by Thrifty Lesley | Apr 26, 2020 | All Recipes, Dinners, Less than 500 calories
What are Faggots? Faggots are a traditional British meatball made from offal, especially pork, with herbs and onions for flavouring and breadcrumbs to stretch them out. The offal is minced and is usually a combination of heart, liver and fatty pork belly or bacon,...
by Thrifty Lesley | Mar 24, 2020 | All Recipes, Dinners, Meal Plan 1
This post was first written in June 2013 and updated in June 2021. This recipe is one of those extremely variable ones. You can bake this as a pie, leave the top of and bake as a bacon and sweetcorn tart, or steam it as a pudding and change the filling in a great many...
by Thrifty Lesley | Mar 23, 2020 | All Recipes, Dinners, Lunches, Sides
I made these onion bhajis recently and was very pleased with them. In these times of stripped supermarket shelves, recipes using minimal ingredients are even more useful than normaI. I used gram flour (chickpea flour), but if you don’t have that, ordinary flour would...
by Thrifty Lesley | Mar 17, 2020 | All Recipes, Love Your Leftovers
Over ripe bananas, we all get them. We buy nice, ripe bananas, and blink, before we know it, they’re over ripe, and not nice to eat. I like them riper than my husband, who likes them at that teeth roughening, under ripe stage. But they go from that stage to...
by Thrifty Lesley | Mar 13, 2020 | All Recipes, Dinners, Less than 500 calories, Love Your Leftovers, Lunches
I went to Canterbury Christmas Market with the U3A last December. One of the things I did there was to browse in the Oxfam book shop. Lots I wanted, of course, and I bought 3, couldn’t carry any more! One of the books I bought was a very sweary one called Thug...
by Thrifty Lesley | Mar 11, 2020 | All Recipes, Love Your Leftovers
Oranges If you are having an orange, do you do anything with the peel, the pith or the pips? Zest If I am just having an orange to eat, I’ll often zest it into a small container that I keep in the freezer for the purpose. That zest can then be used for all kinds...
by Thrifty Lesley | Feb 24, 2020 | All Recipes, Dinners, Lunches, Round Up Post
It’s Shrove Tuesday next week, the traditional day to use up everything that’s left before the arrival of Lent. Pancakes are one of those lovely things that can be paired with all manner of other things to make something delicious. If you have the minimum of...
by Thrifty Lesley | Jan 27, 2020 | All Recipes, Dinners, Less than 500 calories, Lunches
Just had lunch and made something different. I’ve got some lovely nut butters in the fridge that I got from SousChef.co.uk. I love that site, it’s got masses of lovely cheffy things! I got big 1kg tubs of almond, pistachio and hazelnut. It’s cheaper...
by Thrifty Lesley | Jan 26, 2020 | All Recipes, Dinners, Lunches
I had a butternut squash that needed using recently and decided to make soup with it. I thought I’d flavour it with ginger and lime. But in the end I went with some fresh ginger from a jar, the kind that you get in Asian shops. A big jar for less than £3 Then,...
by Thrifty Lesley | Dec 7, 2019 | All Recipes, Dinners, Lunches
I had the U3A cookery group round recently and we like to make canapes at the December meeting. Amongst other things, we made these Red Pepper, Goats Cheese and Walnut Palmiers, and they were delicious, although they could have done with a little more goats cheese...
by Thrifty Lesley | Nov 24, 2019 | Guest Posts
I don’t know about you, but I always have a fridge and cupboards stuffed full of Christmas food. Here are loads of ideas on what to use them for 1 Soup, a Turkey & Cranberry Toast Topper, a Cheesy Tart Turkey stock soupTurkey & Cranberry Toast TopperCheese...
by Thrifty Lesley | Nov 22, 2019 | All Recipes, Dinners, Valentines Day Ideas
There was recently a competition exclusively on the Facebook Group. The competition was to create a 3 course celebration meal for 2 people at 80p a head. This proved to be even more challenging than I anticipated, even for our very talented membership, as only 3...
by Thrifty Lesley | Nov 21, 2019 | All Recipes, Cakes and Bakes, Less than 500 calories
I went to a friends recently and she gave me one of these Anzac biscuits. They were really good! Mike loves oaty things so I asked for the recipe and was quite surprised when they turned out to be Anzac biscuits, which I know are very similar to Twinkles Hob Nobs...
by Thrifty Lesley | Nov 16, 2019 | Christmas
How to make a family photo calendar I have had a little look at Word etc to find a calendar for 2020 and found this one in Excel. If you are au fait with desk top publishers, most of them will have this kind of photo calendar. You can then load digital copies of your...
