My homemade hummus is the best ever. Why? Because I can adjust it to taste exactly how I like it. And so can you. Prefer a garlic hit? Add more garlic. Like the tang of lemon? Add some more. While cooking from scratch may not save you time, it does mean you can have perfect tasting food.

I’ve been making hummus as a protein / fibre snack lately to eat on whole wheat crackers or with vegetables. I’ve never been a huge fan, but lately I’ve fallen in love with it’s subtle flavour. The biggest challenge is to make the lot last more than one day. Makes just under 500g.

Method

1. Blend or process until smooth. If the mixture is too thick, add a little water to loosen it up or until you have your preferred consistency. Taste and season, adding more garlic, tahini or lemon juice as suits your tastes.

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1. Easy Shortcrust Pastry
2. Easy Chinese Style Lemon Chicken
3. Homemade Pizza Sauce

This is a basic grilled or fried chicken breast with a little difference – topped with cheesy potato rather than having the spuds served on the side.

This dish is nice with a salad, but I have a pregnancy aversion to salad at the moment, so vegetables it was. The bonus of using vegetables is that you can add them to any leftover potato mixture for bubble and squeak the next day (just fry the mixture in a little butter like fritters).

That is exactly what we did for breakfast. The little fella insists on being involved in all cooking (who am I to argue with that! Hopefully the interest in cooking doesn’t wear off!). When I explained I was cooking bubble and squeak he noddled solemnly and said ‘noisy breakfast’. However there was total silence as it was eaten. Serves 4

Method

1. Boil whole potatoes until almost tender (a reader the other week suggested steaming spuds instead to ensure they don’t get overcooked. Great tip!) Cool and grate. I left the skin on when boiling and most of it stayed on the grater when I grated the spuds. If you over cook the potato (um, like I did) it’s more like mashed potato than grated, but that’s just as good!
2. Meanwhile, halve the chicken breasts horizontally so that you have two fillets or schnitzels. Lightly hammer or roll to flatten.
3. Combine potato, onion, cheese, egg and chives.
4. Fry chicken in a little oil until brown on both sides and cooked through or grill under the griller/broiler until cooked. Place on a tray and top with the potato mixture.
5. Grill under a medium hot grill until potato mixture is browned and cooked through (about 5 – 10 minutes).

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1. toddler food–homemade chicken nuggets
2. mushroom and leek stuffed chicken breast with chardonnay sauce
3. asian style chicken drumsticks

Our Christmas lunch with family was a bring-a-dish affair, the best way to enjoy Christmas day without having all stress and financial burden of catering for everyone. As well as potato salad, I took the raspberry swirl cheesecake above. You can find the recipe for this cheesecake here at Taste.com.au.

I baked this on Christmas eve. Being a cheesecake novice, I was nervous that I had taken on too much. The stakes were high. I had promised cheesecake and had no back up plan if this didn’t turn out.

Well, after a few choice swear words and two hours baking rather than one, the cheesecake didn’t look nearly as good as the one pictured on the recipe, but it sure tasted sensational! (Oh yeah, even if I do say so myself ).

This cheesecake recipe has a lot of ingredients, including a whole tub of mascarpone, meaning that it’s not the cheapest dessert to make. To bring the cost down, I made the mascarpone, which is relatively easy to make, much cheaper than the store bought stuff and tastes just as good, if not better.

To compare: a tub of supermarket mascarpone is $23 per kilo. Making your own with fresh cream comes in at around $7.90 a kilo, a big saving.

The recipe below yields about 400g of mascarpone cheese.

Method

1. Heat cream over medium heat in a saucepan until it reaches 85°C (a candy thermometer is useful here). Make sure you stir regularly to ensure the cream doesn’t scold on the bottom. Many recipes suggest heating the cream in a double boiler over boiling water, but I found the cream would not reach the desired temperature (even after constant heating for 20 minutes) so ended up transferring the cream to a saucepan over direct heat and this worked fine.
2. Once the cream reaches 85°C, add the vinegar and continue stirring until it is thick enough to coat the back of the spoon (a couple of minutes). Remove from heat and let sit to cool. The cream won’t visibly curdle like it would if you were making ricotta, for example, although you may see some whey. It looks more like custard.
3. Line a sieve with a double layer of cheesecloth or muslin or a new, clean chux and place over a bowl. Pour the cream into the sieve and sit in the fridge over night (I placed a saucer over the top to cover, but don’t squeeze or press down on the cream). What you will have in the morning is a thick, creamy mascarpone – thick like cream cheese, but with a creamy rather than tangy taste. Yum!

