The frugal cook adapts recipes
Are you a frugal cook or do you find you have to rush out to buy expensive ingredients for a particular recipe? This can bust your budget and lead to waste if you don’t find a way to use these items up in other dishes.
I made a banana loaf the other day with some very black bananas that no one was going to eat. I used this Delia recipe as my starting point, but as I didn’t have any walnuts or oranges I substituted brazil nuts and dried cranberries. It was really delicious!
The frugal cook needs to be able to do this: either adapt recipes or make meals up to suit what you have. If you don’t have an expensive ingredient like sundried tomatoes try fresh or tinned with some tomato purée. No shallots? Use ordinary onions. If you don’t have dried porcini mushrooms, the usual fresh sort will work ok.
To be a frugal cook, make sure you have plenty of store cupboard staples. Flour and baking powder, tinned tomatoes, tomato purée, tinned or dried pulses, pasta, rice and noodles spring to mind.
Bargain buys for the frugal cook
Casserole sauces bought cheaply from places like Approved Food and Home Bargains are good for days when you can’t be bothered or don’t have time to cook from scratch. Tinned veg is handy to have. Canned tuna or sardines can make a good quick meal.
I also like to keep a stash of frozen vegetables. There is no waste with frozen and you can used just as much as you require. Eggs and cheese are good to have in the fridge, and a pack of bacon can add flavour and interest to all manner of dinners.
No food in the house?
What to do if you think there is no food in the house? I know there are some folk in dire straits who genuinely have very little. However for most of us, this just isn’t true.
Have a good look in the store cupboards. I bet there is a ton of food in there. You may not be able to make a meat and two veg type of meal, but how about a lentil shepherds pie or veggie curry for a change? If you can make a tomato sauce from onions and tomatoes, you can build it into a veggie casserole with courgettes , carrots, lentils, etc. and make some dumplings to go with it. Or use it to make a pasta sauce with garlic and peppers, or a bolognese with some mince meat. Add and taste as you go along.
Mess about with curry powder, cumin and chilli to add a bit of spice to what you have. Eggs can make an omelette, a quiche, or you can crack them over your tomato and pepper sauce and bake them the oven. How about curried eggs? If you have flour you can make pastry. What do you have that will go in a pie?
A veggie classic
If you have cheese, onions and potatoes you have a veggie classic: cheese and potato pie with no pastry needed. Mash the spuds and mix in sautéed onions , plenty of cheese and some seasoning. Yummy with baked beans !
Use up all the bits of veg in a stir fry with noodles or rice. Make all kinds of fillings for a jacket potato with whatever you can find. And if you really can’t be bothered to cook, there is nothing wrong with the odd ‘something on toast’.
Use recipes as inspiration and as a guide for quantities rather than feeling you need to slavishly follow them. Don’t be afraid to make something up. You might find you are a very creative frugal cook, able to summon up a great meal from an apparently empty larder.
Remember also to use up your leftovers! Food waste is a serious issue and is like tipping your money in the bin.
Are you a frugal cook? What are your top tips to make something from store cupboard staples?
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I usually make walnut and banana bread from overripe bananas, but I will look at this recipe. I don’t buy ready made sauces as I have never liked any, they taste synthetic and very acidic as well, and are filled with all kinds of things more akin to a laboratory than a kitchen. But we do have veggie curry, which is delicious and veggie lasagne, and I have lots of store cupboard staples, such as pulses, flours, baking powder and so forth. And cans of beans – borlotti, haricot, red kidney, etc. I know some canned veg are meant to be good, but I still can’t bring myself to use canned carrots or peas. I use frozen peas (doesn’t everyone?) and turn that into minted pea soup – that can be made in 15 minutes, start to finish, totally yum!
I often improvise in recipes. My husband says “This is nice but I don’t suppose we’ll ever get it again.” He’s right – because next time it will be something else that gets substituted!
