Making bread is easy with a breadmaker, and for £40 it’s easily paid for itself. You can keep flour and yeast for quite a while in the cupboards, and even if you run out of bread, 3 hours later you can have a ready made loaf (quicker if you have one of the new fast-bake machines).

I’ve mainly stuck to packet bread mixes since I bought the mixer. Packet mixes work out slightly cheaper than buying a loaf of bread, and the ciabatta packet mix is great for making about 10-12 white rolls, which work out nicer and a lot cheaper than buying a decent bag of rolls from the supermarket. However, recently I’ve been venturing into more untried territory of using strong bread flour and yeast, and essentially cutting the cost of the bread even more.

My first attempt was with some strong wholemeal bread flour. It came out a little dense (but brown bread tends to be denser I find, even from the bakers) but more importantly it seemed a bit tasteless to me and I didn’t enjoy much. I tried a second time, adding a bit more salt and some sugar, as suggested on the packet, but found that the bread came out overcooked (I put it on the wholemeal setting instead of the basic bread setting, which I think was wrong!).

After chatting to my dad, a seasonal bread maker, he suggested mixing white bread flour with wholemeal or multigrain mixes, to lighten the bread. So today I used a third of a multigrain bread mix (as we’d had it for a while) and topped up with white bread flour to get enough ingredients for a 1.5lb loaf, the first time I’ve made a large loaf (usually stick to 1lb). 3 hours later and the results looked impressive, and once the loaf cooled we tried a bit and it’s nice and light and very nice with the grains through it. Only problem to me with it is that again it’s lacking in taste, but I didn’t add any salt at all so I just need to work on getting the right balance of seasoning and then we have perfect bread Cheaper than the shops and while it’s waiting to be cooked, much longer lasting!

Incidentally, the recipe and proportions I used were
165g Hovis Harvest Grain bread mix
210g Sainsburys strong white bread flour
1 tsp hovis yeast (slightly out of date but clearly works fine!)
155ml lukewarm water
1 dessert spoon of olive oil

Cook as a 1.5lb loaf on the basic bread setting (took 3 hours exactly).

Forget pancake mixes, you don’t know what’s gone in there. All you need is 3 ingredients plus some butter or oil for frying them in.

1/2 pint (300ml) milk
1 egg
Plain flour
Pinch of salt (optional, I don’t use it).

Beat the milk and egg together then slowly add flour and beat (an electric whisk is useful here) until you get a thick but still loose consistency, similar to that of a slighly thick sauce (or double cream). Then heat a pan and add some oil or butter to coat the base of it, pour in some of the mixture until it thinly covers the base of the pain, allow it to cook until the top is almost firm, then turn it over (flipping pancakes is great fun!).

Cook all of the mixture into pancakes. I tend to keep an oven on low heat to put the finished ones in so that they’re all still hot when you’re finished. Then serve with whatever suits your taste

• Icing sugar
• Lemon juice (fresh is best!)
• Maple syrup
• Stewed Fruit
• Vanilla icecream

Or for savoury ideas why not try ham and cheese?

Don’t forget… pancakes are great any time of the year, not just today

So I asked my mum for her gooseberry streusel recipe, one I can remember her making when I was little. We’ve always had gooseberries, I can remember eating them straight off the bush as a child. We have our own gooseberry bush now which produces a small amount of gooseberries, but my taste seems to have changed as I don’t like them much anymore.

Today I gave the streusel recipe a go. It’s quite a nice light cake and I love the streusel topping, and David said it all tasted good (I can’t comment on the gooseberries! Although I did eat it all ). You can also freeze it whole or cut it into portions/quarters and freeze it for up to 2 months, so I’ve frozen 2 quarters and kept the rest out. It’s quite a moist cake, from the gooseberries, so it doesn’t need any cream or custard, however it can’t be kept for too long else it’ll go mouldy.

Ingredients

Streusel Topping:
150g self raising flour
100g unsalted butter
100g caster sugar

225g gooseberries, topped and tailed

Sponge base:
180g self raising flour
Pinch of salt
125g caster sugar
125g unsalted butter
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 tablespoon of milk

Method

Take the streusel ingredients, put the flour and butter into a bowl and rub together until it’s resembling a crumbly mix, add the sugar and continue to rub the mixture together to get your streusel mix (it’s hard to explain but you’ll know when it’s right! Took me about 10 minutes to do!!)

