I had a brilliant day last Saturday. I met up with some of my best friends to watch the fireworks at the end of the Lord Mayor’s show from a boat on the Thames (followed by a little cruise up and down river). Before that I wandered around the food stalls on the South Bank…
Author: cheapfreshandeasy
Pretty herb pasta
I’ve started making my own pasta. I bought a pasta making machine for around £25 a few weeks’ ago and I love it. It’s a relaxing and therapeutic process and you can prepare pasta dough to keep in the fridge for a few days so you can make it in advance for when you are…
Tarragon chicken
Tarragon has a mild aniseed flavour and pairing it with chicken is a classic French dish (poulet a l’estragon). This recipe is from one of my favourite old recipe books – Pan-cooked chicken dishes around the world. I bought the book years ago at a charity shop and would never want to be without it. In that…
Chicken, chickpea and chorizo stew
I can make this from scratch in about 40 minutes which is enough time to cook on a weekday evening after work. It’s perfect comfort food on an autumn evening. There isn’t very much work to do – just a bit of chopping and slicing and then stewing everything for around 35 minutes. You don’t…
Figs with Roquefort and walnuts
These are perfect as canapés or a first course. The salty cheese is delicious with the sweetness of the honey and the crunch of the walnut contrasts with the soft flesh of the fig. They are dead easy to prepare and only take 10 minutes in the oven – make sure to get them out…
Antonio Carluccio’s beetroot lasagne
I was very sad to hear of the death yesterday of Antonio Carluccio. I loved watching him in cooking programmes over the years and listening to him talk about growing up in Italy during the war and foraging for food – to make meals from mushrooms and nettles. His cooking reflects so much of the…
Chicken liver paté
I love paté but hate the look of all those unidentifiable ingredients listed on packs of the shop bought stuff. I’d much rather make fresh paté myself without preservatives (it tastes so good it doesn’t last very long anyway). Different recipes will suggest you use different spirits or fortified alcohol to give it an extra…
Quick and easy mushroom stroganoff
This is one of my regular recipes. I prefer it to beef stroganoff as it’s incredibly cheap (the mushrooms only cost around £2 or £3) and so fast you can rustle it up in about 10 minutes. I like to use a mixture of mushrooms, in this case chestnut mushrooms and some large Portobello mushrooms…
Rosti topped fish pie
The use of grated potatoes to create a crispy rosti topping turns this fish pie into something a bit special. You can use any fish really but I used two large haddock fillets which were reduced to £2.90 in Sainsbury’s. I also bought a packet of raw prawns for £3.90 – the prawns make the…
Chicken with fennel and orange
This is a slightly different version of a Nigella recipe (from Simply Nigella) which I used when I was on the look out for fennel recipes this summer. Fennel is really expensive in the supermarket – about £3.50 per bulb – but at Surrey Street market in Croydon I could buy three bulbs for £2. Bargain!…
Spicy pumpkin soup
This tasty seasonal soup uses small eating pumpkins/butternut squash, not the giant Jack o’Lanterns people use for Halloween. I used a pumpkin the size of a large grapefruit and half a butternut squash I had left over from another meal. I also bought a couple of adorable munchkin pumpkins but I struggled to chop them…
Spaghetti with minty aubergine and sun-dried tomato sauce
Aubergines are cheap and nutritious and make a great base for a spaghetti sauce. I watched Rick Stein make something similar to this recipe based on a Sicilian dish but he used tinned tomatoes which I didn’t have (very unusual for me) so I made it with a few sun-dried tomatoes and tomato puree instead….
Cheap, fresh and easy 