Fishy Pies for the freezer and your tum-tum

Make a huge mahoosive pan of veggie mixture, you can use the cheapest bag of frozen veg, something like 60p, an onion, bit of garlic, chuck in a cheap tin of baked beans, a squirt of ketchup or barbecue sauce, anything goes, just so long as you end up with a big tasty pile of cheap veggie mixture, cook it up and leave it to cool. The next day would be best as it leaves it time to mingle too.

So get your self some foil dishes, the sort with lids, like you get from some take-aways , use the tin foil sort, not plastic as these will going in the oven from the freezer. 

Pop to the piscean produce purveyors and purchase a packet of pollock. This works out to about 43p per piece of fish.

Plop the sloppy jalopy & fish in the tin foil dish, make sure the fish is straight out of the freezer and you are putting it in cold veggie mixture as it will all be going back in the freezer any minute now. 

Instant mash, this stuff is 20p a bag, tastes great and is just like real spud if you treat it right. 

Just use half a bag to start with as it goes cool and difficult to work with quite quickly, half a bag will cover two fish pie dishes.

Add a pinch of dry mustard and a pinch of vegetta or salt if you prefer

After I mixed the mash, I put it back in the bag it came from, snipped off one corner with the scissors  and piped the potato on top of the pies. makes life so much easier. 

Pop the lids on and freeze immediately. When you want to eat one, cook it from frozen for about 40 minutes at gas 4 or 5 depending on your oven. Put some grated cheese on top for extra yummishness. I reckon one tray/dish will feed a hungry me on its own or two hungry me's with garlic bread or other accompaniment
Frozen veg 60p
Onion 10p
Beans 20p
Potato 20p 
Fish £1.75
Round it up to 3 quid for 4 big 2 portion dishes
37 and a half pence per meal. 
Shut up!

Vertical pork chop casserole

6 pork chops found marked down to £2.50 from a fiver. Skewer them through just under the fat and suspend them in a deep enough ovenproof casserole type dish. Season, oil etc and leave to marinade in the fridge while you prepare the veg.

Take the rack from the dish and place enough chunks of frozen spinach to cover the base of the dish.

Add some chopped red onion. and chopped leeks.

Dont over fill it, as you will have to put the chops back in.

Tuck the chops back in, I did this by removing half the veg mix, putting the chops in and tucking the rest of the veg around it and some of the thinner bits in between the chops.

As I haven't actually done this before, due to only having just thought of it, I decided to place the glass lid back on to keep moisture in and stop the tops from going brown too soon.

I'm cooking these quite low in the oven at about gas 4 for an hour to start with and see how it goes, while it is cooking I am uploading these pictures and writing this blog.
I will let you know later if it turned out well or not :-)
Fingers crossed.
Warning, do not, under any circumstances, actually cross your fingers while cooking, not only is this dangerous, by virtue of the fact that it will hinder your dexterity, but there is also no proven causal link between ritualistic culinary gesticulation and the eventual edibleness of the food being prepared.

The Finished pork product, While I was toasting the ciabatta to make garlicy I took the pork out of the dish and stirred a packet of noodles in the the spinach and leek malarkey and blimey Charlie it was tastier than a very tasty thing. Loads of bold flavours, making it quite a rich and filling dinner over all.
Garlic  spinach and leek being at the forefront and with carbs in the bread and noodles bringing up the rear, a surprisingly satisfying winter dish, on a scale of forty winks to food induced coma, this was in the region of after dinner snooze in front of the box., waking up in time for Downton and pudding.

Super cheap, after Christmas snack shopping.

Look at these goodies I found in various shops. At this time of year, all the supermarkets and little corner shops are knocking stuff down like Billy-Oh. The pork stuffing is basically the same amount of meat as you would get in a pack of sausages, but for 38p, bargain! 20p for the salad, genius!

The super tasty houmous was found in Waitrose for 10p, usually £1.49p  Cheap as chick peas!

and these rolls, it's a good idea to pop into a Waitrose or an M&S Food just before it closes as they always have something reduced as they tend not to keep as much for the next day, these roll were 5p each, usually 3 for a quid. I bought about two quids worth and filled my freezer up.  

I cooked the herby pork stuffing as directed, although you could make them into sausage or burger shapes quite easily, on one of them I spread about a tablespoon full of sandwich pickle just to experiment and it worked, made it even more tasty.  

