Bodge It Together Quiche!

Things never go to plan when I'm cooking! I thought I'd make myself a nice cheese and onion quiche for my lunch for the next couple of days. Unfortunately my last onion was all had gone all pink, fluffy and squishy. Not a good look for an onion.

I decided to improvise with a couple of shallots left over from when The Boyfriend was doing some fancy-pants cooking. Hmm... squishy too. To be fair, these guys had been sitting around for a good few weeks.

After raiding the fridge, I thought the only thing that sounded vaguely quichey was a red pepper (plus cheese, of course!).

The small portion!

Other problems I ran into:

• I forgot to chill the pastry (as per usual - turns out fine!)
• I don't have a rolling pin - I stick flour on the outer layer of a roll of cling film, then pull that layer off when I'm finished!
• I don't have a quiche/flan tin - I used a cake tin instead
• I don't have baking beans - for the pastry's blind bake I covered it in foil with some dry rice grains on top.
• I made the pastry too short on one side and the quiche filling ran down the side
• I dripped egg and milk mix into the bottom of my oven, which was hot from the blind bake so I couldn't clean it and had to smell it burning for half an hour!

It turned out pretty well, despite me making it! The cost of the recipe works out to 34p/51p per person depending on portion size (not including the cost of a rotten onion!), and I didn't have to go out and buy more ingredients!

The recipe (bodged together from this original recipe):

190g of plain flour - 8p (based on 60p for a 1.5kg bag)
80g margarine/butter - 18p (based on £1.10 for 500g of Vitalite)
half a tablespoon of oil - about 5p
one red pepper - 31p (£1.25 for a value bag of four peppers)
3 eggs - 74p (£1.48 for six free range eggs)
300ml of milk - 17p (based on 6 pints at £1.89)
90g cheese - 50p (based on 2 x 450g packs for £5 - always on offer!)
black pepper - about 1p.

Total = £2.04

This quiche serves 4-6, so it is 51p for a meal portion or 34p for a side portion. 


The eggies are by far the most expensive part of this quiche, but I will only eat free range eggs after seeing the state of rescued battery chickens and visting a barn of uncaged hens.

If you confine yourself to a smaller portion, Calorie Count will give you a C+ grade. The recipe has a fair amount of saturated fat (6g), but it's very low in sodium and has a fair whack of vitamins and minerals from the eggs and milk. Not super healthy though I'm afraid.

Anyway, my point is - who cares if you don't have the right ingredients/equipment/cooking ability? You can bodge a cheap meal together without having to run to the local corner shop every time you cook!

Make it do or do without!

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!

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! :)