For the sponge base, add the salt into the flour, cream the butter and sugar together, then slowly add the eggs. Add a couple of spoons of flour/salt into the blender/mixer. Then you need to fold in (by hand) the rest of the flour and the milk, until it’s a smooth consistency. In a greased cake tin (I used a 23cm one, ideally you should use a 21cm tin), spoon the cake mixture onto the base and spread out. Then put a single layer of gooseberries onto the mixture, going from the centre out. Try not to have gooseberries on the edge as they’ll probably burn. Then scatter your streusel topping over the gooseberries and try to ensure the gooseberries are covered completely (to prevent burning).

Bake at 180 degrees celsius for 75 minutes. Allow to cool and then store in a cake tin, or freeze.

I usually use frozen blackberries and raspberries as I get loads off my parents in the autumn and they’re great for all sorts of desserts.

Ingredients

1 cooking apple
1 dessert apple
3 handfuls of blackberries
2 handfuls of raspberries
100g plain flour
20g brown caster sugar
30g dark muscavado sugar
40g butter or margarine

Method

Peel, core and slice both apples. Put into a large pyrex bowl, add a teaspoon of water and put into the microwave for about 3 minutes to soften the apples. If freezing, divide the apples into foil dishes at this point. Add the blackberries and raspberries.

In a mixer or food processor mix the flour, sugar and butter until fine. If it gets a bit lumpy/gloopy just add a little more flour (this can happen if the butter/margarine is soft). The cover the fruit in the crumble topping.

Cook at 180 degrees celcius for 35 minutes (25-30 minutes for smaller portions). Serve with custard, cream or icecream.

So today I decided to give them a go. It was a joint effort and for the first attempt we were quite chuffed with the outcome as they were really nice (“best fish cakes I’ve ever had” from David!). The next plan is to add this to my bulk cooking list, so make up a batch of them and freeze them. At this rate I’ll have a home-made frozen ready meal for every day of the week!

On to the recipe, these are the quantities we used, of course a fillet of fish and two potatoes won’t always weigh in the same ratio, but hey, it’s all cooked and it’s all edible, so adjust the quantities to suit your own tastes

Ingredients

1 fillet of smoked haddock, skinned and boned
2 potatoes (aim to have around 50% more of potato than fish)
6 spring onion finely chopped
Grated cheddar cheese
2 eggs
Fresh breadcrumbs (3 slices of white bread blended to breadcrumbs)
Plain flour
Milk
Butter/Margarine

Method

Boil the potatoes, drain and pat dry. Then mash (don’t add any milk or butter!) and allow to cool slightly. Add the spring onion and a few handfuls of grated cheddar and mix into the mash potato. Poach the fish in milk, either in a pan or in the microwave. To use the microwave put the fish into a Pyrex dish, add milk until it’s partially covered, then cover with cling film. Put on high for 3 minutes. Remove fish from dish but keep the milk. Pat the fish dry, flake and fold into the mashed potato mixture along with a beaten egg. Form into round shapes.

Beat the second egg and pour into a bowl. Put the breadcrumbs on a plate and some flour in another bowl. Take each fish cake, dip it in the flour, then in the egg and then in the breadcrumbs. Once they’re all done heat some oil in a frying pan and add the fish cakes. Fry until the breadcrumbs are golden brown all over.

We then put them on a baking tray into the oven on a 150 deg C heat to keep warm (you may need higher if you don’t have a fan oven).

Then I also made a simple cheese sauce to go with them by melting about a teaspoon of butter in a saucepan, adding about 2 teaspoons of flour, mixing it in to the melted butter, then the milk from the pyrex dish and a couple of handfuls of cheese. Sorry, no real measurements as I just go by the consistency and taste, but all good cookbooks should tell you how to make a simple cheese sauce.

