Chunk of bannock with butter

Recipe:

200g plain flour
15g baking powder
pinch salt
half a pack of feta cheese, crumbled
6 sundried tomatoes, roughly chopped (from a jar with oil)
level teaspoon dried rosemary
level teaspoon onion powder
large glug of olive oil
175ml cold water

Mix dry ingredients, add olive oil and water, mix. It should be quite soft. Heat a small amount of olive oil in an omelette pan, tip in the mix and spread it out. Cook for 20 minutes on a low heat, preferably with a loose-fitting lid on the pan, then turn and cook for another 20 mins. Turn out onto a wire tray and cool. Eat with olive oil or butter.

Very tasty, with little salty explosions when you bite into a bit of feta. Quite fluffy.

Feta & Sun-Dried Tomato Bannock

Perfect for cheap holidays, at this price it’s almost disposable. Not the most waterproof at 1500mm, but good for summer, and you can always up the proofing with Nikwax or similar – or even make a tarp to go over it.

http://www.tesco.com/direct/tesco-4-person-cross-pole-vis-a-vis-tent/205-1293.prd

Sometimes you need some bread, but you need it soon, and you need it frugally – and firing up the oven just to make a small loaf isn’t exactly economical. The answer is bannock – a bread cooked in a frying pan on your cooker top.

This was my first time making it, and I was very pleased with how it turned out, and it couldn’t be easier to make.

Ingredients

• 200g plain flour
• 15g baking powder
• pinch salt
• 50g melted butter
• 170ml farmhouse cider (or water)

Add dry ingredients to a mixing bowl, mix together. Add liquid and melted butter and mix thoroughly. Heat a small amount of lard or dripping in a small frying pan (I used an omelette pan), then tip the mixture in and spread out evenly.

Bannock mixture added to the pan

Cook on a low heat, covering with a lid for the first 5 mins and cook for 15 minutes on each side, or until a fork pushed into the centre comes out clean.

The bannock after turning over

Turn out onto a cooling tray, then break or cut into pieces and eat with butter or whatever spread you fancy from sweet to savoury.

The finished bannock

A great, tasty recipe that uses up leftover cauliflower. Great for getting kids to eat vegetables, too.

Ingredients

• half a cooked cauliflower
• 285ml milk
• 1 garlic clove, crushed
• 1 veg oxo
• herbs – thyme or parsley
• knob of butter
• 2 rounded teaspoons cornflour, mixed with a tablespoon of milk
• 125g grated cheddar (optional)

Roughly mashed cauliflower

Fully cooked sauce

Mixing the sauce and pasta

The finished meal

Don’t use fabric softener on your towels and tea-towels. Not only will you save money, but the towels will dry you or your crockery better.

Fabric softeners coat fabrics with a thin layer of chemicals. These chemicals have lubricating and electrical conductive properties.

The conductive property is important for preventing a buildup of static electricity.  If you live in a dry climate or experience dry winters, using fabric softeners will make a noticeable difference in the static buildup and cling that your clothes have. However, towels and tea towels are either cotton or linen, and don’t hold a static charge.

The lubrication property helps make the fabric stain resistant by repelling liquids, which is great for clothing and most other laundry. Unfortunately, this is bad for towels since you want towels to absorb water from your hands, body and anything else you’re drying with a towel.

It’s getting a bit frightening at the shops these days, isn’t it? Not so long ago, I could buy a can of corned beef for around a pound, in two supermarkets I checked this week, the price was £2.49! A small can of red salmon was £3.99. They try and tell us that inflation is running at 4.5%, but these sorts of rises are skies above that.

There’s all kinds of reasons the inflation rate is understated – one is to include items where the price is dropping – usually technology.

The second is a practice called ‘hedonics’ where prices are weighted according to the value or pleasure we get from a purchase. I’ll explain. If you bought a £400 laptop five years ago, compared to a similar purchase now, the older laptop would be slower, have less storage etc. So the economists say we are getting more value/pleasure from the newer purchase, therefore the price is actually reduced for the purposes of calculating inflation. Yes, it’s a con – you’re still paying £400.

Another aspect of hedonics is to substitute items. Lets take a nice piece of rump steak. Because the price goes up, less people buy the steak, instead buying (for instance) mince to make shepherds pie. Those slippery economists, just call it ‘beef’ and because people are now spending less (even though they are buying different cuts of beef), will say that the price has either dropped or stayed the same, so the huge price rises in rump steak are not reflected in the inflation rate.

Tricksy little economists.

Ingredients for four servings

• Bits of left over roast chicken
• contents of the roasting pan
• 1 large onion
• 3 medium potatoes
• 1 mugful soup broth mix (pearl barley, peas, split peas, red lentils)
• generous handful of frozen peas
• half a packet of instant mash
• garden herbs (I used bay leaf, thyme and rosemary)
• salt & pepper to taste

Left over roast chicken

Cut the meat into bite-size pieces

Chicken in bite-sized pieces and separate bones and skin

Assorted items for the stock

Put all the bits in with the chicken bones, adding more water if necessary. Leave everything to simmer for an hour.

At the end of the hour, strain the stock into a large bowl, then return it to the saucepan. Rinse the gubbins through to extract more of the flavour, then dispose of the remains. Add the rinsed soup mix to the stock and bring back to simmering point. Half an hour later, add the chopped onion and potato.

Chopped onion & potato

Simmer for another half hour, stirring occasionally, then add the frozen peas and chicken pieces and simmer for another five minutes.

Add the instant mash, a small amount each time and stirring after each addition. Don’t worry if it goes a bit lumpy, it will smooth out as you stir and it thickens.

Adding instant mash

Now taste and add salt and pepper as required.

Serve in bowls with crusty bread. Enjoy!

Finished stew

“Preparing for hard times” – I’ve mentioned this phrase of few times in this blog, but what does it mean and why? It means exactly what it says, and as for why – all the signs are pointing towards some very hard times indeed. Anyone who does the food shopping will have noticed that prices are mostly rising, or pack sizes are shrinking. A basket that once cost £30 now costs upwards of £40, so canny shopping becomes more and more necessary, unless you married someone very rich.

What if times get even harder? What if the fuel tanker drivers go on strike? What if wheat rust spreads even further? Cotton, sugar, coffee, onions and many other basic items have increased massively on the futures markets. The future of citrus fruit crops in Florida is under threat from an incurable bacteria. To get all Biblical, there are “wars and rumours of wars” (Matthew 24:6). If the US dollar falls, the whole world will be in disarray.

Perhaps now is the time to step up that storage.

There are many sites which give advice about hard-core preparation, and I’ll be reviewing some of them over the next few weeks.

Tins of Branston Baked Beans are available at Asda at £1 for a 4-pack. I bought several packs for my food storage – see Credit Crunchy Food Storage.

No, not the film! Camping is becoming more and more popular, mostly due to dwindling family finances, and many people are discovering that sitting in a field is more interesting that sitting in an airport! Joking aside, it can be a cheap holiday, although if you go mad and buy top of the range equipment, it can also be an expensive one.

Campsites range from giant affairs full of serried ranks of caravans and tents, with every available facility imaginable, to a small field on a farm with very few facilities, and all points inbetween. Where you go depends on your personal tastes and family makeup, but speaking personally, I hate the giant sites, although if you have a family of teenagers used to hotel compounds abroad, I can see that you might be short of choices.

We’ve been campers for many years and have used ridge tents, pop-up tents, frame tents, trailer tents, caravans and motorcaravans. At the moment we have a motorcaravan, and I’ve just set up a blog to detail our ramblings in Bertha the Bedouin. You can find it at http://www.bedouin-trails.co.uk/