Your comfort/cheap food meal

[vondutch]

Just that

I do this with peanut butter and jam. Don't like it together but on alternate slices it's lovely.

Yes to veggie sausages - sweet potato mash, peas, gravy. Even better with a giant Yorkie.

Veggie hotdogs - even better if served with roasted chipotle corn on the cob.

For ds, toad in the hole: heat oven to 200, put a pack of sausages and a slosh of oil into the oven and cook for 20 minutes. In the meantime, put 140g flour into a bowl, mix in 2 eggs and then beat in ?175 milk i think until as smooth as you can and bubbly. Pour this into the hot baking tray and back in the oven for another 15 mins.

For me, scrambled egg on toast.

Comfort foods - fried egg on toast, various iterations of chicken rice, idiappam and sodhi

Lentil soup. Lentil dahl. Baked potatoes with butter and cheese. Baked beans on toast with cheese. Those terrible Indomie ultra-processed noodles as a soup. Proper French onion soup with cheese croutons. Homemade chicken stew. Cheese and tomato toasties.

More pasta dishes: carbonara, cacio e pepe, a Nigel Slater one with blue cheese, broccoli and creme fraiche. For DS, it's macaroni cheese. In fact, he once rang me at work when he was about 12/13 to ask if I would make it for him that evening.

Carbs and fats - it's fairly basic, isn't it, what we gravitate towards?

It sort of is, I think because it's literally tomato puree spread straight onto bread. Not like passata, the actual thick puree that comes in tubes. If I was making an actual pizza I'd use something more watery and sauce-like in texture, like a passata with herbs added.

I also do a cheat's Rarebit where I spread yellow (American) mustard straight onto bread, top with melted cheese, then grill. People find buttering bread with mustard slightly weird too but it's basically a Rarebit!

This sounds very good.

My lockdown project was teaching myself every single pasta sauce I could find.

My personal favourite is a Nadiya recipe for pink spaghetti, and it's the quickest pasta sauce in the world: put a package of beetroot (the kind that comes vacuum packed) into a blender with half one of those big red chilli peppers, a good squeeze of garlic paste, glug of olive oil, half a ladle of the pasta water, and blend. I do it in the Nutribullet. It's heathy and delicious as long as you like beetroot! And also bright PINK

That's our favourite pasta sauce. My kids love it. Our other favourite is the pinch of yum cauliflower cream sauce.

Poached eggs on toast with cheese sauce. My mum used to make this when we were wee. She often made us 1 slice of toast, an egg, cheese sauce, chips and peas. My dad got 2 toasts and 2 eggs. 😀

I’ve just eaten jacket potato with tuna Mayo, spring onion and grated nature cheddar 😋

Mine is a slice of white bread toasted, spread with butter then watsits laid on top. Pour a tin of cooked spaghetti over the top then sprinkle with grated cheese and either whack it in the microwave or under the grill to melt the cheese. It sounds grim but it tastes amazing!!

*mature 🤦🏻‍♀️

fried egg, ham and chips, plus a slice of bread n butter

Thick Richmond sausages (when on special offer) homemade chips and baked beans , baked potato cheese and baked beans cook tatie in Micro for ten minutes then put In oven , both our favourites

Chicken with lentils and peas. Really hearty and filling.

Slowly fry chopped bacon and spring onion in butter.
add a tin of green lentils and the same amount of frozen peas, plus a1/4 cup of water mixed with 2 teaspoons cornflour.
simmer for 10 minutes then add cooked chicken for another 5 minutes.
season with loads of black pepper and a bit of salt to taste.

Garlic (whole
bulb)
Onion/leek
Courgettes
Peppers
Can of sweetcorn
Tub of cremefraiche
SMOKED bacon cut up
Pasta
Grated cheddar (generous quantity)

Cook onion/garlic/bacon first

Add other ingredients and cook Slowly

Cook pasta

When pasta strained, add grated cheese to melt and stir in and then crème fraiche and stir in then mix together everything else.

Recipe for lentil soup (this is v v easy but try it, it's delicious)

Very finely chop or grate an onion and a carrot (if you can do this through the blender so much the better, sometimes I use frozen chopped onion) and fry off for a few minutes in a little bit of butter.
Add large handful of red lentils, fill your pan with water and add a couple of vegetable stock cubes and cook for 30-40 minutes.

It's really homely, comforting, nutritious and cheap. You can add some ham from the slow cooker if you like. Serve with buttered white bread.

Sausage and mash. X

This is going to sound rubbish but I promise it’s nice. It’s also what we have when we’re ill in this house.

Pasta broth which is literally - some pasta (ideally macaroni) cooked in stock. I use those stock pot things but you could easily use a cube. I put onions and carrots in the stock to cook at the same time. Eat it all including the stock which is the soup.

My son thinks it’s a treat which is handy!

Mash. Lots of cream, salt and butter. Can’t go wrong.
Also dh makes the most amazing rarebit which he makes me when I’m feeling a bit run down, it’s delicious and he never shares his kitchen secrets, I’m the consumer in the relationship - he’s the creator 😂

Oh, and a woman at work the other day made this lunch which I thought was just fascinating purely because I’d never seen it before…
she put some Jacobs cream crackers on a plate, poured over half a tin of beans and sprinkled with grated cheese then whacked it in the microwave for about a minute. She says the toppings get hot and the crackers don’t go soggy! So basically cheese and beans on toast but actually crackers.

For me by myself, boiled egg and Marmite soldiers or Marmite toast and beans

For me and others, fry some onion and chicken pieces, then put 2 cans of black beans/mixed beans, sometimes sweetcorn, can of tomatoes, chicken stock, cayenne, paprika, garlic powder, cumin, salt and pepper and sweet potato in the slow cooker and leave on for however long. Have with plain yogurt (and avocado ideally but spendy). Do a variation of this sometimes with chorizo or beef mince twice a week every week