Monroe - Cooking on a bootstrap: over 100 simple, budget recipes

CONTENTS

For Jonathon, my still-Small Boy

INTRODUCTION

Every recipe book I write seems to contain a recipe for lentil soup, and I am unashamed of this. When I was living in my freezing cold flat, scraping together change to buy food to sustain me and my boy through an unforgiving winter, well-meaning friends would advise me to buy a bag of lentils. Theyre filling, they would say. Cheap, theyd enthuse. A good source of protein, theyd nod enthusiastically. I was sceptical, because the humble lentil was a stranger to me. It was something Other, something unfamiliar, something else. And one of the most poignant things about living on a stringent budget, is you cant afford to experiment with new ideas that may go wrong, or may taste revolting, or may end up burnt and stuck to the pan and inevitably in the bin. There isnt a margin for error and experiment when there isnt a margin for turning on the sodding hallway lights, I would try to explain.

By now, in better times, I have experimented my way through bags of lentils to find well-tested recipes that are simple and sustaining, and, above all, delicious. Dear reader, I am incredibly fussy about what I put in my mouth. It has to bring me joy. It has to satisfy. It has to ignite, to delight, to sing to me. Please, as we go on this journey together, trust me that there is not a single recipe in this book that I do not adore, have not tested and tested and tweaked and improved and sighed over and groaned over and loved and cherished. I write these on postcards, store them in a Jiffy bag marked SACRED, HALLOWED, PRECIOUS.

My mission is simple that cooking on a budget neednt be gruel and gastronomic flagellation. It can be sumptuous. It can be nourishing. It can be flavourful. It can be devastatingly delicious. It can be restaurant-quality. It can be achievable. It can be all of these things with the smallest of kitchens and the simplest of equipment and absolutely no basic skills whatsoever. It can be yours.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

As I was writing this book, my wonderful and extraordinarily patient editor, Martha (it takes a whole village to raise a cookery book these days), had the same queries throughout the pile of recipes that I handed her. Is the butter salted or unsalted? Do you weigh your vegetables? They are also the usual questions that I receive online and in letters from my readers, so I thought I would address a few here.

Which rice do you use for risotto?

I use long grain rice over Arborio, as it is, in my humble opinion, just as adequate. Toast it at the edges in a little oil or butter until it becomes translucent, then gradually feed it booze and stock a little at a time, stirring consistently, until soupy and still slightly firm. Some people like their rice al dente, I like mine falling apart in my mouth, but we all like it on a budget and thats why were here. Arborio rice is admittedly delicious, but I save it for a restaurant wow experience, rather than blow my budget on being pernickety.

Salted or unsalted butter?

I like to choose my own salinity I think I read that phrase first in Kitchen by Nigella Lawson and it resonated with me like a church bell clanging in my culinary heart. A salt fiend, I prefer to add my own, and unfashionably plenty of it.

What can you use instead of butter and olive oil?

In baking, swap butter out for a mild vegetable oil such as sunflower or vegetable, and a tiny pinch of salt. In cooking, do the same, but coconut oil is also a good substitute. Olive oil is always delicious for smearing on toast or some gently cooked veg, but I throw my hands up at the cost of it, so usually revert to rapeseed or sunflower with a good grind of pepper to emulate the darker green oils. The same works when dressing a salad.

Im vegetarian what can I substitute in your meat dishes?

My general rule of thumb is that a butter bean is a good hefty substitute for chicken in a soup or casserole, usually with a little carrot in it to sweeten it up. Kidney beans or black beans are a decent swap for beef in a chilli or curry, and cooked long enough they are soft and tender in a way that even the slowest-cooked joints of meat can never quite attain. I sub chorizo with small white beans like haricots or cannellinis, with a hefty dollop of garlic, salt and paprika to imitate the flavour. Dont look at what you cant have, look at what you can. Pack soups out with chickpeas and lentils, sling some veggie sausages in your stews, and find your way around one of my half a dozen veggie burger recipes, and youll wonder what all the fuss was about anyway.

I dont have that herb...

Herbs shmerbs, although they are all sumptuous little bursts of flavour, they are neither prescriptive nor indispensable, and one can easily be substituted for another if you find you dont have them to hand. As a general rule, I keep rosemary on my window ledge (and a lot of it in my garden, grown from the 1 plant from the supermarket and gently nurtured into a large wild beast). I keep coriander in the freezer, blitzed to a paste with a tiny bit of water and frozen in ice cube trays for ease, and to be honest the rest barely get a look in. I get some mint in the summer, but the slugs like it rather more than I get a chance to, and it keeps them off my hydrangeas, so theyre welcome to it. You can swap one wintery herb for another, so flirt between rosemary, thyme, lemon thyme, sage and bay as you fancy. The same with bright herbs; basil, mint, parsley and chives are all fairly interchangeable too.

Smoked bacon or unsmoked?

I always advise people on a low budget to buy packets of cooking bacon (if they are meat eaters, of course), which can be found in the bottom shelves of the supermarket, tucked out of the way. It is a tightly packed wodge of scraps and offcuts, a mixture of smoked and unsmoked, so really, anything goes. Some people prefer the musty taste of smoked bacon, one of my friends says its like tipping an ashtray into your casserole, so it really is a matter of personal preference.

What size eggs?

For years I bought my eggs in mixed weight free range boxes, as they were cheaper than the uniform half dozen, and have never had a cake fail on me yet. Not a quails egg, not a goose egg, but anything in between works just fine. We are so sentimental about the science of baking sometimes, but I am here to hurl all of that out of the window and tell you there is no such thing as bad cake. There is cake that sometimes needs to be eaten with ice cream to hold it back together, or cake that needs 5 more minutes in the oven, but they are still both brilliant in their own warm, delicious right.

Granulated sugar?

Again, hurling the cake book out of the window here, but I use white granulated sugar in almost everything. If you have a bullet-style blender and a penchant for absolutes, then just grind it into dust, sieve it, and store it in a jar for baking.

I dont have any red wine for my casserole...

... then use black tea. It sounds like a mad trick, but it certainly works a treat, imparting the same lip-smacking tannin flavour as a halfway decent bottle of plonk would. Leftover wine can be kept in a jar or bottle beside the oven to add to soups and risottos, and yes, you can sling your table wine in with your dregs of Beaujolais etc etc, in fact I find if I mix them all together in a murk in a jar, Im less likely to accidentally take a swig when cooking! Blended wine, I call it, rather than found behind the couch.