If you’re wondering how to use mascarpone, it is traditionally used in tiramisu, but is nice served with fruit (fresh, poached or char-grilled), tossed through pasta (instead of ricotta, say), spread on toasted fruit bread, or can be used in pretty much anything that asks for cream – mascarpone gives the dish a decadent touch.

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1. homemade chips
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This potato salad is always a hit at BBQs and functions, is easy to make and can serve a lot of people on a very small budget. I’ve included prosciutto, four thin slices cost less than a dollar and add a gourmet touch, but for a vegetarian version, leave out the prosciutto altogether.

I took this salad to our Christmas celebrations and so used a kilo or so of potatoes, I usually allow for a potato or so per person (depending on the size of the spuds) and adjust the rest of the ingredients to suit.

Above I used garlic chives, which we have growing in our garden. I love being able to go out and snip a few chives for the salad – for free!

I’m surprised I haven’t shared this recipe before – it’s one that I learned from my mum and that I often take when I’m asked to ‘bring a salad’.

Method

1. Boil potatoes in salted water until tender and drain.
2. Place eggs in cold water and bring to the boil. Boil for 12 minutes then drain and rinse under cold water. When cool enough to handle, peel eggs and roughly chop.
3. Fry prosciutto over medium heat until browned, roughly chop and set aside.
4. Combine mayonnaise and sour cream. Taste and adjust ratio according to preference. In a large bowl, toss the potatoes, eggs, prosciutto and mayonnaise mixture until well combined. Add half of the mayo mixture and increase until you have the spud to sauce ratio you prefer.
5. Using a pair of kitchen scissors, snip the chives over the potato salad, lightly tossing to distribute. For presentation, sprinkle a little prosciutto and chives over the top.

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1. cheesy potato topped chicken
2. Chorizo and Potato Omelette
3. Potato and Leek Soup

I thought I would share with you the most popular recipes on Frugal and Thriving for 2011. These recipes were the most viewed and the most searched on the website and all of the recipes appear in the top 100 pages viewed on the site.

And like all of the recipes on the site, they are ones we cook and eat at home.

Of all of these recipes, my favourite would have to be pea and ham soup, although we probably eat the tuna rissoles the most (about once a fortnight), with the savoury pumpkin pie coming in second for most frequently cooked meal. The recipes appear in descending order of popularity. Click the picture to go to the recipe.

10. Pea and ham soup

9. Savoury muffins

8. Rock cakes

7. Portuguese chicken drumsticks

6. Honey and balsamic salad dressing

5. Tuna rissoles

4. Roast pumpkin and feta salad

3. Best ever rissoles

2. Chicken schnitzel

1. Savoury pumpkin pie

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1. pea and ham soup
2. merry christmas from frugal and thriving 2011
3. Hiding The Lentil. 10 Top Ways To Feed the Family Lentils

We got in some Christmas baking last week. Just before the tummy bug hit. While the weekend was not much fun, last week we had lots of fun making mess and eating biscuits.

I wanted to share this cheap and easy recipe from the Down to Earth website, which is what we used to bake the bikkies. The biscuit dough is just butter, flour, sugar, sweetened condensed milk. You can find the recipe here.

I actually halved the dough recipe because the original makes a huge batch. I froze the left over condensed milk; I’m not sure how it will go out of the freezer, but it will be used in baking also, so it probably doesn’t matter if it goes a bit grainy.

We rolled the dough and cut Christmas shapes from it. Just like playing with play dough but better tasting. They would be great to decorate, but they didn’t last that long in our house .

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1. choc caramel and almond slice
2. Easy Shortcrust Pastry
3. start a christmas fund and take the sting out of christmas cheer

Well two weeks stretched into four, a lot longer writing hiatus than I had intended, but it was a much needed break. I have a little confession to make: I haven’t been so much sick as morning all day and night sick . We have another member of the family on the way, due at the end of June.

As I’ve spent much of the last few weeks either in bed or indisposed, cooking has been well and truly off the agenda and there is a dearth of new recipes from our household at the moment and a very empty fridge and pantry from lack of shopping.

I fell back on this old staple to use up what we had on hand; this is a very flexible recipe that you can adjust with whatever ingredients you have in the fridge. Adding cooked chicken gives it a nice protein boost, but as our freezer was empty (for the first time in years), our pasta was vegetarian. The mustard and paprika along with the cheese make a tasty sauce.

Method

1. Melt the butter over medium heat and cook onion until soft and translucent without browning. Add the garlic and cook for a further minute or so.
2. Stir in the flour and cook for another minute. The mixture should look bubbly.
3. Add the milk a little at a time, stirring constantly to make a smooth sauce. Add enough milk to get the consistency you like. The sauce will thicken slightly as it cooks and it is always best to add less than you need and then add more later to thin the sauce out rather than adding too much.
4. Add the paprika, mustard and cheese and stir until the cheese has melted. Now the most important part: taste the sauce and adjust to your liking.
5. Stir in the cooked pasta and vegetables and heat through before serving.

