Frugal cooking: How to save money in the kitchen

Friday, October 28th, 2011

Frugal cooking: How to save money in the kitchen

We advise readers how to save money in the kitchen through frugal cooking tips and tricks.

One of Fiona Nevile’s most astute purchases has been a five-litre Twenties Thermos flask that she bought for one pound at a church fete. “I imagine it was used to take soup to shooting parties”, says Fiona, a passionate gardener and cook. Fiona, however, doesn’t attend shooting parties – she cooks in her Thermos, radically reducing th e energy required in conventional cooking.

Based on the traditional “hay box” idea, that food heated to simmering point will lose heat much more slowly in an insulated container, the Thermos works even more efficiently due to the vacuum surrounding the inner container. “I’ve cooked bread, cakes and even a cockerel that we had to kill because it was annoying the neighbours,” says Fiona. “I had to quit my job due to illness two years ago, and although my partner still works, our income was severely diminished and we needed to reduce our bills quickly. The Thermos really helps.”

Her other great purchase, she says, is a food dehydrator. “When we have a glut of vegetables or supermarkets do a three-for-one offer, we can dehydrate them and store them in a plastic bag for several months. Vegetables come out looking like they should be doll’s house food.”

Financial experts concluded earlier this month that British families are experiencing “an unprecedented collapse in living standards” due to a combination of pay freezes, inflation and fuel bill increases. Reducing energy use is now not just about carbon emissions – it’s about helping make your money stretch further.

I have written much about reducing heating costs in the home. But what about the next biggest energy guzzler – the kitchen? Our family has already turned to stews and casseroles, slow-cooked on a low heat for six hours. The children, brought up, I am ashamed to admit, on the modern child’s predilection for everything to be dry and sauce-less, at first looked askance at the rich deeply-flavoured gravy that everything now comes with. The slow cooker not only reduces my oven fuel bill but enables me to buy cheaper cuts of meat. Even a scrawny piece of mutton melts off the bone after several hours.

Slow cooking doesn’t mean a diet of stews, though. Aly Hodge, a mother of three who lives in Wiltshire, cooks lasagne, chutney, rice pudding, corn bread – pretty much everything – in her two slow cookers. “I blog about family life and a lot of mums report switching to slow cooking – for the convenience, but also to save on fuel bills,” she says.

Chef Arthur Potts Dawson, the brains behind the People’s Supermarket movement, says that as well as using a slow cooker, he now tries to have two or three days in the week when his family eat raw food. “It’s healthy and saves money.” When he do es cook, he makes sure he leaves not a scrap of waste. “Our record is using a chicken for six different meals: roast first; then, with the leftover roast potatoes, squashed in a patty with peas and fried; chicken salad, chicken stir fry with rice; with bacon and eggs for breakfast and using the stock for soup.”

While slow cookers can save around one third of the electricity a conventional oven uses, a thermal cooker – the commercial version of Fiona’s Thermos – can save 80–90 per cent. Dave Knowles is a thermal cooker fanatic and commissioned a factory in China to make him one. “We use ours most days,” says Dave, who runs a chandlery near Southampton and originally devised his thermal cooker for people living on boats and in caravans. “For stew, you have to get food up to simmering point, cook for 10 minutes, then seal and leave it, meaning 10 minutes of cooking fuel for something that would take three hours in a conventional oven.”

He says that last Christmas, he even made a Christmas cake in it, with the cake tin in an outer “bath” simmering for 35 minutes before being sealed. “It came out beautifully moist and at a fraction of the cooking costs of a normal seven-hour-Christmas-cake-baking time.”

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Raising a glass to the joys of the sloe life

Thursday, October 27th, 2011

Raising a glass to the joys of the sloe life

The first frosts of the year have arrived, but there is compensation. It’s a sign, not just that the car windscreen will need scraping and central heating bills are about to go through the roof, but that sloes, the last fruit of the British autumn, are ready for picking.

