2022 £1-a-day Food Challenge - Day #5

Breakfast was back to porridge again for Day #5. I made it with slightly less water so that the drizzle of fig-leaf syrup stayed on top a bit more which looked nicer and the porridge tasted slightly less thin. 

Elevenses

Lunch as per Day #3 with basil. Still very good despite it being the fifth day on the trot eating the same thing.

Tea

One of my little drives over recent years has been to reduce my refined-sugar intake a bit. As you will be aware if you've dipped into these pages before, I have a sweet tooth and a cup, (or preferably a pot), of tea and a piece of homemade cake, or shortbread, or whatever, are often what make up my happy place in the day. I'm never going to be someone who eliminates all refined-sugar from their diet but reducing it for health reasons is another matter and I've tried to adapt my eating patterns to reflect that. One of the things that this includes is making yeast-raised buns to eat at tea time in the afternoon when I need something to eat that is more than a tiny nibble. I've found that most such buns rely on a simple bread dough enriched with various additions that while they usually include sugar do not major on it. Certainly not in the way conventional cakes or biscuits do. The repertoire of these kinds of buns is extensive and although they share some basic similarities, there's plenty of variation and I've found it a happy hunting ground in my quest for lightening my refined-sugar load on a day to day basis. 

Many of these buns include dried fruit as well as a variety of spices and the combination of these provides a varied palette for experiment that can equal any cake repertoire. I'm thinking, yes, of hot cross buns but also South African mosbolletjies like the ones I made the other day, traditionally flavoured with grape juice, brandy and aniseed, Bath buns dotted with fruit and speckled with ground mace or nutmeg, miniature panettoni scented with orange or lemon zest, simple, vanilla-flecked Swiss buns (though these normally have icing which isn't exactly low sugar), stollen bollen that are miniature versions of German Christstollen with a small nugget of golden marzipan hiding inside each one, lussekatter, Swedish buns made traditionally for St Lucy's day on 13th December, fragrant with cardamom and saffron, choereg,  Armenian Easter buns, mysterious and wonderful with ground mahlepi and aniseed not to mention the stickier delights of Chelsea buns or cinnamon rolls. I could go on but you get the gist! 

Not all of these buns are suitable for this challenge - because of the spices for one thing and other additions such as a lot of dried fruit or ground almonds which are not cheap. One that is suitable however is an Italian bun - pan di romarino or rosemary buns. These are flavoured with fresh rosemary and citrus in the form of candied peel boosted with orange zest. 

Good quality candied peel is a) difficult to obtain in the UK-  even at Christmastime it's not easy to track down candied peel that comes in whole pieces rather than those ubiquitous tubs of chopped peel that are quite frankly nasty and b) even if you can obtain the good stuff, it's expensive. 

The good news is that candied peel can be made very cheaply and easily at home and the results are better than anything you will ever buy. It does take time however and I've learned (the hard way) that it can't be rushed. But set aside a morning or an afternoon when you can be around in the vicinity of the kitchen and it's not difficult. You don't need to be hands-on with it either the whole of that time, just around to check on it and respond when it's ready. It is also a way of using up something that would otherwise be thrown away. Citrus peel can't be added in large quantity to garden compost - worms don't like too much citrus and while they'll deal with the odd half lemon hull, a whole load of orange or grapefruit peel is too much for them so candying the peel for subsequent use rather than putting it in the bin is eco-friendly too. 

Preparing pink grapefruit peel for candying. Peel as you would an orange and eat the fruit for breakfast.

I use Jane Grigson's basic method in her Fruit Book but this one looks similar if you want something OnLine. You need to cook the peel twice in plain water before it goes anywhere near the sugar and this I shorten by using my pressure cooker which saves a great deal of time and fuel. For orange peel I cook the segments in about 700ml water under pressure for two lots of seven minutes each (changing the water between lots) and for grapefruit peel I cook the segments for two lots of ten minutes. From then on, I follow Jane's method. The trick is to let it candy slowly. If you rush it, or take the peel out too soon, you risk burning it or it remaining sticky, instead of becoming dry to the touch which makes it difficult to store and handle. Of the two pitfalls, it's better for it to be sticky than burnt! You can still use it if it's sticky but any burnt sections you'll have to throw out.

