2022 £1-a-day Food Challenge - Day #4

Breakfast - not porridge today for a change! 

As a Sunday treat I broke out and made some oatcakes to have with my dandelion honey. This may not sound like much of a treat but believe me, it feels like one after the last three days which have been a great deal of hard work in the kitchen on fairly thin rations. Delicious rations mostly, to be sure, but thin. 

I'm rather fussy about oatcakes - too many of them taste cardboardy to me. The best I've ever eaten came from an unassuming, local bakery in Beauly near Inverness in 1996 and on returning south I did my best to replicate a recipe for them. I've been making the results ever since. They really benefit from the mixture of grades of oatmeal - pinhead for crunch, medium for body and fine to hold the dough together as well as a good balance between salt and sweet. The quantities of salt and sugar I've given work for me but you may want to tweak the amounts to suit your own taste. 

I like them best loaded with proper bee honey - a good heather or wildflower honey or a dark, aromatic French miel de campagne made from chestnut flowers or fleurs de garrigue. But a sliver of mature, slightly crystalline cheddar sits atop them very well too. The dandelion honey was good on them however although it was a bit too runny to stay on top of the oatcake as you can see!

To make the oatcakes, you need:

174g pinhead oatmeal (from a 2kg bag from Buy Wholefoods Online 22p)
196g medium oatmeal (from a 2kg bag from Buy Wholefoods Online 23p)
30g (+ another 20g or so for rolling out so 50g in total) fine oatmeal or porridge oats blitzed to flour in the food processor (Aldi porridge oats 3p)
2 tbsps (38g) soft brown sugar (Aldi 5p)
1 tsp salt (Sainsbury's Cooking Salt nil)
56g salted butter (from 500g pack Marks and Spencer salted butter 35p)
6 tbsps boiling water (nil)

Total cost 88p. This made 19 oatcakes yesterday so 4p per oatcake. You can halve the quantities if you don't want so many but I like to have a stash in a tin in the cupboard, if I'm making them.

Put the butter and water in a pan to melt over a low heat. Mix the dry ingredients together in a bowl. Once the butter has melted, tip in the dry mixture and stir to form a stiffish dough. Roll out thinly but not too thinly - about ⅛" in depth, no thinner - on a surface floured with the remaining fine oatmeal and cut into 3" rounds with a fluted cutter. Bake on a lined baking tray at 195-200℃ for around 15 minutes until the edges darken a little and the oatcakes are crisp. 

Lunch - the same as yesterday apart from substituting dill for the parsley and basil. 

Tea

 

Supper was pasta again, thanks to the bantams - bless their feathery trousers!

This time it's an Italian  recipe that I only discovered a few weeks back for pasta e piselli con pan grattato - pasta with peas and breadcrumbs which I've adapted to fit the constraints of the £1-a-day budget. It's a very simple thing - the sauce is just frozen peas cooked briefly with a generous handful of chives and then whizzed up to make a creamy purée with some hot vegetable stock, olive oil, a splash of apple cider vinegar, and salt and pepper and spooned over tagliatelle or whatever pasta you like.

The pan grattato, known in Italy as 'Poor Man's Parmesan', is sprinkled on top of the sauce either instead of, or ideally as well as, Parmesan cheese or, as I'm using, Parmesan's poor relation, Grana Padano. It's remarkably good  and makes a lovely, piquant and crunchy contrast to the creamy sauce which has no cream in it. 

It consists of stale sourdough bread whizzed to crumbs and mixed with finely chopped herbs which are then fried in olive oil until crispy and brown. I've only tried them on pasta but they would be nice over a salad or on soup too. They are a fantastic way to use up stale sourdough bread. 

To make this, start with the pan grattato for which you need:

80g stale sourdough breadcrumbs from homemade sourdough loaf 5p

about 1 tbsp of mixed fresh herbs finely chopped - I used tarragon, lemon thyme and rosemary from the garden (nil)

a pinch of salt and black pepper (nil)

18g Puglian olive oil (Aldi 13p)

Total cost 18p. This is enough for 3-4 servings but it's quite moreish so probably works out at about 6p per person.

Mix the breadcrumbs, herbs and salt and pepper together. Heat the oil in a frying pan and add the crumbs and cook over a medium high heat moving the crumbs around with a spatula to stop them burning. Once they are golden brown and crisp, remove from the heat, decant into a bowl and leave to cool down and crisp up further.

For the piselli sauce you need:

250g frozen peas (from Aldi 900g bag of Garden Peas 15p)

22g Puglian olive oil (Aldi 16p)

a big handful of chives from the garden (nil)

¼tsp salt (from 1.5kg bag of Sainsbury's Cooking Salt nil)

a grind or two of black pepper (Aldi nil)

1 dsp homemade apple cider vinegar (nil)

c125 ml homemade vegetable stock (nil)

Total cost 31p. This makes two generous portions ie 15p each.

Bring about a litre of water to the boil. Add some salt and then the frozen peas and chives and simmer for a few minutes until the peas are cooked. Tip the contents of the pan into a sieve set over a big jug to collect the cooking water which can be used to cook the pasta. In a small but deepish pan heat the vegetable stock and tip in the strained peas and chives. Add the oil, salt and pepper and apple cider vinegar and then blitz to a roughish purée with a stick blender. Thin with a bit of boiling water if it seems too thick. Put the pan back on the heat to keep warm while you cook the pasta. Once the pasta is cooked and drained, ladle into bowls and spoon on the sauce. Top with the pan grattato and a little Parmesan or Grana Padano cheese. 

I think I left my sauce reheating for a bit too long - the colour has lost some of that lovely, vivid green it had just after blitzing to a purée. Note to self - only do the puréeing at the last minute!

The impetus to cook this was wanting to find another pasta dish that I could use on my very limited budget but it's been a happy discovery regardless of the budget - delicious and a bit different. Definitely in the to-be-repeated category.

E x