Chilli kinda carne

I recently read an article about quick, tasty, healthy staple dishes you can cook up in your kitchen and use in a variety of ways - flexifoods, they called them. For me chilli con carne, that tasty Tex Mex creation, is a veritable gymnast in the kitchen in terms of its flexibility.
Chilli con carne has to be one of the most versatile dishes you can cook up in your kitchen. You can serve it over rice, spoon it over hot jacket potatoes, add it to a tortilla with some avocado, salad and natural yoghurt, serve it over corn chips with accompaniments for nachos, the list goes on...
Chlli con carne literally means “chilli with meat” but in our house I bulk it out with some carrot and zucchini to up the vegetable quota, along with the kidney beans and tomatoes. This means I can make a 250g serve of mince stretch to at least two dinners (because it also freezes well).
You don’t need to buy one of those packet mixes to make a chilli con carne – it is so easy to whip up at home with just a few simple spices.
My ingredients vary from time to time but this version I made the other night was the tastiest I’ve made in a while.

Frugal Foodie's chilli kinda carne
INGREDIENTS
250g beef mince
1 onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 carrot and 1 zucchini, grated
One 400g tin diced tomatoes
One beef stock cube
One tsp each cayenne pepper, oregano, ground coriander and ground cumin
½ tsp ground chilli (we had 1 teaspoon but not all are as brave as us!)
2 tbsp tomato paste
One 400g can kidney beans (or 1 ½ cup beans you've prepared yourself)
2 tsp brown sugar
Splash red wine vinegar
METHOD
Fry the onions and garlic in a large pan with some olive oil until soft and starting to brown. Add grated carrot and zucchini and cook until soft and starting to turn a golden colour (basically until the zucchini loses its “greenness”).
Add the mince, and fry until browned, breaking up with a fork as you go. Add your spices, mixing in to combine and stir until fragrant.
Add tomatoes, tomato paste, stock cube and a little water (I half filled the tomato can with water, sloshed it around and added that) stir to combine and let it simmer for ten minutes or more (the longer it simmers, the better the flavour)
Add the sugar, kidney beans and red wine vinegar and let it heat through, adding salt and pepper to taste.
Serve however you please. If you’re worried about the heat natural yoghurt or light sour cream are the best accompaniments.

Frugal Foodie is back, with a delicious dinner

The couscous isn't so golden in this pic as all the brown bits stuck to our new pan! still delicious though!

Whoa, it's been nearly a month since I posted any content on the Frugal Foodie! Apologies for the absence, forced by a quickening of the pace of life, as well as the arrival of a new computer (and the loss of some of my photos and documents in the process...grrr hubby!). But I've still been doing a lot of cooking, baking and eating in my absence (and taking photos of it!) and my aim is to make a concerted effort to post more regularly from now on.

To get back into the groove, here is a meal that's become a favourite in our home. Now, I must preface this by saying any time my husband asks me to make a meal again is a good sign it's a winner, but when he specifically requests it you know you've struck gold! So it was with this tasty dinner of couscous with haloumi and chickpeas.

This is a perfect meat-free dinner for times when you want something lighter, but still super tasty. You all know how much I love the nutrition-packed legumes (especially chickpeas) and I am equally crazy about haloumi cheese. Nigella Lawson once described it as vegetarian bacon and I have to agree with that description. It's salty and toothsome and when you cook it in a pan, you get a golden crispy outside and a gorgeous soft, slightly oozy cheese within. Haloumi is not too expensive if you get it from ALDI, but you could also stock up when it's on sale as it keeps fairly well in the fridge. Oh, and pan fried haloumi is good on its own with a squeeze of lemon, some fresh herbs and a little chilli.

Combine these two great ingredients with couscous (your passport to a speedy supper) and a minty, spicy dressing and dinner's done. No need for meat (though you can add chicken or something); a rocket salad to accompany it is good, or eat it on its own.