These quantities made 6 large fish cakes in total

So I followed the recipe and it came out okay and tasty enough but I don’t think my first attempt was great! Possibly should have used a whisk for stirring rather than a spoon, especially once I put the full mixture back into the pan. However it certainly tasted nice and I’ll definitely give it another go. The method was fairly simple:

4 egg yolks
1/2 pint (283ml) of milk
25g of sugar
1 vanilla pod

Heat all but 3 tablespoons of the milk in a pan with the vanilla pod in it. Bring it to the boil and then put to the side for 15 minutes. Beat the egg yolks, sugar and remaining milk in a jug. Remove the vanilla pod from the milk and mix the hot milk into the egg mixture. Then strain the mixture back into the pan and heat and stir until you get a custard consistency.

I must admit I forgot to strain it but it still came out okay. I also squeezed out some of the seeds from the vanilla pod to give it a bit of extra taste. Still, it wasn’t bad for a first attempt

In the news they’ve now added, however, that fast food is in fact cheaper than buying from the supermarkets, something I complete disagree with! How can paying over £2 for a quarterpounder burger from McDonalds be cheaper than shopping in a supermarket? And just to prove it, here’s a couple of fast food recipes to compete with two of my favourite meals. The difference? The homemade ones will be far more filling!

Quarterpounder with Cheese

You can buy aberdeen angus quarterpounder burgers from most supermarkets. In Marks & Spencers you can usually get a deal of 8 burgers (2 packs) for £5. That’s 62.5p per burger. Or you can get the non aberdeen angus burgers for £4 for 2 packs, so just 50p a burger.

Need

1 quarterpounder burger (Aberdeen Angus from M&S – 62.5p)
1 white roll (20p max)
A cheese slice or some sliced cheddar cheese (10p max)
Half an onion (10p maybe?)
Tomato ketchup (pennies)

Total Cost: £1.05 compared to over £2!

I also like to add lettuce and plenty of it, again, this is not very expensive, 10-20p max.

We usually put our burgers on the George Foreman, and fry our onions. Simply put it all together as you would and hey presto, a quarterpounder with cheese for about £1.00. In McDonalds you can expect to pay over £2 for one, and in Burger King the ‘Angus’ (which is meant to be a quarterpounder but really doesn’t seem to be when you get it) is over £3.

Sausage and Egg Muffin

I adore these and am very impressed that McDonalds uses free range eggs too, however they are still quite expensive (around £1.50-2 for a sausage and egg mcmuffin I think). To replicate this at home:

You Need

White muffin (20p max)
1 free range egg (25p max)
100g Sausagemeat (40p average)
Slice(s) of cheese (10p max)

Total Cost: 95p on average compared to £1.50-2.

Flatten the sausagemeat into a burger shape and either put it under the grill or on a george foreman or sandwich press. Poach the egg. Easiest is to do it in a microwave egg poacher as it stays round then! But you can do it as normal if you need to. Toast the muffin. Then just make the muffin up. Goes well with a good strong cup of tea!

Shopping for Food

We don’t buy ‘basics’. I’m sure some of it tastes just as good as normal brands, and some stuff is normal brands repackaged, however I can’t be bothered to work out what is and what isn’t good! I like decent food, I like meat to be meat and not gristle, bone and fat!

With a bit of trial and error, most fast food meals can be recreated at home, in a cheaper and probably healthier way. Some can seem a little fiddly but once you’ve got the method covered then you’ll find it a quick and easy meal to recreate and enjoy

Need:
1-2 medium sized, clean skinned potatoes per person
Sour cream
2 Streaky or Back Bacon rashers per potato (you could also use fried onion, ham, tuna or anything else that takes your fancy!)
Grated Cheddar or some other strong flavour cheese

Method:

1. Bake the potatoes in an oven using either combination or standard oven cooking. Bake until cooked all the way through, then leave the potatoes to cool.
2. Cut each potato in half and scoop almost all of the potato, leaving just a lining of potato to hold the skin together.
3. Mash about half the scooped out potato with a spoonful of sour cream. Then spread the potato and cream mix back into each potato skin.
4. Grill the bacon and then chop into small pieces. Place the bacon on each of the potato skins.
5. Sprinkle the potato skins with the grated cheese.
6. Cook at 180-200^o C for 20-25 minutes, or until the cheese has melted and started to brown a little.
7. Serve with sour cream and chive dip.

