One Pan Corgetti Carbonara

I received a Tesco Orchard Voucher for £2 off Tesco Fruit and Veg, so I decided to buy something I wouldn't usually buy. I bought some courgetti, a spaghetti substitute made from courgette, because I'd heard a lot of people taking about it.

I decided to make a healthier Carbonara using the courgetti, as I love Carbonara but it's not the healthiest of dishes. My thrown together recipe is found below. I served it with some baby sweetcorn I also got with my vouchers. Both I and the hubby loved it. Suggestions on improvements would be welcome :)

Ingredients (serves 2)
Small amount of cooking oil
Courgetti - Can be bought pre-prepared in Tesco, or made using a spirlizer.
Bacon - fat cut off
Garlic - I use garlic powder as it's easy to store, but fresh garlic does just as well. I used the equivalent of 1 garlic clove.
50ml Milk
1 Large Egg
Handful of Grated Cheese - Traditionally Parmesan is used, but I used extra mature cheddar because that's what we had in!
Salt and Pepper to taste

Method
1. Heat oil in frying pan. Cut bacon into small pieces, discarding fat.
2. Fry bacon in oil. When bacon is cooked add the Courgetti and garlic, stirring regularly. Cook for 4 minutes.
3. Whisk together milk, egg and half of the cheese. Add salt and pepper to taste.
4. A bit at a time, add the milk/egg mixture to the frying pan, stirring continuously. Allow egg to cook through and reduce for 5 minutes, or until liquid is mostly gone.
5. Serve with cheese sprinkled on top.

Tesco Christmas pudding - trial tasting

 I received a voucher from Tesco Orchard for £10 off their Finest Christmas pudding, which as they were on for half price got me two for free! One for us and one for foodbank.

The packaging was very attractive but I noticed some of the boxes were damaged, so picked out boxes that weren't. When I got the puddings home the cardboard package had buckled, because it couldn't support the weight of the heavy puddings. Not a big deal, but I'd expect better from the Tesco Finest Range.

We cooked the pudding in the microwave which took less than 10 minutes, so that would be perfect after a hectic Christmas dinner! We served it with custard, which went down a treat. The pudding had an excellent texture and flavour. Both my husband and I loved the addition of the nuts as it gave an extra crunch to the moist pudding. The fruit was very juicy and flavorsome. I found the alcoholic nature of the pudding a bit overwhelming, but my pudding loving husband thought it was just spot on! The pudding was very moreish, and we both wanted more than one slice! I'm not sure I'd manage more than one slice after a big Christmas dinner though. Overall I'd give the pudding a 4/5, because whilst it was tasty and easy to prepare I'm not sure it's worth £10.

I'm not cooking Christmas dinner this year, but I think i may end up in charge of pudding! ;)

Do you make your own Christmas pudding or do you buy it?

Eat well for less

I've really been enjoying the BBC's Eat Well For Less series. It's full of good advice about feeding a family healthily on a budget, as well as dispelling a lot of myths about food.

I've not found it overly helpful though, because as a family we're well within the normal spending range for our family (we're a couple, and spend about £40 a week on groceries, which is about average for a family of 2). We tend to cook our own meals, we've steered clear of takeaways since we came up with a meal plan, we don't usually buy branded products and we shop at a budget supermarket. Surely we can't make any more savings?

Then I came across the absolutely fascinating Facebook page! The people running this claimed they could feed a family of 4 for half of my budget. I genuinely didn't believe it. But I've been reading through their menus, and it seems with some careful planning a bulk buying you really can feed a family for as little as £20!

I'm not sure we have the storage space for 3 months worth of food (especially as our flat has issues with damp, and I wouldn't want to lose that much food if it went bad!) but I'm taking it as a personal challenge to get as close to £20 a week as possible. I'm going to try to buy a month's worth of freezables and non-perishables in advance, and then buy perishables week on week. I think initially it will be more like £30 a week, but we'll see where we'll get.

