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This week I read about all this stuff to do with food for the poor and Jamie Oliver’s thoughts around it. Essentially he wants to show people how to eat better on a budget and he’s doing a TV show called, ‘Jamie’s money saving meals’ and he’s written a book called, ‘Save with Jamie’.
Now the controversy, if you want to call it that, is apparently because of the connections he’s made between a poor persons diet to productivity and comparisons made with poor folks in Italy who supposedly eat fresh pasta and veg and the alleged relative superior productivity of Eastern European people.
So it’s got me thinking. I do think that you can eat well on a budget;
- a simple chickpea curry costs under a pound to make when you use canned chickpeas
- good old sweetcorn soup with a few asian spices and crusty bread can also cost £2 for feed two people
- a lovely indian spiced mixed vegetable omelette is also inexpensive when using frozen vegetables
- have you seen my BBC Good Food recipe for parsnip pancakes? If you have gram flour in the house, you could make enough for two people and them in bread as a sarnie for under a couple of quid
- if you are using tinned tomatoes, a simple tomato and basil spaghetti dish can cost around £3 for four people
However, as far as I can see, whichever way you cut it, chips are cheap. Cheaper than most healthier alternatives. If you’re buying them, they are filling, you don’t need any gas to cook them or water to wash plates. They are one of life’s little comforts and if everything else is looking grim, the smell of fresh chips and a cuddle can do something lovely for the soul, for a bit.
So, I’m not sharing a recipe for the poor. This is not a recipe that is labelled in any such way. I’m sharing an absolutely scrummy, lightly tangy and pea-sweet, luminous, moorish and easy to cook recipe that happens to be pretty inexpensive to cook. Bonus
A lot of my mummy peers have come out of their previous careers, or have taken reduced hours. It doesn’t mean our tastes have changed, we still like to eat well; as well as we always have and perhaps even better now that little mouths want to copy us. Saving a few quid along the way is a bonus though isn’t it?
When I was a teen people ate pasta on a diet, for the relatively low fat content. I remember watching Oprah discussing her huge weight loss saying that she could eat pasta every day of the week and that her chef would do something completely different with pasta every day. I think this is what I love about pasta. I still haven’t fallen out of love with it and am not yet bored of it. Funnily enough though, I spoke to a relative who was cooking pasta as we spoke. I asked her what sort of sauce she was making and she said, ‘the normal one’. This made me chuckle. The default pasta sauce is of course some sort of tomato sauce…come on, do something different today.
Ingredients
One medium onion, finely diced
2 fat cloves of garlic, finely diced
2cups petite pois, defrosted
200g creme Fraiche
2-3 tsp vegetable oil
100ml water
400g pasta
Some shavings of vegetarian hard cheese
The spices; 1tsp cumin seeds, 1/2 tsp ajwain (carom) seeds, 1/4 tsp black pepper, 1/4 tsp turmeric, salt to taste, 1 1/2 tsp coriander powder
Method
1 . Put the pasta on the boil in salted water, per packet instructions. Don’t forget to wash it in plenty of cold water when it is cooked
2. Heat the oil and then add the cumin seeds and carom seeds together with the turmeric and allow the seeds to sizzle before stirring in the onions and salt. Soften the onions for a couple of minutes and then add the garlic and soften until the onions are transparent.
3. Add the peas and stir in the coriander powder, coat the peas and then add the water. Bring the peas to a simmer and cook for 3-4 minutes. Then stir in the creme Fraiche and the back pepper and cook for a further 3-4 minutes.
4. Pour the peas into a food processor and blitz it until its almost smooth. It’s lovely with some texture in there, so don’t try and get it completely smooth
5. Place the pea purée into the cooking pan again and stir in the pasta
6. Serve and garnish with the shavings of cheese
Image may be NSFW.
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