Skehan - Kitchen hero: great food for less

Sofie Larsson

This book is quite simply about the tricks of thrifty cooking and cheap eating. For my generation in particular, who have grown up in a time where pre-washed salad bags, ready-grated cheese and plastic-wrapped convenience foods have become everyday purchases, thrifty cooking practices can seem like they are from a forgotten world. However, any good cook will know that these are skills that have been used for years, to save money and eat better food. Now is the time to rediscover these great cooking traditions and stop relying on convenience foods, which cost us more and are of inferior quality to dishes that can be made at home. Banish any thoughts of penny-pinching: this is about embracing home cooking at its very best. The real aim here is to make inexpensive ingredients work harder for the money you spend on them, so that ultimately you end up with delicious food that will become part of your everyday diet.

My grandmother is one of the most frugal self-taught cooks you will ever meet: she raised my mom and her six siblings with very little income, but that never stopped her producing wonderfully elegant meals at minimum expense. Her long-engrained home-cooking skills, using inexpensive materials and simple methods, are some of the greatest kitchen tips that have been passed on to me. There is a whole army of grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles up and down the country who possess and use these skills without giving them a second thought. Many of them may have been brought up in households with tight budgets, where watching the pennies was part and parcel of daily life. Some of my favourite recipes and cooking practices in this book are ones Ive learnt as a result of just chatting on the topic of frugal cooking with those in the know from my own family to butchers, greengrocers and fishmongers.

This book begins with my frugal cooking guide, in which Ive included some of the top economical tips and tricks that have been passed on to me: from ways to make your cooking easier and more efficient to general practices that will save you money. There are one or two recipes in the book that will be more expensive to make than others, but the important thing to remember is that these will usually feed a crowd or leave you with leftovers that will keep you going for a few days. My dessert and baking recipes are a good reminder that frugal cooking doesnt have to mean missing out.

The chapters in this book are filled with recipes that I hope will become part of your cooking routine. They are all simple to follow and dont require any complicated kitchen equipment, so even those with very few cooking skills can be encouraged to try their hand at them. For those who love to cook on a regular basis, Id encourage you to try using old-fashioned ingredients, such as offal, or underused cuts of meat. I hope all the recipes will inspire you to try a new approach to cooking one that is hugely satisfying for your appetite as well as your wallet.

a frugal cooking guide

Cooking frugally is all about what I call clever cooking, and by that I mean using what you have, saving leftovers to use again, make-ahead preparation, utilising your freezer and choosing inexpensive ingredients that will go far. An understanding of the skills employed by butchers and fishmongers will help you to choose the best ingredients for cheaper prices, so in this section Ive outlined the main things you should consider when cooking with meat and fish, as well as advice on other ingredients.

Understanding the seasonality of food is an important part of clever cooking: for example, buying out-of-season strawberries or asparagus in December will not only cost you more but you will most likely have a lesser-quality, tasteless ingredient that has been flown halfway across the world not good for the environment or for your cooking. In recent years, growing your own vegetables has also become a popular way to help save money and encourage awareness of seasonality you need very little space, a few containers, a bag or two of soil and some seeds to produce ingredients that can otherwise cause a dent in your weekly shopping bill.

A quick word about organic produce: when and if you can afford it, do try to choose organic. Organic fruit and vegetables are not sprayed with pesticides, and organic meat is free of antibiotics and the animals will have been ethically reared and slaughtered. Always try to choose free-range poultry and eggs. It is more expensive, but there is, of course, a price to be paid for the quality of the food we choose to eat.

Its important to support your local butcher as much as possible. The skills of a good butcher are essential ones to harness as a home cook. Your butcher will be happy to help with any queries about different cuts of meat, the amount you need to feed a crowd and even a few cooking tips or recipe suggestions. He will help you select the correct cut for the recipe you plan to make, as there is no sense in buying a cut that requires slow cooking for a flash-in-the-pan recipe. When it comes to choosing cheaper cuts of meat, or offal, your butcher will give you lots of advice, especially if you are unfamiliar with these ingredients.

Meat can be one of the more expensive ingredients on the weekly shopping bill, so utilising cheaper cuts is the perfect way to reduce costs. However, many cheaper cuts of meat have become unfashionable in modern times, and while they might have made everyday dinners in our grandparents time, nowadays most people dont know what they are or how to cook them, even though they are still readily available. We are definitely missing a trick, though, because some of the most delicious recipes, such as crispy Asian pork belly, tender oxtail and slowly cooked spiced lamb shoulder, are revelations and prove that these less-expensive cuts really deliver in the flavour department.

People today have a meat-heavy diet, largely due to the fact that meat has become more and more accessible and is conveniently packaged in plastic, meaning that consumers have lost any connection with where the meat actually comes from. Understanding and learning where different cuts of meat originate from on an animal not only helps you to be more economical but it also gives us, as home cooks, a better understanding of the ingredients we are cooking with. In this section I outline some of the cheaper cuts of meats and meat products, many of which are included in recipes throughout this book. Give them a try, and you will be happily surprised by the results!

Finally, while I love my meat, I do think its important to keep a balance, so try to eat a varied diet and cook some meals that are not completely centred around meat.

Its important to ask questions about the meat you buy, and this goes for pork in particular. With it being such a regular part of modern everyday diets, corners are often cut in the production of pork products. Ask for meat from pigs that have been reared slowly with natural feed. Good-quality pork meat should have a soft pale-pink colour. The main retail cuts of fresh pork are shoulder, loin, belly and leg. Some cheap cuts to ask for are: