If you look down the comments on the ‘About’ page here you’ll see a message from a lady called Jane asking me if I was interested in writing for a student magazine. Needless to say, with my current restricted income, I was VERY interested in doing this, especially since I write about food on a daily basis anyway. 

So Jane and I started conversing over e-mail and she eventually sent me the front page of the magazine. The line on the bottom right of the page caught my attention. “Quick and Easy Recipes.”

Hang on. Is this the stuff I’m supposed to be doing? I wondered if Jane had actually looked through the site because I can’t recall the last quick and easy recipe I posted. Most of my cooking takes about two hours to complete. True, the double G&Ts slow me down somewhat but the timings hardly compare to using a stir in sauce.  

And what does easy actually mean? If the average student is anything like the engineering undergrads I teach, I’d expect them to find operating a microwave a serious challenge.  But that would rule out pretty much any recipe worth writing down.

So I thought long and hard about what to write and eventually came up with…

Spicy breaded turkey cutlets. Cheap, easy and sort-of quick. Plus its a good way of getting rid of unused bread.

The idea is simple. You take these thin turkey steaks, brush them with tomato puree, coat in egg and cover with a mixture of dry breadcrumbs, cayenne, paprika and mixed herbs then fry until cooked. They go pretty well with some cous-cous and courgettes. 

The turkey only takes a minute or two to cook and the preparation time would have been about 15 minutes had  I not been cleaning the kitchen whilst cooking. The pack of turkey, which cost £3.60, would feed three or four easily and the spices hardly add anything to the cost. So I estimate that with a fairly simple cous-cous and courgette accompaniment the price would be around £1.50 for a large meal.

Hopefully it will do for the magazine. I have some turkey left so I might try again at the weekend and see if it can be improved. I think maybe getting some tomatoes and making a garlicky tomato and courgette salsa might work.

Now I just have to think of one more. Maybe this should be a long slow cook recipe that can be left in the oven while the student goes down the pub. Hmmm…..

A bit of a food porn moment coming up here…

Who’d have thought a cola based sauce would make a pork rib look so good?

I’d been vaguely aware of people cooking with coca-cola but never really considered trying it myself. It sounded too weird, even for me. Then yesterday, having decided to have some spare rib chops for dinner, I was surfing the net looking for ideas, quite unsuccessfully. For some reason, if you google for spare rib recipes, you’ll get a hundred million results talking about either barbeque sauce or something chinese and usually hoisin based. I’d already been there and done that. I wanted something more exciting.

Then I found this website. It wasn’t exactly what I was after but it got me thinking. A bit more research yielded a vast source of cola recipes, some from the Coca-Cola website itself and many more from random cookery sites. In the end I did go for a barbeque style recipe but the addition of coke made it exciting enough to be worth trying.

So what did it taste like? Very good, actually. It had more body than lots of barbeque sauces which seem to just be vinegary. I’ll certainly do it again and I won’t be scared of usuing coke in food anymore. 

Even better, this definitely qualifies as a student recipe. The Pork costs about £1.00-£1.10 per rib. The sauce ingredients are mostly things that you’ll have around if you’re into cooking and don’t cost much. I used Coca-Cola but I see no reason as to why other brands couldn’t be used. The other ingredients were an onion, honey, worcestershire sauce, tomato paste, vinegar (white wine or cider is best), cayenne (substitute chilli if necessary)  and paprika (optional).  If it was served over rice instead of mash and some frozen peas, the entire meal would be about £1.55 per portion. Here’s the the recipe!

Due to an early morning flat viewing, I ended up staying in Hammersmith last night and cooking for 3. It was decided that I should do a sweet and sour. Whilst browsing the shelves in Tesco, it struck me that sweet and sour could easily be turned into a budget recipe. Most of the basic ingrdients aren’t expensive at all and, if you avoid doing batter for the meat, it is all pretty easy.

Admittedly, when I make a sweet and sour I do put in lots of stuff that is a little bit pricey. I tend to do egg fried rice with sesame oil and spring onions and throw five spice over the meat. But I was pretty convinced that it could be a much less expensive affair.

So I tried it out, substituting diced turkey for pork. I threw in my usual extras but they certainly could be left out. The turkey worked fine in the dish. It was all very good apart from the batter, which was ok but not as good as I wanted.

Here’s the cost analysis.

1.99 for 620g diced turkey leg,
0.16 for a large onion
0.60 for half a pack of peppers 
0.49 for a can of pineapple chunks in juice
0.04 for a couple of small garlic cloves
0.35 at the very most for cornflour, a pinch of sugar, ginger powder and a dash of vinegar 

That made the sweet and sour dish about £3.65 on its own for three people. Adding a portion (8p) of plain boiled rice made the whole (decently sized) meal £1.30 per portion.

If you wanted egg fried rice, the eggs, spring onions,sesame oil would set you back about 75p more so the meal would be £1.55 per portion.  I also tossed the meat in five-spice. It costs 80p for a jar and I only used a little- so maybe an extra 5p per person.

As for the batter… well batter isn’t my strong point. I guess it would be another 15p per person but I always make too much and it never quite works. It always turns out thick and stodgy or, like last night, a bit insubstantial.

