Risotto aux poivrons

Easy meal to do, most of it is just waiting around in the kitchen. Total price should be around £2.

Put some butter in pan with a little oil and had an onion in bits in it. Small fire, cover the pan and let it wait.
In another big pan do the same.

Cut 2 peppers, 2 tomatoes, 2 sausages

When the onions are ready, put rice in the big pan and mix well so the rice drinks the oily liquids. When there is none left and the rice looks kind of transparent, add some white wine. When it has disappeared, add progressively 2 and 1/2 the volume of rice in water (for three people we had 1 and 1/2 cup of rice, so 3 and 3/4 cups of water). Add spices. When the water has disppeared it will be ready. Raise a bit the fire.

In the meanwhile put the tomatoes, peppers, saussages in the other smaller pan and raise the fire a bit.

When the vegetable are cooked, add them in the rice pan. Mix, wait for the water to disappear if there was any left.

Serve

Fajitas

Great stuff Morrison's was ginving a pack of tortillas for one bought. So we did mexican food. Maybe the most expensive meal so far because we used food items already prepared.

Cut an onion and peppers, fry them. Add them on a BBQ sauce in a pot.
Cut a turkey steak in file little bands, add paprika and fry quickly.

Put the turkey in the sauce. Finished!

Serve with lettuce, finely grated cheese (do it yourself, it is cheaper), greek yoghurt and rice.

Crêpes, Crêpes, Crêpes, salées et sucrées

What is more easy than doing crêpes? Easily done, easily cooked and opened to any kind of stuffing. We were 8 eating. I did about 30 savoury crêpes and 30 sweet ones. The price is ridiculously small, less than £2. What costs is what you want inside.

For roughly 30 crêpes:

Prepare a basic batter. Pour in 1l of milk in a large salad bowl. Add a little bit of melted butter. Take the yolks of 4 eggs, mix them with some milk in an aside bowl and pour in. Keep the whites in a separate bowl.
Add roughly 400g of flour, very slowly, always mixing. It avoids having bits in it. Actually there will be some, so do not panic too much if after 30 minutes you still see some flours not very well mixed.

Transform the eggs' whites into snow (not sure how you say that in english). You can whip it by hand (takes a long while) or use a machine. To check if they are ready, put the whip in it. When you take it out if must contain some of the snow, like if it was a solid and no more a liquid.

Add a pinch of salt in the milk, mix and then add the snow and mix very well to get a homogenous batter.

Let it rest for about an hour and mix again.

Then you can prepare it as you like. For savoury crêpes, add more salt, some pepper and spices you like or herbs. For sweet crêpes, add sugar, some vanilla, rum and cinnamon if you feel like it.

The cooking:
warm a pan and put a little bit of butter in it. If it boils immediatly, then the pan is at the right temperature (should not be too much either, beware). Pour some batter in it and do a motion of the pan to spread it through the pan. Let it cook a bit and when the border start getting brown, turn it around.

Advice:
you can prepare them long in advance and then just warm them in a pan.
For savoury crêpes, warm the crêpes, and put what you want on it. Ham, cheese, egg (maybe prepare it in a separate pan), tomatoes, peppers, whatever.
Once it is finished (eg the cheese is mellted or the tomato is hot), fold a bit the crêpe over the stuffing and serve.

Sauce au bleu sur pâtes, poivrons verts et tomates farcies

A third way of doing a nice cheap sauce and use what was left of the previous day's ingredients. It migh look long, but the sauce was actually prepared long before the pasta finished to cook. So instead of waiting useless in the kitchen, do a sauce ! Estimated price around £2.50 (wine cost a lot but I used only 1/4 of a bottle) for three people (Mat, Sebastian and me).

Put the water to boil in the kettle
Take 2 spoons of crême fraîche, a glass or two of milk and about 50g of blue cheese (if you use the Danish blue from Tesco's, be careful, it is quite a strong taste) in little pieces. Add some cornflower and mix. Pour in a pot and let warm lightly on the gas.

Aside, cut one onion in small bits, put in in the pan, quick at start and then quite slow once the onions start getting some colours, cut a green pepper, put in in the same pan.

Add some spices in the sauce (I added Espelette chili, pepper and salt). Make sure it does not boil.

By then the pasta must be cooking. You have nothing to do, just cut some parsley to be added in the sauce right at the end and open a bottle of white wine. Drink some and pour a bit of it in the sauce and in the pan. Wait.

Once the pasta is ready, boil the sauce if you have not done it (be careful milk rises quickly and it should not).

Serve with the tomatoes left from 2 days ago that you warmed in the microwave.

While the sauce is cooking, taste it and add cheese, and spices or wine according to your taste.
The cornflower is there to make it thicker. But it only works after you boiled it.