If the first secret of frugal eating is planning, the second is being prepared to change the plan at the drop of a hat. Or more precisely at the drop of a price. It’s why we were unexpectedly eating scrumptious pineapple desserts at the weekend and why we’ll have mushroom soup tonight.

Lidl mushrooms were reduced last week by almost 60% to 49c for a 250g pack. Now that’s a deal.

The problem with most mushrooms on sale these days is that they are actually pretty tasteless, and not just the ones in Lidl either. So, to make a soup with some ooomph, you need to add quite a lot of flavour in the cooking, doing all you can to maximise the soup’s “mushroominess”.

You can do this with careful cooking but also with a little swirl of extravagance at the end.

Pictures of creamed soup are really sort of pointless aren’t they? They just look like coloured liquid. But trust me, this tastes very good!

2 onions, chopped
1 large stick celery, chopped
3 cloves garlic
250g mushrooms
1.5 pints chicken stock
1/2 a small head cauliflower or 1/4 a large one
1/2 teaspoon pesto
1 oz butter
Salt and pepper to taste
50ml cream
White Truffle Oil

Put half the butter in a pan with a lid and melt until it starts to froth. Lower the heat, then add the onions and celery. Sauté until the onions are becoming transparent. Add the rest of the butter and the mushrooms. It’s fine to add the mushrooms whole. Stir the mushrooms to coat them well in the butter as it melts.

Cover the pan with a lid, reduce the heat to low and let these vegetables stew gently for about 15-20 mins. Make sure the heat is low enough that the vegetables don’t brown. The mushrooms should start to release liquid and keep things moist, but if it is getting a bit dry add a few spoonfuls of stock. Then add the chopped garlic and continue stewing for another 5 minutes.

This slow cooking really brings out the flavour of the mushrooms and also makes the onion very sweet.

Put the cauliflower in a saucepan with the chicken stock. Bring to the boil, then add the mushrooms and the other veg. Simmer for about 20 mins or until the cauliflower is soft. Remove from the heat and stir in the pesto.

You can now blend the soup either by pouring it all into a blender or whizzing it with a stick blender. In either case blend until it is really smooth. Return to the heat, stir in the cream. Taste the soup before adding salt and pepper - if you’ve used a stock cube it may well be salty enough already.

Serve with a swirl of white truffle oil on top and crusty rolls on the side.

This makes around 2 pints of tasty, satisfying and very mushroomy soup.

What Did it Cost?

Everything for this soup, apart from the stock which was homemade and the oil which came from a deli, was bought in Lidl. Homemade stock is hard to price so I’ve put the price of one stock cube on it.

Costs: mushrooms 49c; celery 10c; onions 12c; celery 10c; garlic 5c; pesto 5c; butter 15c; cream 20c; stock 25c; truffle oil €1.20.

So the full pot, which is about 4-6 servings of soup depending how hungry you are, costs about €2.60, or around 45c-65c per serving.

A Little (Worthwhile) Extravagance

The truffle oil I’m using cost something like €30, or maybe a little more, for 250ml. It seems very expensive but I used less than half a teaspoon per bowl of soup, which was plenty. Admittedly it almost doubles the cost of the soup!

One of the advantages of getting good value where it’s available is that it allows you to splash out on more expensive ingredients at other times. The truffle oil adds a wonderful deep earthiness to the flavour and turns a good soup into a really special one for what is still a very economical price.

Tags: Mushrooms, Pesto, Recipes, Soup, Truffle Oil
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I know it must seem monotonous, eggs for breakfast every morning, and yes, we eat a lot of eggs, but this is normal for us and not related to the challenge. There is a lot you can do with eggs, not that we always do much with them - this morning was boiled eggs again, as on Day1, but with 2 eggs for him this time.

Cost: 68c.

Lunch will seem boring too because I had exactly the same as yesterday, while he took a packed lunch of cheese and tomato sandwiches, some peanuts and the last slice of melon.

