I think Saint Hugh of RiverCottage is going to save me £120 this month!

[deaconblue]

Last week we had 4 veggie meals, 2 fish and a braising steak stew on Sunday, I made 2 soups from his veg book too. The week's shop was £94 (previous weeks had been £130 and £140, we average £130). This week I've planned 5 veggie meals, 1 fish and sausages on Sunday and another 2 soups and the week's shop comes to £93ish! I've also decided to cut out buying processed snacks so haven't bought mini cheddars or biscuits and have made home made cheese and ham muffins, and pitta with hummus for kids' snacks instead. At this rate we will be £120 better off at the end of this month.

Dh is finding he is more farty than usual though

Does anyone have his first Everyday book? Any good?

Yes. It is very good, though not quite such a way of life as the veg one is turning out to be....

Weeeelll, I finally used HF-W's new Veg book last night and the food was bloody gorgeous!

We had the beetroot and walnut hummus, mushroom risoniotto and the sweet potato and peanut gratin.

All very easy to make and very very tasty. DH is going to cook some more veggie recipes next week which I am going to choose from book, yippeeee!!

leek and cannellini bean soup this lunch time. Was delicious. I semi blitzed it as it looked a bit watery but was full of flavour. Am trying the spelt (I'm going to use barley), squash and fennel salad tonight. Am cooking fish for the dc and dh to go with it though as it looks a bit too veggie for their liking.

I bought some spelt today!
And had a long chat with the woman in the health food shop (when she asked me what I was going to do with the spelt) about the book which ended with her saying she was going to get it....

Honey roast tomatoes. Crikey they were good. Didn't have cherry tomatoes, just a pack of vine tomatoes that were getting a bit past their best and on toasted sourdough even DH said they would have made a proper meal with a salad (only had for lunch). He has stopped looking for pork products to stick on the side of every vegetarian meal at last!

Did you find you had loads and loads of juices from the tomatoes?

Yes quite a lot and they needed about 45 mins because they were bigger, but that made them even better on toast as it soaked in and mopped up the rest with lettuce.

The pearl barley and roasted butternut, fennel and walnut salad was delicious. Like a nutty risotto. Nearly chopped the end of my finger peeling the bloody butternut though!

Ah, not just me then. We had them alongside our dinner, but they went well with lentils. I think bread would have been better to mop up the juices.

We had the tomatoes with our kale and mushroom lasagne, they went really well. And ours were cheap rubbishy tomatoes without much flavour but the recipe made them very much more pleasant.

Peppers stuffed with new potatoes, feta And pesto. Was bloody delicious. The feta and pesto melts and goes all gooey

This whole MN lark is turning into an expensive pass time! I've also ordered the book as I was a veggie for 20 years but then married a carnivorous Frenchman and I'd love to try and make more veggie meals again.

I have a box of sorry looking cherry toms in the fridge which probably won't last until the book arrives, can someone enlighten me (roughly) as to how to roast them with honey please?

Got his book on Xmas day, cooked Pearl Barley Broth on Boxing Day as I was so inspired. It was gorgeous, even DS (5) ate a big bowl. Such a worthwhile book, I'd recommend it to anyone.

I think River Cottage burned down at the weekend

I loved the macaroni peas recipe,Osmiornica. Mine wasn't stodgy at all.Did you add quite a bit of the water to it?

I did cheat though,and use cheddar,because I loathe parmesan.

And I added extra garlic.

Yes, there's an article here about the fire.

We had roasted cauliflowr tody. It was yummy.

Porotos granados tomorrow.

Viking:

Oil a roasting dish
Halve 500g tomatoes & put cut side up in the dish - should fit snugly with little space between.
Crush 2 garlic cloves with a pinch of salt, then beat with 1tbs honey, 3tbs olive oil & pepper.
Spoon over the tomatoes.
Roast for about 30 mins at 190 degrees C.

Thanks!

We had Vegetable Byriani last night - absolutely lovely, though next time I'll ramp up the spices and chilli a bit. But really nice and filling and tasty.

I am now left with a fridge with lots of random veg in - cauliflower, peppers, courgettes, aubergine, a few tomatoes.... there is just SO a HFW meal bursting to come out of there for tonight's dinner!!!!! MMmmmmm. Looking forward to it already!

I am enthused - but can I ask - is it possible to purchase the veg and other stuff and meal plan if your life is a bit chaotic?

I work strange hours and can't possibly make a meal every night, and there is no one but me around at lunch.

Would this book be worth it for someone like me, or is it more for someone who is in every evening and knows which evening they need a wuick meal and which they need a late meal and so on?

well, there is a chapter on store cupboard suppers which would be very handy. A lot of the salad and raw food recipes are very quick to throw together. And in these days of salad leaves packed in bags in inert gases which can easily keep up to a week, I think it would be fairly straightforward to buy the ingredients in advance without knowing when you were going to use them, you would just need a strategy to make sure you used the things that were going to go off, first. But since, in general, the recipes that have stuff that goes off quickly are the quick ones (eg a butternet squash keeps for weeks but takes a long time to cook whereas a bag of rocket keeps up to a week but takes no time to prepare) it ought to work.
There are also quite a few soup/stew/curry type things that could be made ahead and frozen.
I think what you would have to do, is to read quite carefully through the recipes you fancied doing that week, looking at the timings and making quite sure they would not take you, say, an hour and a half and thus be no good for when you get back late.
You can use organisation to create flexibility IYSWIM.

I think you would need to vaguely meal plan but you could plan say 4 meals which need similar veg and then eat/cook them whenever it suits. Eg we had porotas granados and the spelt, butternut and fennel salad this week so could have used half a butternut one evening and the other half for a lunch.