Uses for Leftover Vegetables

I was hunting around on the Sainsburys website for recipes that I could either use or adapt. I am rather biased towards Sainsburys because they used to pay me large amounts of money every week, but I think that their online Recipes and Tips feature is incredibly good. Recently they were doing a promotion called Feed Your Family for £50, which provided recipes for the main meal of the day along with a shopping list. Of course most of the ingredients are Sainsburys own, but despite the fact that it's obviously a marketing strategy it also has lots of great recipes.

Free Food

I volunteer at a centre which has to feed a large number of people on fairly short notice and as a result the store cupboard is jammed full with dried foods which can be cooked quickly. Every month the shelves have to be checked for things which are going out of date, or are already out of date. At the end of June I was set to the task, and told that I could take anything I wanted if I put a donation in the food kitty.

Well, it was quite a haul! I suspect that the checking in previous months had been interrupted part-way through, as some things were rather badly out of date (but as the date is checked again before it's cooked, I don't think anyone will have been served out of date food).

I sifted through the stash at the end of the day and chose the things I thought my family were likely to use. I'm not too fussy about best before dates, or even use by dates; as long as I can't detect any signs of actual problems then I'll eat it. That's a good thing about being vegetarian - it's far less likely that your food will kill you.

Anyway, here is what I brought home, as guarded by my cat Mo:

You want some foods? I have foods.

Grocery Shopping - Advance Planning

Image by Ian Britton, used under Creative Commons licence

 Money is going to be tight when I go back to university. I already know that, and I've got a rough idea of how much I'm going to have - not anything like as much as in previous years, so I need to make some big savings!

Most of the savings will be through not buying clothes, not going on foreign holidays, not eating out as much or visiting the cinema as often; all the usual things that get cut back when the budget has shrunk.

But I'm really hoping that I'll be able to make big savings by being canny with my groceries.

In the Spotlight: Strawberries

Image by Digital Wallpapers, used under Creative Commons licence

It's strawberry time! Our strawberry patch is beginning to produce several ripe strawberries a day, which is great because we all love strawberries. At the height of strawberry season in previous years we've had too many to eat before they start to go off, so many are either frozen whole, or pureed and then frozen. It's a great way to make sure we've got fruit throughout the winter.

Chocolate Curd

Earlier today I was at a local garden centre, idly browsing the shelves, when I came across something so delicious that I almost couldn't believe it was real... chocolate curd.

You can buy this glory through Amazon

I'm a huge fan of lemon curd, and I'm a huge fan of chocolate, so the idea that I could get the two together was fabulous. It was quite expensive, though, so I thought I might try my hand at making my own first.

In the Spotlight... Carrots

The edible part of a carrot, like many other vegetables, is the root. It is possible to eat the leafy greens as well, but that's less common.

Image by Sunrise, used under Creative Commons licence

Bubble and Squeak Cakes

I tried this weeks ago, back in our cabbage glut before the excess made its inevitable trip to the freezer, and then forgot all about it until now. Loosely inspired by this recipe, here is how I made bubble & squeak cakes.