It’s always possible to put a meal together because I always have a selection of tinned and dried pulses in stock. Lentil cottage pie is one of my favourite meals. Other store cupboard stalwarts include cartons of tomatoes, pasta (which I don’t like but my husband does, tinned fish, cheese and eggs. I’m never without frozen peas or cauliflower. The latter is excellent when cooked until soft, mashed and used as a thickener for soups and casseroles.
I make lots of soup with parsnip, apple and potato being my favourite.
I love toast, preferably with marmite and cheese!
Haha – I hear the same! But it is wonderful how the same basic ingredients can turn out so different with very little variation!
The last thing I made using bits and bobs was a vegetable soup, actually more of a stew which I ate over some rice. Any leftover bananas go in the freezer for smoothies or as a base for popsicles.
I made a sort of ratatouille the either night and did the same. I enjoy that sort of a meal
Actually, that sort of meal is a favorite of mine, too. Happy weekend.
It’s good to hear that people use up leftovers and that we have the imagination to create something from store cupboard odds and ends. I keep reading about how much food we throw away but I can honestly say that food wastage in my house is virtually zero. I hate waste!
2 of the best tips I have found:
1. Don’t bother buying ‘fancy’ beans; buy the cheapest supermarket tinned baked beans and rinse off the sauce with cold water – perfect haricot beans without any of the hassle of soaking.
2. Buy the biggest punnet of budget-priced mushrooms; take out of plastic punnet and put mushrooms on newspaper overnight. This removes the internal moisture in the mushrooms and they will shrink a bit. Cover with tea towel. The mushrooms will dry out so you can put them in a jar and they will keep for as long as any shop-bought dried mushrooms – at a fraction of the price and just as intensified taste.
That’s a great tip with the mushrooms. I’m fairly successful using a paper bag
and putting them in the salad drawer of the fridge but that takes up a lot of room.
I’m off to buy some to try your tip! Thanks.
Sue
Plans changed yesterday and I couldn’t do the meal I’d planned. We got home at 7pm and by 730pm we were eating jacket potato with beans and cheese and a small salad of cabbage ( no lettuce ) chopped onion ( no spring onions) cucumber and tomato with a dressing made of olive oil and balsamic vinegar ( no salad cream ). Today it’s beef stew with yellow sticker beef (£2 for 500g), onions, some rather sad looking mushrooms, carrots, cauliflower stalk, broccoli stalk and the beans that were left from last night all thrown in my slow cooker with leftover gravy that was frozen. and some that was left from Sunday. I do have a couple of jars of ready made sauce in but usually cook from scratch Leftover lettuce and cucumber gets frozen with all my veg peelings and turned vegetable soup when I have enough. Potato peelings get frozen and when I have enough they’re thawed, sprinkled with garlic salt and a little oil and baked until crisp in the oven. Leftover wine (!!!!!!!!) gets frozen and added to casseroles. Any bread that is left gets whizzed into breadcrumbs and frozen. Oil from cans of tuna, sardines or the occasional jar of sundried tomatoes gets kept and used to start pasta sauces or soup. Absolutely nothing gets wasted. As far as I am concerned if you waste food you may as well not buy it and just throw the money in the bin 🙂
Fantastic. Sounds like you totally have this sorted
I do most of this including adding old salad to any meal I’m cooking.
Salad keeps a lot longer since I adopted Sue from “our new life in the country”
who decants her salad into a sealed plastic bag with a dry kitchen roll sheet at the bottom.
This absorbs the moisture and the leaves stay fresh rather than going slimy. Thanks Sue.
I love your idea of making crisps out of potato peelings and must remember to scrub my potatoes well before peeling!
Sue
Today has been a ” use up “day, shopping tomorrow, and I have made 4 bean and veg pasties, 12 jam tarts ( value beans and jam ) cream of veg soup, lentil dahl in slow cooker and bombay potatoes, all yummy and cost about £2.50 the lot! We love these chuck it in and see recipes, some people might have thrown the veggies out but it is so satisfying to make something from nothing!