Ahh - a shiny New Year. Along with it comes homeschooling with no pay (again). Like many sadly this horrible virus has decimated my income this year with over 4 months unpaid so far. My employer is however trying to hold my job open for me to go back to which (since I work for a company with Head Office in France) will remain to be seen.
So hope for the best and prepare for the worse springs into action once again and with it the need to make the food bill smaller if we can.
With this in mind I hit the Internet looking for frugal recipes and once again despaired that so many of them weren't English. Why does this matter? Surely all cheap food recipes are good? Well yes and no. What is available in your local food shops is dependent on what the community is used to eating, but also what is available to retailers.
For some of this it depends on custom and practise. For example when I lived in Germany for a couple of years about 10 years ago it was impossible to get spices to cook curry from scratch. The German supermarkets had brilliant fresh baked artisan bread and cakes to put supermarkets over here to shame along with a fantastic selection of meats (yes- sausages). If you wanted veggies that had been canned to preserve them there were whole aisles so getting snowed in was not a problem if you stocked up. But spices, no. Germany had been an industrial nation but not really a naval one. The Dutch on the other hand (like the British) explored the globe and colonised large chunks of it. Now Slavery and Colonialism arguments aside along with the men woman and children who went out to "convert" the rest of the world influences flowed the other way too in terms of food. Which was why when I lived near the German/Dutch border if you wanted spices you headed towards the Dutch supermarkets.
The things like veggies in the supermarkets depend upon both the climate of the country that you are in (seasonal is usually cheaper and when you add in airmiles and the carbon footprint it is a no brainer). It also depends on the deal that the government has with other countries throughout the globe with regard to importing food. Something that will come to bite back as Brexit takes hold.
Why the tirade? Well I got a little frustrated at the packet of "this and that" that appear in the US recipe sites/You Tube channels of which there seem to be millions. Not everyone will have access to these pre-prepared items, and often little or no explanation is given as to what they contain so good luck finding a substitute.
I was delighted therefore to come across another budget site that is trying to keep the food bill down, (Jack Monroe's cooking on a bootstrap being to go-to I usually recommend.) and that is Thrifty Leslie.
I especially like the fact that she has menu plans as well as the normal "single use" recipes. All I need now is for my OH to finally accept some recipes with pulses in....wish me luck and good luck to you with whatever the New Year may bring.
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