CT FM 003:
Feeding Your Family For A Fiver! Brought To You By: RecipeThis.com
Introduction Welcome to our third Podcast from CT FM. For our third Podcast it is like we are going back in time. To a time when we had our previous food blog DSM Food. It was a cheesey name made up of Dominic & Samantha Milner and our initials in the domain name. We liked it and it was catchy and it gave us some great practice at food blogging. But at the time (which was several years ago now) the most common thing was frugal living. We were living at a time when many countries were going through a recession and people wanted help. They wanted to save money but they didn’t want to live off frozen vegetables either. Some celebrity chefs jumped on board and gave their opinions. But lets face it they were living in their mansions and didn’t get that the poor working classes of the world couldn’t afford to buy lamb every week! They would all include these meals for a fiver and how you could feed your family for less, but in reality it was either full of processed foods, no vegetables or would not fill you up. So I have decided to have another crack at it (eight years later) to see if it can be done and how easy it is. So let’s see if I can do it. I am of course basing it on Portuguese prices and converting into Dollars and expecting that you have salt, pepper and other seasonings in your cupboard already! So lets get started…..
Cooking Tips This particularly applies if you are cooking cheap, but also want to cook well. Then where would you start? Well for us it would all be about stretching a meal out. How you do this depends on how poor or how little money you actually have. My mothers take on this would be growing up in a very poor household and sometimes they would have just two eggs for lunch between four of them. So my grandma would always do scrambled eggs and then bulk it up with lots of bread with butter on. If I was going cheap I would bulk up some pasta shapes with lots of fresh vegetables, with soft cheese and milk mixed together to form a cheese sauce base. I would then add a little wine and you would have heaven on a plate and you would not be missing the meat. When I worked this out it would work out at less than $2 for a family of four and we would have some leftover for the freezer. Dominic growing up would live off jam sandwiches, cucumber sandwiches or some canned soup. This was because his step mum was very young and spent the grocery money on CDs. Dominic still hates cucumber now and I thought it would be good fun to ask the chef in him for the same money what we would have cooked. So that you can see something amazing that can be cooked on the tightest of budgets‌.so over to Dominic Hello I’m back again this week and one of my favourite meals ever to eat especially when I was little was giant Yorkshire pudding with mince and mash inside. Sounds pretty boring but when you got served your giant Yorkshire pudding with the mash and mince inside and then got a jug of gravy it was brilliant; I remember feeling really excited.
Even back when I was a child these ingredients were not expensive and today if I use Portuguese prices but I have changed the currency to dollars so this is what it would cost, a bag of flour 37 cent, eggs 93 cent for 6 but using 2, 1 kg bag of potatoes 72 cent and 250g of mince $1.65. Milk 78 cent 1 litre. Gravy granules $2.20 a tub. So I would make a basic Yorkshire pudding batter, with flour eggs and milk and cook it like you would for a toad in the hole but without the sausages. I would steam my potatoes and add some butter and milk salt and pepper to them and mash them up when they are soft. I would make a savoury mince by frying with some onion and add I beef stock cube and some tomato purree and mix well. When ready add some water and may be a few peas and the odd carrot chopped into small squares. Bring to the boil and thicken with gravy granules or cornflour. If you have separate large yorkshire pudding tins then you can just place them on a plate and add mash and then the mince and then pour some gravy over. But if you have used a large tray then you will need to portion the yorkie up and just place on the bottom with mash and mince. Hope you give this a try if you have never had it. Eating on a budget can done with fresh ingredients. It does not always have to come out of a tin for 50 cent!!!! Anyway back to Sam so she can continue, thanks for listening.
