Cheap Meals: Lentil Soup

I recently tried a brilliant recipe I found on Not Delia. It's really simple, easy to cook, very cheap and pretty nutritious. (It is also vegan if you use either vegan margarine or oil to soften the veg.)

The recipe can be found here and uses some seriously cheap ingredients:

• 250g split red lentils - £2 for 2kg, so can be as cheap as 25p. 60p buys a 250g pack.
• One onion - 19p
• One carrot - 9p
• 1.5 litres of vegetable stock – Can be free if you use water used to boil veg, or if you use stock cubes like I did then 10p for a pack of 10 stock cubes, of which you will need 3, so 3p.
• Margarine/oil – probably freely available in your kitchen.

Total cost = 56p (or up to 98p to buy the full packages of lentils and stock cubes), which is 14p per portion.

(Prices from Tesco's website, so could be even cheaper elsewhere!)

Nutrition

The recipe analyser on Calorie Count shows that this soup is pretty good for you (grade A). It's low in calories, high in vitamin A and super-dee-duper high in fibre. 

The biggest problem with it is the sodium content, which pretty much all comes from the stock cubes. If you have homemade stock yours should be even better!

Simplicity

I love the simplicity of the recipe. You basically just soften the chopped vegetables in the oil/margarine and then boil everything in stock for half an hour. I didn't even need to blend it; it was a nice thick soup but not too chunky!

One tip I will add is to slice the carrots as thinly as you can. This will let them break down in the soup more easily. I could nearly see the chopping board through mine!

There are only two of us, but I made the full four-person's worth. You can either freeze or refrigerate the leftovers for a homemade ready meal another day. The Not Delia website has a few different ways to jazz this soup up with other ingredients too. 

For 14p a portion I would definitely make this soup again. It was one of the nicest soups I've had!

Anyone got a suggestion for more ways to jazz this soup up? I think meat-eaters might want to try adding some bacon pieces to it; apparently lentils and bacon is a brilliant combination. Let me know if you try the soup!

My Garden: Trials and Tribulations

Tomatoes!

 

As Pamela over at Feral Homemaking pointed out in a recent post, gardening is a hobby that can cost you dearly in both time and money. Depending on what you grow, there can be a significant outlay for buying seeds, compost, special fertilisers, etc., and it can take a fair bit of time to make sure everything is sown, watered, transplanted and weeded!

I agree with Pamela that it's best to view gardening as a hobby, rather than a surefire way to lower your food costs. It's fun, and you'll probably have SOMETHING to show for it, but you don't always get the yield you were hoping for.

For example:

• Pigeons ate my carrot seedlings
• My onions are still pitifully small due to bad weather
• My peas were chomped by slugs
• The currant bush has some strange virus
• Haven't seen much from my swedes yet!

As I said at the start of the season, there are a lot of unknowns between sowing the seeds and harvesting the crop!

My entire potato harvest...

You certainly couldn't feed a family on my harvest of potatoes. I planted five potatoes I think (from chitted potatoes, not seed potatoes, so no real cost outlay) but they died back too early, possibly from a combination of bad weather and dodgy stock potatoes to begin with! (Note to self: buy seed potatoes next year). My “bounty” contained six medium sized potatoes, about eight small ones, and another eight or so truly tiddly ones!

But as they say, you win some, you lose some (and you learn a lot on the way).

My tomato plants are finally starting to fruit and I'm going to have a LOT of cherry tomatoes to eat in a couple of weeks. The plants are throwing out flower trusses faster than I can pollinate them! Our cabbages are looking pretty good too! :) There are a few that could be harvested soon, with some more developing more slowly that will provide greens throughout the winter hopefully (although I'll be at Uni by then!).

How are all your lovely vegetables doing? It's been a bit of a mixed bag here with the weather, but my Nana (veteran gardener extraordinaire) said her plants have been a bit useless this year too, so I don't feel too bad!

Do you think you've saved money gardening, or is it a black hole for time and money? :)

Sowing the Seeds!

Phase one of growing your own (digging the plot) already having been achieved, I moved merrily into phase two; planting stuff! :D

Planting stuff is the fun bit of growing veggies. It's full of hope and distinctly lacking in caterpillars and mosaic viruses. It might be second to harvesting and eating your crops, but there are a lot of unknowns between then and now!

At our local garden centre, we topped up our seed collection with 89p packets of swedes (plant in May), cabbage, sweet peppers and spinach beet. We also got some onion sets for 90p for ~100! Looooads of potential veggies for £4.46!

Back at home, we whipped out the John Innes and started filling up seed trays. (Side note: I love the John Innes song by Can You Dig It?, a comic duo who write songs about growing your own!)

We sowed cabbages and leeks in one tray. You can plant them directly in your plot but Dad said he likes to keep an eye on them til they're a bit bigger.

In true frugal spirit, the plant labels are made of a cut up margarine tub. :)

In the other tray, Dad planted his beloved hot chilli plants. (Whilst complaining that the seeds were burning his hands!) These have to be germinated in a heated propagator. There are SEVEN varieties in here, plus one line of sweet peppers. He is so excited because he ordered four new "really cool" varieties online, including Fairy Lights and Stumpy! They have some fun names!

As well as the trays, I got stuck into my vegetable patch by planting a couple of rows of onion sets. You plant them so that the tip is just poking out enough to grow a shoot. Apparently pigeons and blackbirds like to pull them up, so if they start getting mutilated we will string cotton above them to stop them being able to land.

Anyone else been making use of the sunny March weather? Let's get chitting some potatoes! :D

Apples, Apples, Apples!

Our apple tree has finally decided that it's autumn and begun to drop its apples. A lot of them came down in the wind of the past few days, leaving the ground nearby covered in apples! The tree produced so many this year that it managed to snap its own branch under the weight!

They are cooking apples, no good for eating, but I've collected a shopping bag full of them for my Nana and the next day off I get I'm going to blanche a big load of them for freezing and using in crumbles! :)

Do you have any fruit trees or bushes in your garden? What do you do with your harvest?

Free Food = Chubby Me!

I work part-time jobs at a local Chinese restaurant and McDonald's. Ilona, the author of Life After Money, asked me whether I get free food from my jobs. I do, but I have to say all this fast food is starting to take its toll on my waistline! I am overweight anyway but managed to lose quite a few lbs at the start of the summer by eating healthily, working a physical job and exercising regularly. Unfortunately after 5 weeks of free Chinese food (and a week of McDonald's too), it's all starting to pile back on!

In my defense I share my Chinese food with my parents (and sister if she's about) after I finish work, but I get the whole McDonald's meal to myself as it's halfway through the shift. McDonald's are trying very hard to provide healthier options (“You do salads?!”) and we give out nutritional information on the trays with every meal, however it's easy just to grab fries and a McFlurry and head for the staff room on your break!

Today I was planning on having the veggie deli (sandwich) and a drink, which would have been a fairly nutritious meal. The veggie burgers are pretty decent – you can see whole chickpeas and sweetcorn kernels in them! This would've been a fairly respectable 549 calories, providing 12g of fibre.

Unfortunately when I went on my break I decided to get a full meal and finish it off with a brownie! The diet Coke seemed somewhat ironic! :) When I calculated this I was so shocked – I've been eating the sandwich+fries+drink all week, usually with a dessert too! It all came to 1269 calories, with 14g of saturated fat (I'm only meant to get 10g/day as heart disease runs in my family), and 47g of sugar (33g+ of these were added sugar, of which I'm meant to get no more than 40g/day!).

Starting tomorrow, I'm just getting the veggie sandwich without mayonnaise and an orange juice. If I want dessert I'll have a fruit bag! That'd be at least 2, probably 3 (with the beans and salad in the deli), of my 5-a-day for free too! All for 705 calories, which is just over half of the amount I ate today!

I don't know the exact calories for the Chinese food I've been eating, but I usually get vegetable chow mein (which is fried) or vegetable curry with chips or fried rice. I can't really think of a healthy alternative food because pretty much everything is fried. Upon Googling, stir fried vegetables and boiled rice seems like my best option. I guess I could just eat at home, but then it's not freeeee!

What is the best compromise between frugality and life in general? Would you eat free Chinese takeaway 4 nights a week or cook yourself something healthier when you got home? Do you pay for exercise classes that you could do yourself at home? What's the cheapest healthy meal you make?

Cheap meals: Tasty Lentil Salad (Vegetarian)

When I was about seven years old there was a sale on baked beans at our local supermarket. A can of beans cost just 3p with a maximum of 4 cans per customer. My parents took my (even younger) sister and I along so that in total we could buy 16 cans of beans for 48p. We were pretty poor and had beans for most meals in a variety of different ways. I got so sick of them that I hated baked beans for a good five years or so after that!

Whilst it is possible to live on the absolute cheapest food available, you can rapidly get bored of it. My object is to find a variety of meals that cost less than £1 per person (or portion) to cook, hopefully with leftovers that can be taken to work the next day.

My recipe for lentil salad comes in at £2.92 for four portions, or 73p each. It is a variation on this recipe using cheaper ingredients, no coriander (because I hate it) and increasing the garlic (because I love it).

I am also concerned about nutrition. According to Calorie Count's recipe analyser, one serving contains:

So it's pretty healthy. It's also easy to cook! Look:

Tasty Lentil Salad (serves four)

250g green lentils (aka Lentilles vertes) – 500g bag costs 92p

4 tomatoes – six cost 69p (Lidl)

1 red onion – 20p

100g salad cheese (if you're not worried about the high saturated fat and sodium you could add more) – 50p for 200g

Juice of 1 lemon – 35p

4 cloves of garlic – 26p

1.5 tsp oil (I used olive oil).

1. Rinse the lentils thoroughly before adding them to a pan of boiling water. They don't require much stirring but don't let the water boil down. Burned lentils smell SOOOO BAD! These need to simmer for 40 minutes.
2. Whilst the lentils are cooking, roughly chop the tomatoes and cut the cheese into cubes (approximately 1cm x 1cm). Put these to one side for later.
3. Chop the red onion in half and slice it. Crush the garlic cloves.
4. When the lentils have been cooking for about 25 minutes heat the oil in a frying pan on a medium heat. Fry the onion for approximately 5 minutes then add the garlic and fry for another 5, stirring regularly to prevent the garlic burning.
5. Drain the lentils once cooked and mix in the garlic, onions and lemon juice. Plate it up and then add the tomatoes and cheese to the top. 
   
   
   (Totally forgot to take a photo of the finished product! Blogging fail! :D)

Depending on how hungry you are, you could add some pita bread to the meal too. (55p for six wholemeal pita in Tesco, or 18p for six Tesco Value white pita breads).

Let me know what you think if you make this! :)