Ignoring the batter, everything was good and we had a nice meal washed down with Champagne. Ok, so it was really Tesco Cava which was on offer. We can’t seem to break away from the student sterotype! The sweet and sour recipe is here. There’s a link to the egg fried rice on there too.

On the last day of the experiment I couldn’t decide what I wanted to make. I found some mackerel at about £5.40 per kilo. This seemed cheap for fish, so I thought I should include it in the experiment, but I eventually succumbed to my craving for pancakes.

I bought the mackerel anyway and decided to do an extra student recipe with it the following night. It had been years since I had eaten it and I could barely remember what it tasted like. There were a few recipes with mackerel and various citrus fruits on the web, so in the end I tried out mackerel and orange fishcakes.

Yes, I know it sounds strange, but it works - trust me! I would do it again. Sharp flavours go well with mackerel. Only a little orange juice and rind should go into the fishcakes so that the orange doesn’t dominate. If you have curry powder around, a little of this can go in too.

I accompanied the fishcakes with rice tossed with chopped coriander, which a lot of Indian shops sell very cheaply. I had peas too, but spinach would probably have been better. The ingredients for 6 fishcakes came to £3.14. That is anough for 3 normal meals or 2 huge ones. The breakdown of the cost is as follows.

£2.60 for mackerel
£0.20 for 300g potato.
£0.09 for half an orange.
£0.05 on curry powder
£0.14 on an egg
£0.06 on 3 slices bread.
Rice will be about 7p per person and frozen spinach would be about 11p. So that makes it £1.23 for a normal portion or £1.74 if you are really hungry. The eggs and bread were leftovers anyway! The full recipe is here.

Now I have had enough of all this cheapness! What am I going to do with all the money I saved? Probably go to Borough Market and buy Ostrich!

I’ve collected all my receipts together (the ones I could find anyway) and come up with a pretty good estimate on this week’s spending.

It went something like this

£1.07 for cereal (A very large pack of Tesco sugar-free muesli). There is a fair bit left.
£0.96 for milk (3 pints Tesco semi-skimmed)
£0.38 for a loaf of bread. About 5 slices are left but it’s on its last legs.
£0.64 for on cucumber for sandwiches.
£1.50 on tuna for sandwiches
£0.74 on an enormous jar of Tesco low-cal mayonnaise. Suprisingly it’s nearly all gone!
£0.84 on eggs. A couple are left.
£1.65 for the smoked haddock dinner
£1.45 for spaghetti and meatballs
£1.63 for duck wih honey and ginger
£1.08 for the liver and pasta dish
£1.75 for pork chops and apple sauce
£1.08 for devilled kidneys
£1.65 for chicken and mushroom crepes
£1.90 for soft drinks
£1.40 for random snacking
That is £19.72 in total! Hooray! I did it in just under £20.

You might remember that I said I’d add all unused perishable items to the bill. The only thing I haven’t used is the other half of the aubergine that I cooked with the meatballs. I haven’t used it because someone has stolen it!   I would feel cheated if I added it to the bill.  

You’ll notice that on several days I cooked for two and split the cost. This made things cheaper and also meant I could get more variety in what I was eating. If you can’t do this, it doesn’t matter. You can halve the quantities in the recipes to make enough for one. Most of these dishes can be chilled and reheated too (although I recommend an oven on its lowest setting for this, not microwaves, which seem to destroy things.) 

So it seems that you can eat quite well on £20 per week. The only thing I felt I compromised on was lunch.  You don’t have to live near a Lidl or Morrison’s either. I did nearly all my shopping at the 24 hour Tesco and Sainsburys on my way home. Incidentally, Sainsbury sometimes does better prices on vegetables.

Very soon I’ll write a page on all the things I learnt from this week’s eating and put it with the student recipes.

When I was little, my favourite school dinner was mushroom crepes, chips and peas followed by butterscotch tart. No wonder I was a rather rotund 10 year old. My parents must have hopeful that I’d be following in their vegetarian footsteps, but that didn’t last long after i discovered lasagne.

Last night, I realised I had just about come to the end of the experiment and had three eggs and a fair bit of milk to get through. Pancakes seemed like the natural thing to make. I wanted mushroom crepes but, with all the walking I do each day, I wanted to add some protein. Chicken seemed like a natural choice and chicken legs at £2 per kilo were perfect for the experiment.

The crepes were more difficult to make than usual. I blame this entirely on my hall’s electric hobs. I’m glad I didn’t learn to cook on one of these. They are horendous! It would have put me off for life. It is impossible to control the temperature on them. I managed to burn a couple of crepes.  

The filling was made from the chicken legs, onion, mushroom, chicken stock, garlic and leftover cream. I’d found some reduced stringless beans to serve with the crepes and also added a couple of new potatoes.

Although there are only 2 crepes in the picture, there was another which i had later so it was a very big meal. It came to £1.65 excluding the eggs and milk. These added about 20p but made about 6 crepes, whereas 2 or 3 are enough for one serving.

That is the most expensive dinner so far at about £1.85 but it was a good way of getting rid of some leftovers. Also if you cooked for 2, the extra crepes mean the price would work out to be  £1.75 per meal.  Here is the recipe.

