2022 £1-a-day Food Challenge - Day #3

Breakfast was exactly the same as the previous two days apart from using a spoonful dandelion honey instead of the fig-leaf syrup on my porridge for a change. This makes not a ha'p'orth of difference really but it gives me the illusion of choice which is psychologically important with these repetitive meals. 

I've managed to rediscover how the library card app works so I'm back in business with it and I'll go back in due course and reformat Days #1 and #2 with them as I do think it makes it easier to read these quite long posts.

As it was the weekend a little elevenses seemed called for ...

Lunch was exactly the same as yesterday but with some fresh basil snipped from the cuttings I've taken and just potted out in the garden in the cheese instead of herb fennel. Better with the basil, I think but both have been delicious. 

Teatime!

Mosbolletjies are another traditional South African recipe that I was introduced to by a friend who lived for some years in Pretoria and then Durban. They are made in the Cape wine-growing region of South Africa at the time of the South African grape harvest in February or March when there is plenty of freshly pressed grape juice or 'must' around. It's the must that has given its name to these little buns. Traditionally the fresh grape juice was allowed to ferment for a few days and then used as the sole raising agent for a sweet, aniseed-flavoured bread dough enriched with milk, butter, a dash of brandy and some dried vine fruits. 

My mosbolletjies are raised with ordinary baking yeast but they do have pressed grape juice in them from the tiny grapes on the vine which sprawls over a trellis in the garden. Obviously, the juice is not fresh in May, but I froze a couple of small bottles of it back in September when the grapes were ripe and we squeezed them for the juice. No sophisticated method here - just crushed in very clean fists over a jug!

 

This is more or less the only use for these grapes because although they are reasonably sweet when ripe, they are full of large pips and because each grape is so small their unappetisingly chewy skins make up a disproportionate part of each one. Obviously, no brandy could be added on my £1-a-day budget and I have tweaked the ingredients slightly to make them thriftier but they are a passable version of the real McCoy nonetheless.

The ingredients are as follows:

2 tsps dried yeast (6g) (Dove's Farm from Ocado 6p)

500g strong white bread flour (Ocado 35p)

½tsp salt (Sainsbury's Cooking Salt nil)

40g salted butter (from Marks and Spencer's 500g pack of salted butter 25p)

7g ground aniseed (Just Ingredients 14p)

100g raisins (Aldi 27p)

140g sultanas (Aldi 30p)

50ml homemade fig-leaf syrup (see yesterday's post for details 2p)

250ml home-pressed frozen grape juice defrosted (from the garden nil)

1 bantam egg (nil)

water to make up 350ml liquid in total with the egg, grape juice and fig-leaf syrup (nil)

To glaze the buns - 1 bantam egg (nil)

18g pearl sugar (Ocado 15p)

Total cost £1.54 This quantity of dough makes 12 buns each costing 12p.

Once the dough has risen and proved, I glaze them with beaten egg, sprinkle them with a little pearl sugar and bake them at 195℃ for around 12-15 minutes.

It was soup again for supper but this time a green one. I practically live off green soup in a normal week but not a particularly frugal green soup - I make it with plenty of leeks, a big bulb of fennel and masses, (and I mean masses!), of fresh watercress. It's a vivid green colour, packed with vitamins and minerals and I love it. It would more or less blow my whole day's budget however at the moment to include a bowl of it so an alternative plan had to be made to come up with an ersatz version. 

When I talked about my ideas for doing this, there was immediate suspicion in the ranks and talk about people needing to make alternative, independent arrangements for supper which I found slightly churlish. H, in particular, is suspicious of any of my ideas that use 'plants common in Medieval times but no longer regularly used today' and regards anything that falls into that category as something to be treated at least with extreme caution and preferably, outright and forcible opposition! So when I mentioned the possibility of the ground elder (brought to this country originally by the Romans) that we have not yet exterminated from the flowerbeds as an alternative to watercress, alarm bells went off big time. 

In a sense, I understand where he's coming from - if nettles, ground elder, purslane, good-king-henry, jack-by-the-hedge or whatever were just as good as spinach or watercress, Sainsbury's or Waitrose would be piling them high in cellophane packages and selling them dear! The fact that they are not doing that is a reasonable indication that actually they may well be not as good and times have moved on for the better. 

There was also an unfortunate incident when we first moved here which has added grist to his mill. In the flower beds there were quite a few small parsley plants growing, which I was pleased about as there were virtually no other herbs growing here at all. D carefully transplanted and watered them and I was looking forward to using them in due course. 

Fortunately, I had a big pot of more established parsley that we had brought with us when we moved, for more proximate use. I say 'fortunately' because the innocent-looking 'parsley plants' turned out to be hemlock and a sprinkle of that on our kedgeree or anything else might well have killed us all stone dead! 

H has never forgotten this nor allowed me to forget it either and he is right, one does have to be meticulous about the identification of less familiar plants if one is going to start using them in the kitchen. In all fairness, I don't think I would actually have used the hemlock as it doesn't smell like parsley and I would have noticed something amiss even if a vigilant visitor had not already pointed out the fact that we appeared to be cultivating a poison factory! The hemlock was quickly dug up and removed before ever seeing the light of my kitchen but the experience was salutary nonetheless.

Bearing the above in mind, this is what went into my wild green soup which, despite the reservations of certain members of the household, turned out to be pretty good in taste, if a bit murky in colour. And I noticed that the bowl of even the most vociferous sceptic, despite initial misgivings, went down fast. Enough said!

8g Puglian olive oil (Aldi 6p)

300g onions (Aldi Wonky onions 14p)

3 sticks celery (Aldi 6p)

1 large (very large actually!) baking potato (374g Aldi 16p)

1 litre homemade vegetable stock made from vegetable trimmings, herbs and 2 tsp salt (1p)

a colanderful of wild greens and herbs from the garden - ground elder, salad burnet, dandelion leaves, sweet cicely, herb fennel, parsley - no hemlock! (nil)

a grinding of black pepper (nil)

a splash of apple cider vinegar - about 1 dsp - to sharpen the seasoning at the end (nil)

Total cost 43p. It's made just under 1.5 litres - enough for 3-4 servings costing about 12p each.

To go with the wild green soup I made sun-dried tomato and rosemary rolls using home-dried tomatoes and rosemary from the garden to flavour a basic white bread dough very similar to the bread dough I made my fennel seed flatbreads from on Day #1 which works out at 6p per roll. Strictly, I know my tomatoes are not 'sun-dried' because they were dried in a dehydrator but 'dehydrated tomatoes' doesn't sound so appealing so I'm calling mine 'sun-dried' anyway. You can get me under the Trades Description Act 1968, if you like!

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