The tiny fruits look like miniature black plums with a soft, white bloom, some no bigger than a pea. They are inedible raw, but once cooked or macerated in alcohol, have an intense flavour, most famously in sweet, fragrant, carmine-tinged sloe gin. And making it at home is a piece of cake – once you have your sloes.

Your best bet is to recruit a country-loving friend, ideally a dog walker, as these always seem to know when and where the best forage is to be had. On a chilly morning last week, I press-ganged my friend Luke and his dogs, wrapped up warm and headed for the Somerset countryside.

Fifteen minutes’ tramp through silvery fields brought us to the booty. Although related to plums, sloes are the fruit of the blackthorn bush, Prunus spinosa. The bushes or small trees (which grow to 13ft) are often found in hedgerows, where their inch-long thorns make them an effective barrier. Picking takes time and gloves – not just because of the thorns but because the fruit is fiddly for cold-numbed hands.

The chief concern for most gatherers is whether they have genuine sloes or bullaces, a relative of the damson. The two look very similar, although bullaces are larger. A good bet is to look at the leaves: sloe leaves are at least twice as long as they are wide, while bullace leaves are rounded. In addition, bullace trees have few, if any, prickles.

This sounds straightforward. But, in fact, as Miles Irving, author of The Forager Handbook (Ebury House, £30) and supplier of wild foods to many of London’s top restaurants, points out, natural hybridisation between the two plants has blurred the distinction. According to Brian Doonan of the sloe website www.sloe.biz, the best way to be sure is to taste one. A raw bullace will be sour, but a sloe will be lip-curlingly, mouth-dryingly tannic.

Everyone agrees that they are best picked after the first frosts. To some, the fruit will not be truly ripe until now. But to sloe experts like Julia Medforth, who makes sloe gin, sloe port and sloe sherry at her Yorkshire Wolds estate, Raisthorpe Manor, the frost breaks down the skin so they macerate in alcohol more readily. She’s been picking from her 20 miles of hedgerows since September and replicates the frost by freezing them before popping them into the gin bottles.

“It’s been a good year, with a hard winter followed by an early, warm spring,” Medforth says. “We’ve had a good wind, too, which blows the leaves from the bushes and makes the fruit easier to see and pick. The older bushes, 50 or 60 years old, are the best.”

If you make your sloe gin now, you can drink it for Christmas, but as Irving says, it is better to leave until next year. “Most of the flavour comes from the kernel, a gently almondy note, which takes months to develop.”

Sloes are worth using in other recipes. I’ve added a handful to an apple crumble, which turns the fruit the prettiest pink and enrichens the flavour. Irving prefers to use them as a sauce for game, cooking a handful with red wine and sugar. Rub it through a sieve and add any juices from the roast meat, plus salt and pepper to taste. While you are waiting for the gin, this will give you the sloe fix, quick.

Sloe recipes

Sloe gin/sherry

Empty a bottle of gin into a jug. Prick a mugful of sloes with a fork, then drop them into the bottle, stopping when the bottle is half full. Add 5oz/140g sugar. Fill the bottle with gin and close it tightly. Shake the bottle every day for a week, then once a week or so for a couple of months. You could drink the gin at Christmas but it will be better left until next year or even longer. Or fill the bottle with sherry, adding a little sugar. Shake and store as for gin.

Sloe “butter”

Decant the sloes from the sherry and put in a pan with barely enough water to cover. Simmer until the fruit is really soft and the liquid has reduced to three or four tablespoonfuls. Rub the sloes through a sieve or use a mouli-legumes, aka a vegetable mill. Either way, the little stones make this a tiresome job but persevere. Weigh the pulp and add half its weight in sugar. Heat gently until the sugar dissolves, then boil for three to four minutes until thick. Scrape into a jar and leave to set. Store in the fridge. Eat on bread or with cheese.

Sloe truffles

Mix the sloe “butter” with an equal weight of melted chocolate. Spread into an oblong about little-finger deep. Allow to set in a cool place, then cut into squares and dust with cocoa powder.

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