Page 46 - Phonebox Magazine April 2013

foodie
PHONEBOX
Supper on a Shoestring
All you can eat for £14 - by Jennie Archer
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No, not the price of an evening buffet at a new Chinese restaurant, but the entire food budget for a week for youngsters living on benefits (as presented by a BBC documentary recently). A discussion at the local pub quickly followed surrounding the notion of what it would be like to only have £14 to feed yourself for a whole week.
Within the hour five of us had taken up the challenge. My partner and I had the luxury of an economy of scale with £28 to feed ourselves for seven days, the other three were doing it solo. We quickly agreed that tea, coffee and alcohol were excluded from the budget. (It would have been plain wrong to have compromised the trade at the local pub for the chosen week!)
straight
roast and vegetables. It
made repeat appearances as chicken chowder, a chicken supreme and
finally, its rich stock formed the basis
for a pearl barley risotto. Not bad for a small bird which my partner felt he could have eaten in its entirety at the first meal.
2 courses just
£2.45!
Great article from Jennie, but why bother cooking when you can eat out at such amazing prices! Yes two courses for £2.45 and good courses at that? Robin- son’s Wine Bar at Newport Pagnell run a special menu on a Thursday, with soup at 85p and a main course for just £1.60. It comes out of the kitchen of the fabulous restaurant next door, is presented beauti- fully and tastes divine. We had carrot and coriander soup, followed by belly pork complete with crackling. Whilst the por- tions aren’t huge, we weren’t hungry when we came away. But we were a little smug. (If only they did it every day, I’d nearly hit Jenny’s £14 weekly budget!)
5 course fine dining just £20
But it doesn’t stop there. If you have a special occasion on the horizon, but are feeling the pinch - try Northampton Col- lege. Maybe not your first choice for a fabulous meal out, but their catering col- lege have to practice on someone - why not me! The students run a proper restaurant inside the college, with silver service and very posh food. Some of the waiting staff are a little nervous, but no- body spills anything and the food is ad- venturous, beautiful to look at and top class. Photos below show a pigeon breast starter - with some of the best guacamole I’ve tasted,
and a rather fine lemon tart. Proper bargain! HB
The approaches to feeding ourselves were all very different. I drew heavily on the knowledge passed to me by my late mother, a domestic science teacher, who trained in the 1940s. Not quite a Nigella Lawson but a domestic goddess in my eyes who could turn scraps and left overs into a delicious meal with the addition of a little homemade cheese sauce or a pie crust. Dan, a landscape gardener, chose a more monotonous dietary route making his own “beer bread” and a vast chilli con carne to eat daily with either rice or pasta.
Other evenings I produced a vegetarian bake and made the minced beef into meatballs in tomato sauce with pasta. The favourite meal of the week was definitely turning the cocktail sausages into “tadpoles in the hole” with sauté potatoes and the remaining vegetables in a cheesy sauce.
Our budget for the week of £28 went like this. Each day started with a hearty bowl of porridge. Lunch was either homemade vegetable soup or a pack up of sandwiches. The first appearance of chicken and stuffing sandwiches was delightful. When it appeared for the third time in the week the pleasure was definitely diminished.
We were managing fine in respect of achieving a healthy diet on our budget but fruit was proving a challenge. A banana a day may not keep the doctor away but it fitted better with our budget than the blueberries I soon started dreaming about. I had also failed to include any “treats” into my planning and by mid I was week craving a biscuit. So I recklessly blew 29 pence on a packet of ginger biscuits and my morale was instantly lifted.
The evening meals for the week were built around a chicken, some minced beef, a bargain purchase of 40 cocktail sausages and a slab of cheddar cheese. The chicken, with its sage and onion stuffing, first appeared as a
Over the week the bill totalled £22.27, well within our allowance. We’d even enjoyed the meals - tasty with an extra side order of self satisfaction. However I couldn’t help wondering if the youngsters living on this budget for real, week after week, would have anything like the pleasure we had with eating all you can for £14.
Slow stewed beef in Olney Beer
A couple of packets of Oxtail at the local butchers caught our chef on the street’s eye this week and being a cheap cut of meat, fits our shoestring supper theme just perfectly.
In a large pan gently fry two onions, carrots and sticks of celery until soft. Turn your oven on to max temperature. Remove from the pan and over a high heat brown your Ox tails (defrosted) until nicely coloured all over.Add your sweated veg back to the pan and stir through.
boil. Put your stew into the oven and reduce the temperature, either to 160 and leave for 4-5 hours or better still overnight at 90’ degrees.
Once your stew is rich and dark remove the bay leaves and strip the meat from the bone. Serve with mashed celeriac to banish those winter blues!
46 Phonebox Magazine
remains of a mini keg of Hopping Mad's Brainstorm) to the pan and a pint for the chef. Add a pint of good beef stock to the pan as well along with 6 whole peppercorns, 3 bay leaves and a couple of good handfuls of chantenay (or baby) carrots and bring to the
Add in two pints of beer (I had the
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Shoestring
Shopping List Butter
Chicken
Stuffing
£0.98 £3.18 £0.37 £0.55 £1.26 £1.00 £1.00 £1.49 £0.49 £2.40 £0.31 £0.35 £1.00 £0.29 £0.79 £0.55 £0.48
Bread rolls x 6 Potatoes Bananas x 7 Eggs x 6 Cheese (300g) Spaghetti Mince* Tomatoes Chocolate Salad
Ginger biscuits Cocktail sausages* Plain flour (1.5kg) Cob loaf * *reduced
£22.27
TOTAL