Do you have any top tips for buying in bulk? What about buying in bulk when you don't have a car (which we don't!) I'd love to hear them!

Rainbow Trout Recipes

I've recently joined Tesco Orchard, a scheme run by Tesco that lets you try products for free in exchange for reviews and opinions. I got my first voucher in the post this week for fresh fish. I was delighted, as I've been trying to get more Vitamin D into my diet to help the MS, and I knew fish could help.

After a quick google search the fishmonger was able to recommend rainbow trout as a fish high in Vitamin D, so I decided to use the voucher to try it out!

With the help of my husband we cooked two delicious fish dishes.

Having not cooked much fresh fish before we cheated and went for a pre-made sauce! We settled on a Schwartz Sweet Chilli, Lime and Coriander sauce, and it was scrummy.

We rubbed the trout with olive oil, salt and pepper, before wrapping in tin foil and baking at 200C for 25 minutes. We served this with the sauce, boiled potatoes and green beans.

We had two fillets left, and so the next night we used the rest of the sauce to make a vegetable and noodle stir fry, including pepper, mushroom, and home grown spring onions (see my youtube video on how to grow your own spring onions). This was a great tasting way to use up the left over fish, and the flavours went wonderfully together! I didn't feel confident putting the fish in the stir fry, as there were a few small bones in the fish that I felt would have been a bit more difficult to detect if served in that way.

I enjoyed both these dishes tremendously and I really want to eat fish more often. Do you have any favourite fish recipes to share? I'd love to read them!

Menu Planning

I've recently been watching The Box on BBC1. It's a cooking show where contestants are given a box of ingredients and challenged to cook a meal. On a recent episode one contestant was given a box marked "leftovers". In it was some cooked pasta, boiled potatoes, half a bell pepper, cooked salmon and the stalk from a floret of broccoli.

The contestant visibly groaned when he saw those ingredients. I felt a thrill of excitement. I can make a meal out of that! One of my greatest culinary achievements to date was learning from my housemate how to make leftover broccoli stalks tasty! No gourmet food in our house, but nothing ever goes in the bin.

I love cooking. I find it relaxing to prepare food, I love trying a new recipe or idea out in the kitchen. I love opening the fridge, seeing what we've got, and coming up with a bizarre concoction out of leftovers. My husband is a capable cook, but he is not the king of leftovers. He needs a recipe, and all the ingredients laid out in front of him. If he's not got something on the list he begins to panic.

Recently I've been all but banished from the kitchen. I get numbness in my limbs which means I can't tell if I get hurt, and my arms will spasm out of my control, causing me to drop or throw things (like pans of boiling water, or knives). My legs hurt if I stand for long periods of time. I manage to cook maybe one simple meal a week, and even then I probably shouldn't. So the burden of food preparation has fallen on my husband.

Suddenly, we found we never had the right food in the fridge. We were reaching for the takeaway menu more often than was reasonable (or affordable!). And we found ourselves arguing about food, about the cost, on a fairly regular basis.

So we sat down and planned a menu.

At the beginning of the week we write down 7 meals we want to eat. Then, based on that menu, we write a shopping list. We include one meal I can safely cook for a day when I'm feeling well, and one "easy" meal for a night we just can't be bothered, so something like a frozen pizza. If my husband hasn't cooked it before I will write out a simple recipe for him, or find him a simple recipe online.


We then ensure that we buy all the ingredients needed to make those meals, and not more (so there aren't any leftovers for me to fret about throwing away!). We don't designate a meal to a given night because my condition is so changeable. We never know when I'm going to have a good day.

We're three weeks into this new plan, and we've not yet had a meal out or a takeaway, which is a big step for us, and a huge saving financially!

It's been hard to let go of the control of the kitchen, but my husband is so much happier for it being arranged in a way he feels comfortable to cook. Not only has he started to feel comfortable with preparing our meals; this morning I was woken with pancakes for breakfast.