2008
The €50 Challenge: A little preparation
It kind of goes without saying that eating on a tight budget requires at least some degree of planning. It also helps if you can do at least some cooking in advance, if only to avoid the temptation, after a hard day’s work, to blow the budget in the interests of getting food fast and with minimal effort.
So I spent a couple of hours on Sunday getting myself organised.
Some of this involved very minor chores:
- Separate the turkey into 2 bags of 2 portions each and freeze.
- Cut the 400g of cheddar into 8 equal(ish) parts.
- Remove (but don’t discard) the outside leaves of the cabbage. Cut out (but don’t discard) the thick stems from these leaves, then store the remaining leaves in the fridge.
- Sliced up the rest of the cabbage finely and store in a sealed container in the fridge.
- Remove (but don’t discard) the stalks of the broccoli, divide into florets and store in the fridge. Sliced broccoli stalks are great in a stir fry and also make an excellent soup ingredient.
Most of the preparation time involved cooking the minced beef, which will form the basis for 3 dinners this week, and making some soup for the freezer. The two extremely cheap recipes below are, I hope, the main things that will keep me on track this week.
Beef & Tomato Base
This isn’t a recipe for a finished dish, so if it looks as though it’s lacking something in the picture below, that’s because it is! What you end up with is a basic cooked beef mix that can then be used as a base for other recipes and which freezes very well.
800g minced beef
1 large onion
2 stick celery
1/4 red pepper
Garlic to taste (I used 3 bulbs of Chinese Garlic)
1 tin plum tomatoes
Salt and black pepper
1. Prepare the Beef
Fry the beef until it is well browned. I did this in three batches, otherwise there is too much meat in the pan for it to brown properly. As each batch is cooked remove to a dish and set aside.
2. Prepare the Veg
While the beef is browning, chop the onion, pepper, celery and garlic into small pieces. When the beef is done, add all except the garlic into the pan, with a little olive oil, and cook gently till the onion is just transparent. Then add the garlic and the tin of tomato. Season with salt and pepper.
3. Cook the Sauce
Put everything into a large oven proof dish with a well fitting lid. Mix very well. Cover and put into a low oven (140 C) then forget all about it for 3 hours. You can stir periodically if you like, but it isn’t strictly necessary.
This results in a rich meaty sauce, which smells wonderful. Allow it to cool completely, then divide into three equal portions. Freeze two, keep one in the fridge for tomorrow.
Cost Beef €2.89; Onion 10c; Pepper 22c; Celery 20c; Garlic 13c; Tomatoes 25c.
Total: €3.79, or about €1.26 per portion.
Note: I’ll be honest, I don’t usually buy Lidl mince, it is a little fatty. But it tasted very good when it was done and it was extremely cheap.
Spicy Tomato & Veg Soup
This is where I used up all the bits of the veg that I trimmed off but didn’t discard earlier.
1 Onion
5 baby new potatoes, peeled
1/2 Red Pepper
2 stick celery
Stalks of 2 heads of broccoli
Stems of cabbage
1 carrot
Garlic to taste (2 bulbs in my case)
All the above should be chopped roughly
1 tin plum tomatoes
1 tablespoon red pesto
1.5 pints chicken stock
Salt, pepper, paprika and chili powder to taste
Olive oil or butter
Note: Carrot wasn’t on my shopping list, but there was one rather tired looking one in the fridge so I chucked it in. I always have concentrated homemade chicken stock frozen in ice cube bags, but you can use a cube.
1. Prepare veg
Put a little olive oil or butter in a pan and gently fry the chopped onion, potato, carrot, pepper, celery, cabbage stalks and broccoli stems until the onion is just transparent. Keep the hear low - you don’t want the veg to brown. Add the garlic for the last minute or so.
2. Cook Soup
Put the prepared veg along with the tin of tomatoes and the stock into a saucepan, bring to the boil then reduce the heat and simmer gently for 20-30 minutes. Use the broccoli bits as to decide when it’s done - they should squash easily when pressed with the back of a spoon.
3. Zap It
When it’s done, remove from the heat and blend everything. I use a stick blender, but you could just as easily throw the lot into a food processor or blender and zap.
4. Season
Return the blended soup to the saucepan, add the pesto and the seasoning to taste, then simmer for about 5 minutes more. Allow to cool.
5. Freeze
I freeze this in plastic cups covered in clingfilm, which makes it easy to defrost in portion sizes. I got 8 cups, each a little over 1/3rd pint, of good thick soup from the above recipe - actually I had a half cup over, which I just chucked into the beef mix above.
To defrost, squeeze from the cups into a saucepan and heat.
Cost: I’m not going to break it all down - it’s kinda hard to put a price on broccoli and cabbage stalks! - but it comes to under €2.00 for the lot, or about 25c per portion.
Tags: Beef, Recipes, Soup, Tomato, €50 Challenge
July 27th, 2008 at 11:04 pm
Having gone 5 days on €40 on more than one occasion, I have to say that soup is marvellous for this. We have a bunch of two-night recipes, and roast chicken one night will get us two nights of thick chicken soup later in the week.
July 27th, 2008 at 11:09 pm
The best value soup in the WORLD is broccoli and cheese, made using a bag of the broccoli stalks people cut off in Superquinn - and to which you can help yourself for free. There’s always a good few florets in there too, and quite often leek tops as well! You’ll get a huge pot of soup for almost nothing.
