Two home made loafs/loaves (whatever) of bread for a quid.

OK, start off with a bread mix, Tesco's have a deal on at the moment which makes a bag of this stuff 65p, if you follow these simple guides, you will end up with two tasty loav..loafs ...whatever, of bread, the only other things you will need is a nonion, if you haven't go a nonion, an onion will do., and some cheese for the grating, I used cheddar this time, but parmesan is good as well. Prepare the bread as it says on the pack.
While it is doing its first proving, cut up an onion into tiny pieces, sauté until they start to soften, turn off the heat and leave to cool, grate enough cheese for about 3 slices of cheese on toast....ish.

After the first rising, divide the dough into two halves, roll the first half out flat and decorate with half of the grated cheese and cooked onion.
 

From the longest side, start rolling it up like a Swiss roll and place it in a large flat roasting tin, the kind you would roast spuds in.

and you should end up with something looking like a ..a er....loaf of bread. Drizzle olive oil on the top and I also drizzled a bit of yeast extract because around this time I heard that it makes your bread like Tiger Bread and produces nom nom noises when eaten

The other half of the dough should be rolled out the same as the first, but rather than rolling it up, sprinkle half of the leftover onion and cheese mixture around just the edge of the dough and fold it over like a stuff crust pizza. When you put it in the roasting tin, flip it over so the cheesy onion fold over, is underneath and put the last of the cheese and onion on the top, again use a roasting tin so as to get maximum raising during the second and last proving/raising stage.

raise the dough, covered in cling film, for 40 minutes in a top oven or grill area above the oven so its nice and warm, then bake for 30 minutes or, as they say, until Gorden Brown...no sorry, I mean golden brown, like that record by The Stranglers.

When you slice through it, this is what it should look like, swirls of cheese and onion. I'm going to have to stop typing for a minute and pop to the kitchen to see if the bread is still there and not been eaten...by mice....really big mice.

Raise and cook the other half in the same way and you should end up with a bread that looks like this and taste even better. the one thing about this type of bread though is to eat it quick before it goes off or something....that's what I said at the time  anyway.

Catering for a Bonfire Night/Halloween party 40 quid

This is how the food table ended up looking on the night, it was for a  combined Halloween and Bonfire night type party for grown ups with booze, so the remit was, easy to eat with one hand while trying to stay upright and look cool ...oh and cater for veggies, always odd, cooking for vegetarian vampire party guests.
As well as the usual sandwiches, all veggie by the way, chicken nuggets, sausage, crisps, carrot sticks and dips, I also made a huge veggie chilli, pumpkin soup and spinach and feta filo rolls, instead of sausage rolls.

So I started off with three huge pans and a selection of onions which I mandolined up 

with my mandolin 

into various sizes of cut-ness, as I wanted some shredded, some  diced and some chunky 

Two bags of veggie mince for the start of the chill, I always dry cook my veggie mince in the pan for a while. I find this helps the texture of the whole thing when it is finished, during this stage I will add some flavourings too, in this case some tex-mex mix with extra garlic and chilli and a very large dob of yeast extract, never leave home without it.

Dividing up the onion, diced and small bits into the pan that will end up with spinach, rings and bigger bits in the veggie mince/chilli pan and the odds and sods in what will be the soup pan, that doesn't matter as it will be blitzed later when the soup has cooked down, the larger cut onions take longer to cook and give off more sweetness 

start the 1 kilo bag of frozen spinach cooking down in the onions 

veggie mince, seasoning and onions simmering in olive oil, the smells are starting to release now. It's amazing just how much cooking you can do by nose, you can smell the different stage so you know when to do the next part of the preparation. like getting sauce ready etc

as this was party food on a budget I did of course use only 'smart price' or 'basics' and as I was cooking all the wet dishes the day before the party, there was plenty of time for things like kidney beans to soften and flavours to mingle, if you can, always try to do these sorts of food the day before, curries, stews, soups etc all benefit from a good sitting around doing bugger all, 

so the kidney beans and passata (smooshed up tomatoes) are in the chilli 

as you can see it is starting to get that nice glossy look to it. We can leave that to do its own thing over a very low heat to let it all cook through and meldge. Meldge is a word I made up to to explain this process

Poke and stir, agitate and cajole the sspinach just to make ssure it is paying attention.

Pumpkin soup time, this is my first pumpkin soup ever, usually I roast these kinds of things 

so I hollowed out a pumpkin, fortunately it wasn't a sleepy hollowed out pumpkin. you see what I did there?  I

I savd the outer shell of the pumpkin for decorating later and shoving a candle in it for the party, in the meantime, just cook down the pumpkin flesh with some finely chopped potato, that will help give it some body later

veggie stock cubes, two of, in a pint of hot water, chuck this in the pan  and leave to simmer for about an hour on a low heat.

back to the spinach, after having drained the excess water off, chuck in a whole packet of feta, usually a 200g pack is the size they come in, this is enough for the 1 kilo bag of spinach, in this amount you want to add THE SECRET INGREDIENT and I shall tell you what that is.... NUTMEG, yes that's right, nutmeg makes this the dish that it is, the flavour it imparts is out of this world, I use about half to three quarters of a freshly grated nutmeg.  

at this point I turned around in the kitchen from photographing my cooking, only to see the hound of hell on my heels , note the dinner bowl to right is untouched but she is hounding me for what I'm cooking. 

next I turn my attention to the parsely, freh from the stalk, cut up in a tea mug with scissors , so much easier than on a chopping board. 

lob the parsley in the feta-spinach mix, check the flavour, see it it needs a pinch of anything, you should be able to taste the parsley, feta, spinach, nutmeg equally 

Prep your sheets of filo like this, add olive oil with a brush when needed

roll carefully and not too tight. brush with a butter olive oil mixture before baking, medium heat 20 minutes to half an hour turning once if you can

and they should come out all golden brown like that, you MUST cool these on a wire rack so they don't get soggy bottoms, nothing worse. that was it for day one of cooking. time for a glass or three and to let all that lot settle

so, on to day two, in the afternoon before the party, I cooked up a bunch of cheap sausages in mustard and brown sugar, I also did another lot in balsamic vinegar  

I cooked up a dozen eggs, some for egg mayo in the sarnies and some like this hard boiled , with egg mayo centres, half a black olive and a dob of ketchup to make them look like eyes, Halloween stylee 

I put them on a platter with ripped up hot dogs to make it look like fingers, ha ha finger food, get it? finger foo...oh never mind. 

That's the pumpkin in the corner from yesterday, all carved up, the pumpkin soup was blended in the pan with a hand blender and I didn't get a picture of it as I was too busy, the sandwiches were brown bread, egg mayo with rocket, egg mayo with spicy tomato chutney and grated cheese with the same chutney.  a tray full of spinach/feta filo rolls, chicken nuggets flavoured with texmex seasoning, mustard sausages, dips, bread rolls, veggie chilli, carrot sticks, stuffed vine leaves, monster munch and a couple of packets of dark chocolate fingers in case anyone had a sweet tooth. 

My Jack Skellington pumpkin with sand witches and skull candle

Waiting to be eaten.

just enough time to have a kip and put my make up on. I was meant to a  zombie but I ended up looking Kung-Fu Panda. Oh well.

Cheap and very tasty roast dinners, 50p each.

Start off the potatoes roasting, today I flavoured them with fresh ground black pepper. vegeta seasoning, which you will see me banging on about in my other recipes that I've blogged, and I also used a small sprinkling of sage, this goes really well with potato, about a teaspoon full of sage for a roasting pan full of spuds, enough for four grown up piggies. 

Next, I decided to try making a cheap veggie roast loaf, using a stuffing mix that I found in the back of the cupboard, when I saw it was roast vegetable, I decided to drag a piece of feta type cheese from the fridge

I seasoned the stuffing, very lightly, no salt or vegeta at all because most shop bought things have enough salt in them to kill a slug factory, so a pinch of pepper, a bit of oregano, a tiny bit of garlic powder, and a small spoonful of yeast extract, in an attempt to impart some kind of meaty flavour to the end result. 

Normally I would crumble up cheese like this but I had a last minute flash of inspiration and decided to slice it instead.....and......


slice it to fit the stuffing squished onto a silicon baking sheet, I used the silicon so it wouldnt stick. I then sploshed a good drizzle of olive oil all over the shop.

Time to check the spuds, they are about halfway through, so I can get the  stuffing ready to go in the oven too.

So I rolled the stuffing up like a Swiss roll, hoping that the look off the thing would be nice when sliced and on the plate, I've never done this before with stuffing so fingers crossed.

now this picture may look like a scene from the latest CSI but it is in fact the sausage pan,  a cheap, bog standard pack of sausages, these cheap jobbies are not usually very flavoursome so I decided to put put some bang in my bangers by dowsing them liberally with balsamic glaze  

That's the stuff, it's a lot thicker than usual balsamic vinigar , which you can also so use but this caramelises easier in a hot oven and gives you a very tasty sausage. which is always nice. 

OH NOOOOOOOO. My genius idea fell flat on its bottom.  You know what I did? I unwrapped it too soon after getting it out of the oven. I was impatient to see what I had created and paid the price, but, it was flipping tasty though.

So I dolloped it all on a plate with Yorkshire puds, 45p for a bag of 15 from Sainsburys or 35p for a bag of twelve from Asda, cheaper than chips! Three leeks which I found yellow stickered down to 20p, a splash ov veggie gravy granules which I zinged up using garlic granules and a dob of yeast extract, 

4 dinners of nom nom nominess,
potatoes 30p,
stuffing 80p
leeks 20p
sausages 50p
yorkies 45p (puds, not chocolate bars favoured by lorry drivers)
other bits and pieces probably another 20p ish, so each roast dinner was a bout 50 pence each.