This recipe originated from Super Food Ideas, and has been modified to serve two hungry people (with some leftovers for lunch the next day)

Couscous salad with chickpeas and haloumi

INGREDIENTS
3/4 cup stock
3/4 cup couscous
150g haloumi cheese (you can get away with more if you like)
olive oil
1 1/2 cups of chick peas (or a 400g can) drained and rinsed
3 spring onions, thinly sliced
1/3 cup mint leaves, roughly chopped
1 long red chilli, deseeded and thinly sliced
Dressing
1 small lemon, rind finely grated, juiced
1 tsp paprika
Two tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

METHOD
Heat up the stock, either by bringing it to the boil in a small saucepan or boiling the kettle and adding a stock cube (my preferred method!). Place couscous in a large, heatproof bowl, add hot stock, stir with a fork then cover with foil for five minutes and let the stock absorb.
While the stock is absorbing, cut up the haloumi into rectangles (say three pieces). Heat the oil in the frying pan, then add the haloumi and cook for one to two minutes each side until golden.
Transfer to a chopping board, and chop each slice into cubes.
Take the foil off your couscous and stir it with a fork to separate and fluff up the grains.
Add the haloumi to the couscous with chickpeas, spring onion, mint and chilli. Toss to combine.
To make the dressing whisk the lemon rind, any juice from the lemon, paprika and oil in a jug until well combined. Pour dressing over salad, season with salt and pepper and stir to combine. Put into big bowls and scoff down.

Frugal Foodie update...

Apologies again for the lack of posts, we have recently purchased a new computer and I've been experiencing HEAPS of problems (files going missing, unable to upload photos...) More to come soon.

Feedback for the Frugal Foodie

Apologies for the lack of posts of late, it's Show season where I live and I've been doing a lot of cooking for competitions, as well as being busy with life in general! But more posts to come soon!

I now have an email address, frugalfoodies@gmail.com, so if you want to drop a line with your thoughts/ideas/critiques feel free to do so!

I'm also going to do a series of posts titled Frugal Foodie Fundamentals in the coming weeks to explain the basics (for me anyway!) of being a frugal foodie. This is where you'll learn the tricks to trimming down your grocery budget. I can't claim them as exclusively mine, but I want to pass on what I've learnt (and am learning!) to you. Stay tuned and if there's anything you want me to cover, send me an email.

Gourmet pizza at home #2

Three of my favourite foodie things are Moroccan flavours, cranberries and making my own pizza, so this Moroccan lamb and cranberry pizza ticks a lot of boxes for me! It's much better than any takeaway pizza you'll ever get - the combination of sweet lamb, musky cinnamon, tangy cranberries and salty fetta is divine!
I must admit I've deviated away from the original recipe I found for this at taste.com.au. Firstly, I can't stand parsley (I know, I'm weird, but it tastes soapy to me!) so I leave it off and it doesn't make much of a difference. Secondly, I tend to use some of my own home made pizza dough as the base.

Here's my version. It makes enough for four, or two greedy hungry people:

Moroccan lamb and cranberry pizza

INGREDIENTS
1 chopped onion
350g lamb mince
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon (add another 1/2 teaspoon Moroccan spice mix if you have some)
1/4 cup dried cranberries soaked in a little boiling water for 15 minutes
3/4 cup hummus
2 tablespoons pine nuts (toasted in a hot pan beforehand)
2/3 cup fetta, crumbled

METHOD
Heat the oven to 230°C. Roll out your pizza dough into two rectangles and place on two lined trays.
Heat some olive oil over a low heat in a frypan and gently cook the onion, stirring, for 12 minutes until it starts to caremalise. Add lamb and cook for another four minutes until browned. Stir in the spices and drained cranberries.
Smear your pizza dough with the hummus and then sprinkle on the mince mixture, then add the pine nuts and fetta. Put it in the oven and cook for 12 minutes, until the edges of the dough are browned. Serve drizzled with a little extra virgin olive oil (skip it if you're losing weight) and squeeze over some lemons.

Lady Marmalade

A HUGE jar of marmalade. See how the peel is swirled throughout? That's how it's meant to look :P

When I was growing up our pantry always used to be filled with multiple jars of jam made by my mother. In our backyard we had a mulberry tree, a peach tree and an orange tree and when the trees were heavy with fruit, it would be picked off and Mum would turn the surplus into big batches of jam and marmalade. She seemed to do most of her jam making on hot, sticky summer nights; standing by the stove with a book while she constantly stirred the latest concoction boiling away in her special "jam pan". A tray of piping hot sterilised jars would sit alongside her, waiting to be filled and labelled with something like "Mulberry January 1990".

Now I'm continuing on in the jam making tradition and am slowly learning how to make my own preserves. And I have to say, there's something about making jam that satisfies that hunter-gatherer instinct in you; you're turning surplus into provisions to store away for times ahead. Dare I say it makes me feel very accomplished to make my own jams. Seeing the fruits of my labour stacked up on the pantry shelves inspires a sense of satisfaction.

I've only begun my own jam making since I got married and I must say it's been an interesting learning curve. My first jam making attempt was plum jam, which turned into plum toffee because I cooked it too long. I got it right the second time though, which inspired me to try out apricot jam.

I was inspired to try making marmalade after picking up some Seville oranges at the farmers market. Originally I bought these bitterly fragrant oranges to try out some of Nigella Lawson's yummy recipes with the fruit, but I had so many I also decided to try the marmalade as well using a recipe from an excellent book my mum gave me, the Australian Women's Weekly Book of Preserves.

Marmalade making is a lengthy process, or at least the Seville marmalade is. You begin by finely slicing up 1kg of unpeeled Seville oranges, reserving the seeds, and then you put all the fruit into a bowl with 2 litres of water and let it sit overnight in the fridge. At the same time you put the seeds, which are packed with jam-setting pectin, into a bowl, pour over some water to cover them and let them set overnight. This whole process left me and the kitchen bench sticky with orange juice!
The next day you pull out a BIG pan (mine is a 7L Dutch oven), put your fruit mixture in and let it boil for 45 minutes until the rind is soft. The smell of the oranges bubbling away pervaded the house and it really reminded me of my mum's efforts!
It then gets even messier as you measure out your fruit mixture into a bowl to work out how much sugar you're going to add. I had 6 1/2 cups of orange mix, so I added 6 1/2 cups of sugar along with the jellied liquid from the seeds. Back it all went into the pan.
You then stir all the sugar in until it's dissolved, bring the marmalade to the boil and let it boil for 20 minutes until it jells. To test for the jelling you put some plates in the freezer, pull them out when cold and blob a little bit of marmalade on. Let it cool, and then push your finger with it. If it wrinkles, it's ready.
While I was making the marmalade I had some old clean jars sitting in the oven to sterilize them, and after letting the marmalade sit in the pan for 10 minutes (it helps to suspend the peel) I filled up my jars.
It makes a hell of a lot - the recipe said it would make 12 cups, I think I had a little less but I still managed to fill up about six big jars!

It's probably the wrong time to say this, but I actually really don't like marmalade. This one in particular was incredibly bitter, so I dare say I'll be giving away a lot of it!

Marmalade making is living proof the journey is often better than the destination, at least for me anyway.

New book by the original "frugal foodie"

I don't often make impulsive buys but when I heard the new Sophie Gray book Delicious was out I knew I had to get my hands on it as soon as I possibly could! It arrived in the mail on Friday from Fishpond and I have been drooling over it ever since! It certainly lives up to its name...
I discovered Sophie through my readings of the website Simple Savings and I have to say she's been one of my favourite frugal discoveries.

For those who don't know, Sophie Gray is the original frugal foodie, or should I say, Destitute Gourmet. Her five books are great guides on how to cook healthy, mouth-watering meals without blowing out your budget. I love the fact I can pick out a recipe from her book and I will almost always have the ingredients I need on hand in my pantry or freezer.

My favourite books are her first book, Stunning Food from Small Change, as well as her most recent book, Enjoy!.
But after taking a quick look at Delicious, I think this is going to be a favourite too. There's everything from fast "take away" dinners to breakfast, vegetarian food, food for entertaining, and of course, the sweet stuff. Enjoy and Delicious also include options and substitutes for those who are gluten and dairy free, so it's very handy for catering for people with allergies. I highly recommend the Destitute Gourmet books, for more information about Sophie visit here. I must say though the books are hard to find in Oz (as Sophie is a Kiwi); Fishpond is your best bet.