by Thrifty Lesley | Jul 10, 2020 | All Recipes, Dinners
Puchka tart. What’s that? Complete deliciousness on a plate, that’s what The U3A cooking group met at my house this week. When wondering what to make, I thought, like last December, we could make some canapés. There are hundreds of canapé recipes, so after a bit of...
by Thrifty Lesley | Jul 7, 2020 | All Recipes, Breakfast, Less than 500 calories, Lunches
I love baked oats and have made many a different variation of a baked oats recipe. Having tried a dozen or so sweet versions, I began to wonder about savoury baked oats. A bit of Googling later and I realised that it wasn’t really a big thing. However, I was...
by Thrifty Lesley | Jun 29, 2020 | All Recipes, Cakes and Bakes, Less than 500 calories
Was poking about in the Armageddon cupboard today whilst writing a meal plan for next week and trying to use some existing stocks. While poking about and mentally constructing meals, I decided to use some popcorn. Idly reading the instructions, I noticed that it could...
by Thrifty Lesley | Jun 26, 2020 | All Recipes, Other
If you would like to make your own home made jam, but have never tackled it before, this is a great one to start with as it’s one of the easiest. Having said that, raw blackcurrants are hard to find in the shops. I am lucky enough to be able to grow some in the...
by Thrifty Lesley | Jun 8, 2020 | Bready Things, Cakes and Bakes, Less than 500 calories, Lunches
Made Broccoli and Lentil Soup for lunch today and had no bread left at all, so made some of these cheapy bread rolls. I just use ordinary own brand self raising flour. I tried it many moons ago to see if it would work, and it was fine, so I don’t bother with...
by Thrifty Lesley | May 12, 2020 | All Recipes, Cakes and Bakes
I’ve updated this post a bit to make it look better. But the images come from the time when I did this experiment, in 2013, and they aren’t very good. I’ll try and repeat everything and take better pictures. Chocolate Fudge Cake, made with or without...
by Thrifty Lesley | May 6, 2020 | My Diary
It’s ages since I’ve done a catchup post. I’m trying to update lots of recipe posts to make them look nicer and be more usable, bring back cheap family recipes from the dead with all the recipe loading that involves, and I’m just starting doing...
by Thrifty Lesley | May 3, 2020 | All Recipes, Dinners, Less than 500 calories, Lunches
These peanut butter noodles don’t take too long and are really yummy, we’ve had them several times now. You can really stretch out a few shreds of chicken with this. I’ve done it with noodles and spaghetti, both worked well. Ingredients for Peanut Butter Noodles...
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...