Call me mean, but I always leave with a big bag of them. If you find this embarrassing (which I don’t), tell them they’re for your rabbit
July 28th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
Best of luck with the challenge
July 29th, 2008 at 10:29 am
Interesting. Someone brought this site to my attention. As “One who experienced” the Lidl Purchasing Machine, I must say, I find this site slightly contrived and am a “Lidl” suspicious of its objectives. I’d like to think it’s simply a way of championing the view that Irish people should say a big “F*ck You” to the greedy grabbing vultures in our retail sector and by doing this you are welcomed in changing the way of thinking.
However, people will do anything for a scam won’t they? I must say, its a very polished site. Nice photos. Nice ‘Price banners’ too… how very Retail eh? Because, let’s not forget, Retail is Detail, as they say
On the other hand, what if this is in fact ’sponsored’ by the Lidl Payroll and is a counter-active reaction to Aldi’s recent use of Irish Chefs in their leaflet advertising? The disclaimer below means nothing really, as the company’s solicitors could have easily scrutinized the legality of using such a disclaimer as you have done below and found many a loophole in using such a line. Lidl was all about disclaimers if I recall. Sometimes, they would even ‘exclaim’ when a tired worker wanted to leave before 7pm on a Friday, or could’nt change their holidays at a moment’s notice to suit ‘the company’, or had to stay late or work a weekend to satisfy the needs of some trumped up Juvenile ‘Manager’.
The funny thing is, your 50 euro would go a hell of a longer way in any other Lidl country as even ‘they’, the great protector of consumer quality and brand value, are over-pricing food for the Irish Market specifically.
Anyway, I digress. Best of luck with the challenge. Let’s hope Lidl don’t offer you a figure eh, no doubt that disclaimer would have to be rewritten
July 29th, 2008 at 11:11 am
I don’t really have a way of proving I’m not on Lidl’s payroll, but I’m not. And if Lidl offered me a figure I wouldn’t have to change the disclaimer at all, because I wouldn’t take it.
Actually I’m getting kinda sorry I called the site what I did, because it is a little confining in the longer term. I set it up on the spur of the moment after hearing another sniffy radio item about Lidl, and didn’t really expect more than a trickle of people to ever find it.
One of the other reasons I did it was to try out Wordpress and specifically to have a go at making a skin for it, which I’d never done before. So I’m really chuffed by “I must say, its a very polished site.” Thanks
July 29th, 2008 at 11:33 am
great website, well done, easy, clear & clean design, good pics, one of the best wordpress sites i’ve enjoyed.
Thanks!
July 30th, 2008 at 10:35 am
Well, in that case, I can only take your word for it.
And, as an Advertising designer, commend you on your site because it is quite professional and carefully laid out. Your response to my skepticism is also quite professional and your attitude very refreshing compared to some of the flaming going around the web. 
Perhaps your site name has biased my attitude, simply because my experience of Lidl leads me to have a certain, shall we say ‘opinion’ lol. However, if I were you, and forgive me for saying this in a comment section, I would strongly recommend an equivalent site for AldiTreats to back up your stance and show Irish consumers that food is not just about perception of brand and packaging. I shop at Aldi constantly and, having worked for German Discounters I agree 100% that they are by far, well cheaper than every other retailer out there. (Some of their brands are even well-known brands, simply repackaged at a cheaper cost) Although, I have heard, certain Farmers’ food markets, such as that in Liffey Valley Dublin, are also very cheap on fruit and veg etc.
On occasion though, both Aldi and Lidl’s Fruit and Veg suffers during the transport phase and I’v found it sometimes rots or goes off too quick for my liking. I would also never, ever buy minced meat, rashers, sausages or chicken by-products from either of them, as I also would not from Tescos either, because the difference in quality between most retailers’ shelves and the meat from family butchers, especially those with their own herds, is outstanding in taste and fat content. A few euros more from my local butcher is worth it. And if you fry an Aldi rasher next to say a Denny rasher, you’ll see the difference.
So in this case I’m contradicting myself as far as brand goes in some respects. But for all other things, YES, I totally rely on the discounters for keeping my full, yes, full trolley down to 80 euro each week for 2 people. When 50 quid in Tescos would be lucky to get me a meal for one night!
So well done again on the site, it looks great!
July 30th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Thanks again Karl. I agree with you on the meat, which I usually buy mostly from a local butcher who either rears his own or sources it from local farmers. Though I regularly buy Lidl’s turkey steaks and their continental meats and salamis etc. But for this week I went for cheap, and I have to say that it tastes fine, but then it’s just mince and in recipes which would make up for a lot of shortcomings if there are any.
I’ll let someone else do Aldi treats - my life is complicated enough as it is!! Are you out there aldibob????
July 30th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
August 1st, 2008 at 11:10 am
Heh. I know Kate in real life - as in, I’ve actually eaten dinner at her (well provisioned) table. I’ve known her close to a decade, I think, and I can absolutely vouch for the fact this site is not a plant.
Of course, I can’t really prove that *I* exist either, but if I don’t, I’ve built a rather elaborate imaginary life for myself. Hmmm.
August 3rd, 2008 at 12:18 am
Have you tried Lidl’s dry cure rashers, Karl? They’re pretty good.
August 26th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
[...] any sceptics out there, Kate also pointed out that she’s not on Lidl’s payroll (scroll down to comments section). In fact, she was a little sorry about the choice of the name for [...]
December 31st, 2008 at 1:24 pm
I just tried your recipe today and wanted to say thank you, because it was really tasty!