by Thrifty Lesley | Mar 27, 2023 | All Recipes, Dinners, Lunches
I bought a 200g packet of smoked mackerel fillets and wondered how I could stretch them into lovely meals for 2. The first one I tried was this recipe for mackerel pâté that is super simple and very delicious. What do I need to make mackerel pâté smoked mackerel...
by Thrifty Lesley | Mar 24, 2023 | All Recipes, Dinners, Lunches
A mixed vegetable quiche is a classic British dish that comes out very cheap with a bit of frugalisation. If you think quiche or flan sounds like something your granny makes, you could always call it a tart and feel all contemporary. If you decide to use the oil...
by Thrifty Lesley | Jul 21, 2022 | All Recipes, Dinners, Less than 500 calories, Lunches, Stretch A Chicken
Spicy red lentil soup- Stretch A Chicken (7) This spicy carrot and lentil soup uses chicken stock made when processing a roast chicken carcass. The stock brings a great deal of flavour to the soup. If you don’t have any home made stock, use a good quality stock...
by Thrifty Lesley | Nov 29, 2021 | All Recipes, Dinners, Less than 500 calories, Meal Plan 2
Pasta with Olives, Tomato & Soft Cheese Post first written in September 2013. Refreshed and updated November 2021. This recipe makes a generous portion of pasta, dressed with olives, tomato puree and soft cheese. Very quick to make, just taking as long as the...
by Thrifty Lesley | May 3, 2020 | All Recipes, Dinners, Less than 500 calories, Lunches
Peanut Butter Noodles. Add chicken or fish, or keep it vegan 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...
by Thrifty Lesley | Aug 29, 2019 | All Recipes, Breakfast, Less than 500 calories, Lunches
Fed up with plain cheese sandwiches? How about flavoured potted cheese? Do you have cheese sandwiches for lunch? Are you a little tired of them, or maybe wanting to ring the changes a little? How about making a potted cheese. I have lots of little bits and pieces of...
by Thrifty Lesley | Aug 18, 2019 | All Recipes, Dinners
A Vegan Vegetable Bake – Celery, Swede & Chickpea I picked up a couple of heads of celery on yellow sticker this week. I wanted to make something main coursey with at least one of them. I had a little google and looked at Pinterest and came up with this...
by Thrifty Lesley | Feb 25, 2019 | All Recipes, Dinners
Mushroom Ragu Lasagna I recently made a really good lentil ragu which I thought would work well as a lasagna. It did and it was very good indeed. This led me to think of other vegetable based mixes that I could substitute for the lentil ragu layer. The first one is a...
by Thrifty Lesley | Dec 8, 2018 | All Recipes, Christmas, Dinners, Vegetarian Christmas Meal Plan
Vegetarian Christmas Meal Plan – Vegan Walnut and Chestnut Crumble A savoury christmas crumble, chestnuts in the base and walnuts in the topping. One of the recipes from the Vegetarian Christmas meal plan. Savoury Vegan Walnut and Chestnut Crumble Base mixture...
by Thrifty Lesley | Feb 6, 2018 | All Recipes, Dinners, Lunches
I bought 2 packs of yellow sticker pork mince recently. There was a post on the Facebook group talking about some meatballs from Waitrose which had added vegetables and pearl barley. I thought these sounded lovely, so decided to use some of the mince to experiment....
by Thrifty Lesley | Mar 22, 2016 | All Recipes, Cakes and Bakes, Lunches
chapatti Had a lovely play in the kitchen yesterday. Made some chapatti using some Approved Food flour – do you remember those huge, massive, giant bags I got ages ago? Yes, I’m still using them. Chapatti made with chapatti flour rather than wholemeal...
by Thrifty Lesley | May 19, 2015 | All Recipes, Puddings / Desserts
That delicious looking pudding was what I had yesterday at Galin. Peanut mousse with banana cake and caramel sauce. It was wonderful and inspired me to see if I could recreate the mousse. It was super smooth, mildly peanutty and a bit buttery. I asked the owner when...
by Thrifty Lesley | Mar 21, 2015 | All Recipes, Breakfast, Dinners, Lunches, Meal Plan 10
First of all, apologies for the recent lack of posts. I have been well and truly bugged over the last 10 days or so. Where I am, there has been a virulent virus doing the rounds that basically wipes you out for two weeks. It feels much more like flu than anything else...
by Thrifty Lesley | Jan 31, 2015 | My Diary
Crocus and nearly meal plan 8 soup, 32p a serving Got these crocus growing on the windowsill. It’s so lovely to see their cheerfulness on such a bleak day. Feels like spring is not far away. DP is hacking bits off our kitchen ceiling as the blighter is still leaking....