Family Cooking Time This is my favourite part of the Podcast and that is when I get to talk about the family cooking time. I love cooking as a family and I love eating as a family even more. In my mind there is nothing better than great family conversation while eating delicious home cooked meals. Dominic seems to think I have an addiction to the Waltons and who knows maybe I do ď Š
So as I type up and record CT FM 003 it is a Saturday afternoon and I am really looking forward to a family night with loads of great food. It is the coldest month of the year here in Portugal and as it is our new place we still haven’t got heating put in, so we need some warm food to make us feel good. So what do we opt for? We have pulled pork with coleslaw, some chicken wings and some Chinese ribs. This is one of my favourite Saturday night suppers and we love it. The ribs and the pulled pork are cooked in our slow cookers and go in at lunch time so that we don’t have to worry about cooking them later. The in the evening I did the chicken wings in the oven with some olive oil and of course making a quick coleslaw. So how does the price compare? Well because we get our pork shoulder on the bone it works out at just $2, our coleslaw is leftovers from the bottom of our fridge, chicken wings are just $1 and the ribs are just $2, so all in all it is a straight $5. You could go cheaper as well if you wanted to. Swap your ribs for potatoes and have French Fries with it instead via the Airfryer and you could knock off an extra dollar. You then end up with lots and lots of finger licking food for a lot less than ½ the price of a takeaway. Plus you are getting lots of meat, but because ribs, chicken wings and pork shoulder on the bone are so incredibly cheap you could eat meat everyday on a budget and still feel like you were eating very well.
Family Healthy Eating
For us family healthy eating is really important. It never used to be though. We used to feed our son processed foods from the freezer and way too many chips. But thankfully we changed for the better. So if I was to feed the kids healthy food and save money then what would I make them? Well I thought it would be fun to put my top 5 together and these are the top 5 recipes I would choose from: Creamy Pumpkin & Garlic Soup – Pumpkin soup is a fantastic use of leftovers. When you can never quite finish that pumpkin and you have some leftover that you want to use. Meatloaf – if you are having family around for Sunday dinner and you don’t have the funds for roast beef, then why not get the minced beef out and make some meatloaf? Then you can serve it with potatoes and veg in a similar way that you would if you were cooking a joint. Sausage casserole – the original sausage casserole I used to make was always some fresh thick sausages with a can of tinned tomato over with a sprinkle of oregano. Not very frugal but fine for two people. However if you are serving four you could double it by adding some cheap vegetables and then you have a lovely meal. Serve with warm crusty bread and you are in food heaven. Thai Veggie Curry – This is another one of our meatless meals just because we love our vegetables and don’t feel like we have to eat vegetables 7 days a week. If you add lots of vegetables to your slow cooker and then add some Thai spice and a can of coconut milk then you
have a meal in the making. Have it with some noodles, white rice or even with some crusty bread and the whole family will love you for it. Party Meatballs – I love my Aunt Sheila’s meatballs, they are not as healthy as mine but taste delicious. Serve them with a huge pan of vegetable ragu and some pasta shapes and you have the kid’s perfect meal.
This brings us to this Podcasts Sponsor: For Podcast 3 of CT FM we wanted to bring to your attention the slow cooker by Lakeland. We use this exact slow cooker to make our frugal meals with and it cooks them in no time. But that’s not why we would be recommending it, it is because of how frugal it is. I have it on at the same time as my long term crockpot and it uses 1/3 of the electric and is also done much quicker. You can find out all about it at recipe this dot com forward slash lakeland slow cooker.
Frugal Family Cooking For frugal family cooking my food of choice has to be the trusted pumpkin. They are like a genius creation. Dominic will buy us one from the supermarket and it will weigh 5 kilos (11 pounds) and cost us just over $5. It is half the price of butternut squash and he will then chop it up into cubes and it will fill two huge mixing bowls and go in the fridge. It will then be in quite a few meals and last us two weeks. We will have it for mash, pumpkin pie, fries, roasties, casseroles, stews and even tray bakes. Because it has a nice flavour and texture it is very easy to use no matter what the occasion is. If you want to save even more money then
we recommend that you get pumpkin whenever it is available. Don’t just think that this has to happen on Halloween because it doesn’t. Then use it as the base for your vegetables in your meals.
Round Up! Thanks for joining us in our Podcast and we look forward to sharing more of our cooking tips with you in the future.
Links & Resources Mentioned In This Podcast
Pumpkin & Garlic Soup Meatloaf Recipe Party Meatballs Recipe Thai Vegetable Curry Sausage Casserole Lakeland slow cooker review
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Thanks again for listening and best of luck with your cooking.
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