These went down a treat

So you need (this is designed for 2 people, you may have to vary things a little for more)
2 flozs of uncooked long grain white rice or basmati rice (or proper risotto rice I guess!), per person.
3/4 pint of boiling water
1 knorr chicken stock cube or beef stock cube
Diced cooked meat – roast chicken left over from sunday roast, beef, pork, lamb (again from sunday roast), or quickly fried chicken breast
handful of peas
other veg you want – leek, spring onion, fine beans, courgette, green pepper – all chopped small(ish)
1 medium onion, diced

Optional
1 dsp of cream or sour cream if you’re not concerned about calories
Grated Parmesan cheese
Pinch of Saffron infused in a small amount of hot water

Method
Melt a little butter or heat a bit of olive oil in a hot frying pan, add onions and fry until softened. Add the rice and stir occasionally until all the butter/oil is absorbed.
In the mean time disolve the stock cube in the 3/4 pint of water. Also infuse the saffron in a little additional water and leave to one side.
Add the stock to the rice, put on a low heat and cover. Leave for 10-15 minutes (perfect time to now chop the veg!)
Add meat and vegetables, stir in, leave for another 5 minutes.
Once the stock has almost been absorbed by the rice and veg it’s finished unless you want any of the following in it

Stir in your cream if you’re using it.
Stir in saffron infusion (strands ‘n all) if you’re using it. Should go a nice yellow colour now!
Stir in grated parmesan for a slightly stronger taste.

Of course you can also throw in prawns, smoked ham, chorizo (can’t spell that) sausage etc. just add it when the meat and veg go in. I know saffron doesn’t strictly go in Risotto as that’s more Paella, but it gives it a nice yellow colour and does add to the flavour a little, however it’s not necessary. The parmesan cheese in it is very nice though! I know the true way to do risotto is to just add a little bit of stock, allow it to be absorbed and keep doing it that way. However that’s too faffy! This comes out pretty okay I think. Once you try it once I’m sure you’ll alter things to suit your own taste!

So having a nice supply of raspberries is all well and good but after a while you can get fed up of constantly eating them as they are, so what else can you do with them? Well to be really indulgent (ideal when you’re alone as you won’t want to share this!) I recommend a simple warm raspberry and cream dessert:

Put the raspberries into a microwaveable proof bowl (pudding bowl is fine), sprinkle a little sugar over depending on how sharp/sweet they are. Heat in the microwave for about a minute until the raspberries are warmed through and softening a little. A little juice from them is perfect. Then pour over a little fresh cream and enjoy!

Of course unless you’re intending to go running for a mile every morning then this treat is just that, a treat and not one to be had every other night! However there are a few not as bad desserts that you can make with raspberries which I’ve listed a couple below. My Mum makes a fantastic raspberry jam too but I don’t have a clue about how to make this. I’ll get the recipe off her one day!!

Apple and Raspberry Crumble

Slice up a large or two medium cooking apples (peel first) into a pyrex bowl. Sprinkle with a little water and put in the microwave on full power for 5 minutes to get the apples softened. Then throw in a handful of raspberries (blackberries go well with it all too!). To make up your crumble topping you want to use 2 parts plain flour to 1 part brown sugar and 1 part butter. Of course how much depends on the size of your pyrex bowl but 100g of flour to 50g of brown sugar and 50g of butter should do the trick. You want this all mixed well. Once it’s mixed then spread this out on top of the fruit. Put in a preheated oven at 180 degrees C for 35 minutes. You can serve it with ice cream or cream but personally I prefer custard (and the low fat stuff isn’t bad either!).

Summer Pudding

Summer Pudding is pretty easy. I deviated from the recipe I had to make it a little richer. Simply put your raspberries and any other berries you have (blackberries are in season now too) into a pan with a little sugar and stew until the fruit is soft and some of the juice has come out. You still want something resembling fruit and not fruit soup, so don’t overdo it! Then take a madiera cake (I think it’s that, the buttery plain cake you cake buy). Slice this up into semi thin slices and line a bowl with the cake making sure you have enough for the top. Put all the fruit in and then cover it with the rest of the cake. Put it in the fridge and leave it for at least a few hours. When you’re ready for it use a thin spatula to go around the edges of the bowl to loosen the pudding. Then put a large plate on top of the bowl and turn it all up the other way and hopefully your pudding should now sit on the plate but still be firm.

Serve this with icecream or cream.