Feed your family for 50p

What if I told you, you could feed a family of 6 this hearty meal for just 50p per person? It's true, last night we had sausage and pepper casserole, with herby dumplings and carrot and swede mash. It was filling, delicious and best of all cost £3 for the ingredients! I'm trying to get my weekly shopping as low as I can, but still cook home-made, nutritious, meals. In this week's shop that was just over £42 -for everything not just food- I bought the ingredients for the casserole, that was to feed 6 of us. It was delicious, made from scratch and everybody was left full and satisfied.

Pack of 8 sausages each sausage chopped into chunks of 3- 85p 

Red pepper sliced - 25p  (Part of a 3 pack)

Half a box of mushrooms chopped - 43p

500ml Carton passata - 35p

2 Large red onions - 13p 

300ml Beef stock - (2 cubes and water) 6p 

(optional for flavour - 200 ml Red wine - 78p )

For the dumplings:

300g Self-raising flour - 9p

100ml water

herbs -6p

Full swede cubed - 45p

Bag of carrots chopped - 29p

Place all casserole ingredients in a large pan on a high heat and cook for 15 minutes

Add a tbsp flour and stir in stock, passata and red wine if you are using. Simmer for 10 minutes and transfer to an oven proof casserole dish and put into a pre-heated oven at 200 for 45 minutes to an hour.

Place the carrots and swede into a pan of boiling water and cook until soft and mashable, roughly half an hour to an hour.

For the dumplings, mix the herbs in with the flour, add the water gradually and stir with your fingers

until everything comes together in a big ball.

Half the mixture then again and again and roll into balls. After the Casserole has had 45 minutes- an hour, pop the balls onto the liquid and cook for a further 30 minutes. Mash the carrot and swede with a knob of butter and freshly ground pepper and serve.

Slow Cooked Ox-Tail Stew

I'm always on the look out for reduced or cheap items to make recipes for my blog. I have to say that, although these items were reduced, I certainly would not describe them as cheap. I have always wanted to use ox-tails to cook with, but having seen the price of them I've never bothered, I found some reduced in Sainsbury's and decided to give them a go. The finished dish was delicious served up with fresh green broccoli and new potatoes. The stew was everything I knew it would be, rich, thick and very tasty. All this aside would I buy it again? Probably not as the amount of cooking this cut needed meant not only was the meat expensive but the cooking of it was costly too. Having said that, if you fancy a treat and can afford it I would recommend giving it a whirl.

 Ox-tail 1kg

6 carrots chopped

3 red onions chopped

Small bottle red wine

Dried thyme tsp

Splash of Worcester sauce 

2 Heaped tbsp flour

Salt and Pepper

Small carton of passata

300ml beef stock

Tbsp oil

Add salt and pepper to the flour and coat the ox-tails in it.

In a very hot pan with some oil brown each side of the ox-tails.

After they are all browned place them in a large casserole dish and keep to one side.

 In the same frying pan on a medium heat with the fat from the ox-tails add the chopped carrots and onions and thyme and fry until soft, about 15-25 minutes.

Add the full bottle of red wine and a splash of Worcester sauce to the pan and stir.

Transfer to the casserole dish with the ox-tails add the beef stock passata and give it all another stir before putting into the oven at 180 for 2 and a half hours.

After 2 and a half hours give it all another stir turn the ox-tails over and return for a further 1-2 hours until the meat falls away from the bone.

It's quite normal to see an oily surface you can either skim it off now or leave it in the fridge over night to cool and scrape off the next day.

Shred the meat off the bones and make sure that all the bones are removed (No matter how much they have annoyed you this summer you really don't want to choke your family!)

When you have removed all the bones and added the shredded meat back to the dish, you can either keep it up to four days in the fridge until cooking again, or serve up with vegetables and potatoes immediately. 

Bargain beef bourguignon

After a very successful teatime shop at Lidl I managed to bag some great bargains! Among them I got lots of meat including a great big pork carvery joint for Christmas for just £6.99 (last year I paid £14 for the same joint!) and some stewing steak reduced. We have not long had a steak pie so I wanted to do something different so I thought I would do beef bourguignon. I'm sure there will be wine snobs out there demanding I rename it as I haven't used Burgundy but I wanted to prove you can have a tasty meal without using the expensive ingredients. Of course the more expensive and tastier the wine, the tastier the meal, but I had no complaints and I used a £2.99 bottle of house red. This meal is such a delicious winter warmer. You can serve with a pile of creamy mash, or in a bowl on its own with crusty bread. My husband demanded a pastry lid so mine was a pie. What hubby wants....

                                                

Pack stewing steak

5 shallots sliced/ or 2 onions

2 carrots sliced

300g mushrooms chopped

Tsp dried or fresh thyme 

75cl bottle red wine

Flour 

                                                

Coat the meat in flour seasoned with pepper and fry in a hot pan with tbsp oil until browned.

Transfer into a deep pan.

In the same pan you browned the meat, add the chopped vegetables, thyme and a glass of the red wine to deglaze the bottom of the pan.

Cook these for about ten minutes or so then add to the pan with the meat.

Pour in the whole bottle of red (okay no-one will notice a glass missing wink wink!)

                                                       
When it begins to simmer leave for at least 2 hours on a very low heat.
When you come to serve if it needs thickening add some gravy granules or corn flour.