrim

Hello Dear Reader :wave:

For dinner, Miss Leanne provided for us again I made the 'chorizo* and butterbean ragu' from pg 143 of Good and Cheap and served it with wet polenta (cornmeal) as suggested by Leanne and I used up the last of a YS'd romanesco cauli I'd got from m&$. Interesting that a tin of butter beans is 33p (3 for £1 in HB) and yet that portion of cauli, even YS'd was 20p :eek: Picture here;



*Rather than chorizo, I used 2 veggie sausages, fried, sliced up and added to the dish.

Xspender has already made this dish, and reported it a little bit bland, if made as per recipe, so I bore that in mind as I was cooking and I added paprika and some herbs. I was toying with the idea of adding smoked paprika, but I think that I will save this for another time - maybe teaming with some chopped up red pepper.

I think that this - for us, here at Greying Towers - is a keeper of a recipe. It is precisely the sort of thing that we would eat - and absolutely perfect autumnal food. :T Miss Leanne, you've done it again I probably added a few more butter beans than specified in the recipe, but a drained tin of beans doesn't yield the full 11/2 cups specified in the recipe, and I would rather 'bung them in' than keep them in the fridge, forget about them and have to throw them out :D

The wet polenta was my usual recipe of 175g cormeal/polenta, 700g hot water, half a stock cube, salt, pepper and whatever seasonings that I wish to add in to make it scrummy The romanesco was steamed.

Greying

Greying_Pilgrim

Hello Dear Reader :wave:

Dinner last night, last day of September, was the last recipe on my list from Leanne's books I went for a pasta option, which considering it was planned over a month ago, was fortuitous, - as we ate late. Pic here;



I made pasta with cannellini beans, tomato and smoked paprika - which is in 'From Scratch' as a pasta suggestion on pg 58 (ie not a recipe).

I actually used haricot beans, as I had them. I have to say, this was like pouring a can of '57 varieties' onto a bowl of pasta. It didn't work for me. We work hard, but even we don't need this type of carb load. If I was a chesnut logger in the Italian mountains, this type of meal would be brill, but I'm not. So..... And I have to say, it didn't really taste of anything. First real fail of Leanne's books to my mind She's right about pasta and beans combo's being done in Italy, but I don't know how they do it better - but I've a lot to learn, clearly

I have thoroughly enjoyed using Leanne's recipes over the month - both the $4 a day book and 'From Scratch'. I tried 21 recipes over the course of September, of which 15 we liked well enough, and of those, 12 - that's a whole dozen recipes - have been put onto the 'keeper' pile and I'll repeat What a good ratio of keeper recipes - I never get that kind of ratio in the lastest 'celeb' cookbooks.

In addition to Leannes recipes, I made some recipes from Jack Monroe's book this month, and a couple of internet recipes. Without doubt, it has saved me money. I haven't counted up precisely, but it has shaved approximately £10 off my food budget, so 10% :j

If you've not already done so, I'd urge you to have a look through Leanne's PDF's (links at the start of the thread). These are high quality books and recipes that are free for everyone; created by a lady that really is passionate about improving cooking and eating for everyone.

Thank you so much for reading and supporting this thread

Greying

Greying_Pilgrim

Hello Dear Reader :wave:

Well, although my official meal-planner project of using recipes from Leanne Brown's 2 PDF cookery books has finished with the close of September, I had another bash at a recipe, and thought you may like to see the results

I already had a go at Leanne's 'Peach Coffee Cake', (pg 156) from Good and Cheap - but used YS'd plums that I had dropped on. Well, last night, I had a go at actually using 'peaches' for a peach coffee cake - there's novel!:rotfl:

I bought some tinned peach slices in H0me BArg1ns - they were in grape juice and cost 35p for a 400g tin (250g drained weight).

I made half the cake mixture again, but used most (I should say a good 75%) of the peaches, which I drained through a sieve and then I cut up into bitesize pieces (actually just used my hands to tear them apart). The result was this;



The taste is lovely - and it is a perfect match for a nice cup of coffee And as it was only half the recipe mix, I think that it would be a very economical cake to make - as it still makes a decent sized cake. It could easily provide 6 quite nice size slices.

I'm definitely popping this recipe into my index file and keeping my eyes peeled for reasonably priced tins of fruit in fruit juice - in addition to barginous fresh fruit, natch

Greying

PS - sorry for the not very good photo - taken in artificial light, once the cake had cooled last night But the only way to ensure that you got to see the whole cake :rotfl: #lunchbagfillingtime