I grilled the inside of the rolls, dolloped a big dollop of tasty houmous in, a handful of salad, a chunk of sausage and a drizzle of sauce. SCOFF!  

So, rolls, fillings and everything 20 pence a pop or there abouts.
ENJOY!

Cheap FAT FREE Christmas flavoured muffins 8p each.

LOOK! A cats paw print inside an orange. Is the creator a cat? Could this explain string theory?

anyhoo on to less philosophical matters, food. To start off with I took two tablespoons of mincemeat from a jar, put it in a wee bowl with juice from a norange and and some booze., left it to mingle

100gs Self raising flour, you can get SR flour from any of the major shops for about 50p for a 1.5 kilo bag. I tried to work out how much 100gs would cost from that, less than five pence, if anyone can get a closer answer, please let me know.For reason of clarity I shall round it up to 5p to add it all up later.

a well buttered muffin tin

100gs caster sugar. about ten pence worth I reckon. so 15p so far

see? 100gs

smoosh three eggs and sugar and get plenty of air in there, I used a leccy whisk for that. Eggs are about £1,25 for 15 at Asda etc so 25p for the eggs. 40pence so far

pop a bit of unsweetened coco powder in with the flour, I have no idea how to work out the cost of a tablespoon of coco so lets say five pence, it cant be more than that surely. 45pence all in so far

and sieve into the eggy sugar mix, fold it in with a spatch, you need to fold not whip at this stage or you will kick the air out of your intended sponge mix, while you are doing this bit also fold in the mincemeat and booze you mixed together earlier.

I used a medium sized ladle to make sure each cup was equal

licky bowl a clock

15 to twenty minutes in a gas 5 oven and they should be all yumpshous and scofapig. SIX muffins for under 50 pence. NOM

leave them to cool, or not, its entirely up to you

for my next batch I cut out wee circle of grease proof paper to stop them from having sticky bottoms

start again with the 100gs sugar and three eggs, remember, lots of air at this stage.

this time I put half the sponge mix in the tins but without coco powder, dropped in a tangerine/satsuma segment in each one

quickly mixed in a tablespoon of coco into the remaining mix and dolloped it evenly in. so when they cook, they become marbled. 

gas 5 15-20 mins again

and viola, a heap of Christmasy muffins

and this is what the marbled ones look like inside, mmmmmmm 12 muffins for a quid.
Oh and they are lovely fresh our of the oven with cream.

Birds love my fat balls.

Something a little different for this blog,
keeping our feathered friends happy and fed during the cold weather. 

When you spend a lot of time cooking and kitchening, you realise that there are some things that you just cant save for human consumption even if you are an avid believer in never throwing anything away.
If you have a big enough freezer, you can save fat and stock from meats for stews/dripping etc but you never get to use it all. No wukkas me old China-plate, just save it 'till winter.
Get a big mixing container like the one in the picture and lob your nuts in it, with the renderings of the various animals you have consumed throughout the year. For binding, I also throw in bits of bread, crackers, bacon rind, bird seed mix, pretty much anything apart from Mars Bars and chocolate etc because despite what you may have heard, birds aren't that keen on chocolate.
 

I covered a 12 hole fairy cake tin in foil and pressed each fat ball in to the dip. I have experimented with setting looped string into them for hanging the fat balls from the tree, but don't bother, it really is pointless, because five minutes of even the daintiest of birds pulling your nuts out will have your balls all over the shop. 

Squish all the mix together good and tight, so the bread and fat bind and help the nuts and seeds stay in place. You can put these in the fridge or freezer and take them out when needed, just leave them on the grass or bird table but they work very well in the round hanging cages you can buy for putting nuts in.

So go on, feed the birds from your left overs, Don't throw anything away.

Home made mincemeat for home made Christmas pies

My mincemeat was made from a bag of Tesco's VALUE mixed fruit with a few tots of Cointreau and a mulled wine bag

warmed it up in a pan for a while turned the heat off and left it to mingle for a couple of hours

chucked it in a filo sheet with some apples that came off trees for free, trees are good like that.

some with just mincemeat, some with apple and mincemeat and some with roast chop nuts in

oh look , a bit fell off. who had that then?

fat ones with apple and mincemeat, thin ones just mincemeat.

an aerial view

oh and with cream on for some reason makes them better. odd that