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1. chicken and sun-dried tomato pasta bake
2. toddler food–Easy cheesy pasta and vegetables
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An organised pantry not only saves you time, it can save you money by ensuring you don’t buy multiple packets of the same thing when you can’t find what you’re looking for, or by helping you keep an eye on ‘best before’ dates.

Over the last couple of months I have been working on reorganising my pantry, little by little, one day at a time and I thought I would share the results so far.

My pantry wasn’t too bad. Most of what I have lives in a labelled jar or container. It has just gotten disorganised and hard to find things when I need them. This week, I focused on the main, eye-level shelf where all our tinned foods, herbs and spices and sauces live. Here are the results:

Most of my spices have been stored in old coffee jars for some time now. I saved these from my coffee drinking days and purloined a few extra from coffee drinking friends. The problem was that even with the labels on the jars, I still had trouble finding what I was looking for.

So I added labels to the lids. Problem solved.

The quick way to do this is to buy one of those circle paper punches and a sheet of sticky label. But that would have cost money. Instead, I did this the old fashioned way by tracing the circles on paper, cutting them out with scissors, and sticking them down with a glue stick.

Complete spice organisation without spending any money at all.

Two organisational items I did invest in was a tiered shelf for the tinned goods ($10) and a turntable for the back corner of the pantry ($12) (which is always hard to reach). It is so much easier now to grab what we need.

So far, the bottom four shelves of our pantry are now ‘functional’. Just the top two to go, and I have no idea how I’m going to tackle them…yet.

Top tips for pantry organisation:

• Take your time organising your pantry. Do a little each week. This gives you time to think about how you’re going to tackle the job, how you use your pantry, and what you can do to make it work more efficiently.
• Arrange and rearrange things until your pantry is working for you.
• Save money by using recycled jars, boxes and containers to store food in. My favourite container is an empty 1 kilo honey jar. The large jar we keep our rolled oats in is a recycled catering-sized coffee jar. The spice packets that have yet to find homes in jars are kept in a Ferrero Rocher plastic gift box (the perfect size).
• Label, label, label. And label lids if this makes viewing your pantry contents easier.
• Put small containers at the front and larger containers at the back.
• Put the items you use most frequently on the easiest shelf to see and reach.
• Group like items together (all baking items together, for instance).
• Put the things you use least frequently at the back or on higher shelves.
• Line your shelves with paper to make drips and spills easy to clean. I use old newspaper or junk mail.

What are your tips for organising the pantry?

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It’s Halloween today, so I thought I would share another pumpkin recipe: mini muffin- tin pumpkin quiches.

These mini quiches are similar to this recipe, previously shared, except that they are baked in a muffin tin, and therefore take much less time to cook. Of course, you can make any quiche recipe ‘mini’ by following the directions below.

These make great finger food, picnic lunches, school or work lunches or an out-and- about lunch. Makes approx. 8.

Method

• Preheat oven to 180°C. Lightly grease a muffin tin.
• Over a low heat, sauté onion and garlic until softened, without browning. Add the dried herbs and sauté for a further minute, then set aside to cool.
• Beat the eggs and cream, then beat in the mashed pumpkin and cheese. Finally, stir in the onion mixture.
• Cut rounds from the pastry using a pastry cutter or glass, and line each muffin tin hole with pastry. Spoon or pour quiche mixture into each hole.
• Bake for 10 – 20 minutes or until quiche is set. I find that in my oven, things cook more evenly if I turn them half way through.

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We stopped eating beef about five months ago. The reason is that beef doesn’t agree with me. My digestive system has been much happier since. While I think this decision is not only good for me, but for the environment as well, beef mince is a frugal staple and finding replacements can be expensive.

Lamb mince is both difficult to find and expensive (although a first: Woolies is cheaper in this case. Our local Woolies sells lamb mince for $10 a kilo, while the wholesaler charges $27 a kilo and you have to order it in advance). Pork mince is another alternative and reasonably priced. Both can be substituted successfully for beef mince.

Method

1. Prepare noodles according to directions on packet.
2. Brown the mince, breaking lumps up with a spoon. Drain.
3. Heat a little oil and add the cabbage, capsicum, mushrooms and garlic. Sauté until vegetables are just tender.
4. Return mince to pan and stir through peanut butter and soy sauce (taste and add more if preferred).
5. Toss the noodles through the mince mixture, heat and serve.

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