Technically, with breakfast and lunch tomorrow, that should be the end of all this silliness. However there is one more thing I want to try, so one more student meal is on its way. The food shopping bill still needs to be checked (and there are a couple of things there that need clarification) but i’m reasonably sure it will be just short of £20.

Yes, there are things you can do with kidneys other than making pies.

Devilled kidneys were traditionally eaten for breakfast during Edwardian times. The kidneys are cooked in a gravy of worcestershire sauce, mustard, cayenne pepper and stock to give a slightly spicy dish with lots of flavour. The usual accompaniment is toast but, when this is replaced with mashed potato, devilled kidneys make a great evening meal.

Lamb kidneys, like liver, are very cheap. They cost around £5 per kilo. They also vary in texture and flavour depending on how you cook them. I’ve never been too keen on the kidneys in steak pies so, for this dish, I seared them in small pieces and then let the residual heat from the “devilled” sauce cook them until they were pink in the center. The result was suprisingly tasty.

The only problem with kidneys I found is coring them. That is removing the tough white bit from the middle. This is a nuisance, but I guess you should expect to do some work if you buy meat that cheap.

The meal cost about £1.10 for a portion.

The recipe is here. Now I’ve spent about £17.50 which leaves me with £2.50 for tonight. Shouldn’t be a problem.

I hate Sundays. Last night wasn’t the first time I’d been stuck hungry at 6pm with only the “Express” and “Local” shops open. Even worse, these little stores don’t tend to stock the kind of student food I’m looking for. They’re fine if you want pot noodle. But if you’re cooking from scratch you’re stuck with popular middle range products.

The best I could get my hands on were a couple of pork chops for £2.19. They were pretty big but had a bit of fat on them. They would have to do. I thought pork chops, apple sauce and mash would be possible. I had half a savoy cabbage left too. 

For some reason I hadn’t noticed that, since moving out of my last house, I had no potato masher and no potato peeler. The trials of living in halls! So the mash had to be replaced with rice.

The breakdown should have gone like this:

With rice it turned out a little bit cheaper. Some of the cream was replaced with milk and butter. This was the result. Again i was having issues with my camera- but nevermind. You can just about see it.

I hadn’t wanted to spend this much at this stage- but the Sunday trading laws had made frugality impossible. Still, at approximately £1.70 per portion it wasn’t the end of the world. It was fairly good. Mash would have been better but I couldn’t really nip out and buy equipment on a Sunday. Recipes will follow for all of these eventually. 

Well, I’m a bit over half way through the experiment so I thought this would be a good time for a progress check. The first post is here for those of you who don’t know what i’m talking about.

There are two reasons for the date discrepancies. On Thursday I fell asleep really early without eating and I was away over the weekend so got a lot of food for free. Even though scrounging is considered a typical student activity, I thought it wouldn’t really be fair to include these days in my budget. 

The weekly food bill so far stands at £14.06. That includes all the breakfast and lunch items i mentioned from the first day, my dinner costs, two large bottles of diet coke and 3 packs of crisps from the college vending machine. I believe that leaves me with another 3 days worth of dinner to produce plus sandwich fillings for the rest of the week. I think I can still do this in under £20!

To be honest, this has almost been too easy. Lunch has been boring but I tend to just eat over work anyway. Evening meals haven’t been much of a problem, except when I’ve been to Tesco and found they’ve shut half it down for refurbishment .

I’m not sure where the BBC’s average budget of £29 per week came from. What are these students eating? Venison? I guess they are like the guys I lived with in my first degree and live off sirloin steak.

But it’s these things here that really scare me. How do you manage to make 2 portions of pasta, sausage, onion and soup cost that much?! I can’t see how it could be more than £2.50 unless you buy fresh pasta, shallots and wild boar sausages! And it doesn’t look that healthy to me either.

When I started out on this experiment I really thought it would be hard. With all my swanning around at the farmers’ markets, I was spending about £60 on food per week.  But it turns out that there are actually really nice, healthy things you can eat for around £1.50 per meal. I’ve still got some more to try before the week is up.  

Liver is one of the cheapest forms of meat protein you can buy. Unfortunately lots of people really can’t stand it. I guess this is because, when it is overcooked, it is dry and horrible!   On the other hand, lightly cooked liver has a very nice texture and works wonderfully with tomatoes and red wine. Each time i have had it cooked ‘rare’ like this, it has been really tasty.  It makes an incredibly cheap and healthy main meal.

For yesterday’s dinner, I cut lamb liver into small pieces which I flash fried. I then served them on top of tagliatelle tossed with a sauce made from tomato, onion, garlic and herbs. I added some pan-fried diced courgette too. At roughly £1.10 per portion, it is difficult to get a cheaper more healthy balanced meal.

Here is the breakdown for two portions.

To be honest, I was being extravagant when I added the courgette. Leaving it out would make each portion cost less than a pound. Also, if you have any red wine going spare, you could add it to the sauce to make it even better. Here is the full recipe.

Well, this has brought my average spending down quite a bit! Hopefully I’ll find more offal recipes!