Cost: €1.72

Dinner was more interesting!

We had soup to start, Cream of Cauliflower and Tomato Soup. It’s hearty soup kind of weather - wet, grey and miserable - and this really hit the spot.

Cauliflower has almost magical properties as a soup ingredient. It creates a nice creamy consistency - people invariably think there is cream in the soup - and it complements other ingredients without overwhelming them. This is how I made the soup:

1/2 head cauliflower
1 onion
1 bulb Chinese Garlic (or a couple of cloves of ordinary)
1 pint chicken stock (homemade ideally, but a cube will do)
A little butter
2 portions of frozen tomato soup
1 scallion and some paprika to garnish

Melt the butter in a saucepan over a low heat. Chop up the onion, garlic and cauliflower, including the stalks, and sweat for a few minutes in the butter. Don’t let anything brown, just let the veg soak up the butter. Pour in the chicken stock and bring to the boil. Simmer for about 20 mins or until the cauliflower is quite soft.

Add the two portions of tomato soup - I add them still frozen and let them melt. Blend everything with a stick blender or in food processor. You may find the soup is too thick at this point, as I did, if so just add some extra stock or water.

That’s it. Sprinkle over the paprika and chopped scallion and eat. This is easily enough soup for four large portions, so we’ll have it again tomorrow.

Cost: Premade soup 50c; cauliflower 50c; onion 8c; garlic 8c; scallion 8c.
Total: €1.24, and there’s some left for tomorrow!

Then we had big bowls of Chili with Cheese Crisps.

Every time I make chili it’s a bit different because I tend to use whatever veg I have to hand. But one thing I have found a remarkably good addition is left over mashed turnip - which of course I have today. You wouldn’t think it would work, but it not only thickens the sauce a bit, it adds a slight sweetness to the final flavour which is very nice.

Here’s how it was made on this occasion.

1 onion
2 red chili peppers
1 tin plum tomatos
1/2 tin kidney beans
1 pack of pre-made mince base mix, defrosted
A cup of left over turnip mash

It’s very quick to prepare because the meat is already cooked. I just sautéed the onion and chili for a few minutes, added the rest of the ingredients and then let it simmer while we had our soup

Because we eat low carb tortillas or rice is out (and yes, I realise fudge is not low carb!). Instead I make some cheese crisps, which were a total revelation to me when I first discovered them. They are literally just grated cheese zapped for a couple of minutes in the microwave, are quick to make, nicely crunchy and go very well with chili. Maybe you’ve been making these forever, but if you haven’t I recommend giving them a go.

To make them, grate the cheese and put it in well separated little piles on a microwavable dish. The ones pictured took 2 minutes to cook on high in my 800W microwave, but it’ll depend on the amount of cheese and the power of the microwave. When done they are flat on the dish and just starting to become a little dry - it’s really trial and error to get the timing right.

As soon as they done, slip them off the dish using a spatula or scraper (they’ll be very hot, so be careful) and leave to cool and become crisp.

3 oz of cheese will make 10-12 good sized crisps. You can make them ahead, they stay crisp for quite a while.

Cost: Mince base €1.26; tin tomatos 25c; kidney beads 13c; chili peppers 23c; onion 8c; cheese 75c.
Total: €2.70

That brings the total for today to €6.94, counting the fudge and some peanuts we ate watching TV after dinner. I am running low on some things though. There is loads of veg left, but no bread and just a very small piece of cheese. But there is €5.05 left to spend, so all is good.

Tags: Cheese, Chili, Eggs, Soup, €50 Challenge
Posted in Recipes, €50 Challenge | 2 Comments »

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:

1. Separate the turkey into 2 bags of 2 portions each and freeze.
2. Cut the 400g of cheddar into 8 equal(ish) parts.
3. 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.
4. Sliced up the rest of the cabbage finely and store in a sealed container in the fridge.
5. 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
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