Pink grapefruit peel emerging from its second cooking in the pressure cooker ready now to be introduced to the syrup.

Pink grapefruit peel bubbling away in the syrup - quite some way to go yet before it's ready.

Pink grapefruit peel completely candied and with the sugar syrup crystallising on the surface cooling on a wire rack lined with baking parchment. The peel should ideally feel dry to the touch when cool.

This is what your pan should look like just after removing the peel to cool when the sugar has completely candied it ie there should be virtually no visible syrup left at all. Turn the heat down as you approach this point to avoid burning.

Anyway back to the pan di romarino. They're made from a simple white bread dough slightly sweetened and flavoured not just with rosemary but with orange zest. This can be had basically for free using leftovers by dehydrating discarded tangerine peel and then blitzing the results to a fine powder in a clean coffee or spice grinder. Tangerine or clementine peel works best rather than orange peel as it's thinner and easier to pulverise to a powder. 

Ingredients for pan di romarino

3tsps (8g) dried yeast (Dove's Farm from Ocado 8p)
500g strong white flour (Ocado 35p)
1 tsp salt (from Sainsbury's bag of 1.5kg bag Cooking Salt nil)
50g sugar (from Sainsbury's 5kg sack 3p)
40g room temperature butter (25p from Marks and Spencer 500g lack of salted butter)
1 tbsp fresh rosemary finely chopped (from the garden nil)

2tsps dried tangerine peel powdered (nil)
2 tsps dried tangerine peel powder (homemade from leftovers nil) 
1 bantam egg (nil)
200ml milk (from Ocado 4pt bottle of whole milk 11p) 
150ml whey or water (nil)
100g sultanas (Aldi 21p)
3 segments (c 180g) candied pink grapefruit peel (homemade - see above 12p)

½ an egg white to glaze before baking (Clarence Court egg from Ocado 10p)

Total cost £1.25. This quantity of dough divides, like the mosbolletje dough, into 12 so each bun costs 10p. Away from budgetary restrictions I would use 50g butter not 40g and I would glaze the buns with  whole beaten egg and sprinkle with poppy seeds before baking. 

Supper was for two of us as H is away in Madrid for work. Slightly ambitiously, I thought I'd see if I couldn't come up with a thrifty version of pissaladière, the Ligurian / Niçois version of Neapolitan pizza. Both pizza and pissaladière in their places of origin are frugal food developed to feed many mouths on very little. I opted for the northern version rather than the southern as mozzarella is outside my budget and pissaladière never has cheese on it. Instead it has anchovies and black olives both of which Aldi supplied me with very cheaply - a tin of anchovy fillets in olive oil for 49p and a jar of pitted black olives for 49p. The tin of anchovy fillets also supplied me with oil for the pissaladière dough which was a happy freebie. 

Strictly, a pissaladière has a base that is more onion than tomato but I've used a tomato-heavier one here made with the following:

220g walking onions (from the garden nil)
1 stick celery (Aldi 2p)
1 carrot (Aldi 5p)
1 red pepper (from a bag of four Wonky Peppers Aldi 24p)
rosemary, oregano and summer savory (from the garden nil)
6g Puglian olive oil (Aldi 4p)
1 tin chopped tomatoes (Aldi 28p)
a pinch of salt and black pepper (Sainsbury's / Aldi nil)

Total cost 63p for 600g tomato sauce of which I only needed to use 200g for two pissaladières ie 10p per person. 

I only used half the anchovy fillets and half the olives so it cost 12p per person for the anchovies and 11p per person for the olives. 

The dough is made from

½tsp dried yeast (2g) (Dove's Farm from Ocado 2p)
300g strong white flour (Ocado 21p)
1 tsp salt (Sainsbury's Cooking Salt nil)
oil from the anchovy tin - see above (Aldi nil)
210g whey (left over from homemade yoghurt making nil)

Total cost 23p. ie between 9p and 13p per person depending on appetite. I made a smaller pissaladière for me using only 220g dough so that worked out at 9p. D's used 300g and cost 13p.

Overall the pissaladière cost 42p per person. More expensive than some of my previous main meals but still within budget. To go with it, I managed to assemble the world's teensiest salad from some regrown Cos lettuce stumps and a few radish micro greens that I sowed too thinly to produce much substance. More of a garnish than a salad really but it was nice to have it nonetheless.

E x