Spaghetti Broccolese

Last week during the first round of my £1.00 a Day Eating Challenge, I invented a simple, vegan version of spaghetti bolognesse, that I brilliantly named Spaghetti Broccolese.  Because it has broccoli in it.  See what I did there?  Here's the recipe. 

Ingredients:

Serves 2 - 4.  (I don't give many exact quantities here as it's a matter of taste.  Just use the onions, garlic and mushrooms as your base and build up the sauce from there).

• Two medium-large onions
• Two cloves of garlic (optional)
• Splash of oil (olive or sunflower)
• Mushrooms (button or chestnut)
• Half a large head of broccoli, including the stalk, finely chopped
• 2 tins of tomatoes
• 1 tin of kidney beans
• Turmeric powder
• Salt and pepper to taste

Instructions:

1. Chop the broccoli, including the stalk, into small "bite size" pieces.  Bring a pan of water to the boil and steam the broccoli for 5 minutes.
2. Remove the softened broccoli and strain.  
3. Add as much spaghetti as seems appropriate to boiling water.  I usually break the dry spaghetti in half first.
4. Chop the onions and mushrooms roughly, and the garlic.  Stir fry on a medium-high heat in a generous splash of oil, until the mushrooms soften.
5. Add a few pinches of turmeric powder and stir in.  The spaghetti should be about ready by now.  Take off the boil and drain.
6. Add the tinned tomatoes, and turn down the heat.  You might want to transfer from a frying pan to a saucepan at this stage, depending on the size of your frying pan. 
7. Stir for a few more minutes before adding the broccoli and kidney beans, drained.  Simmer for at least 15 minutes, stirring regularly.  It's ready when the broccoli is nice and soft.
8. Add sauce to spaghetti and serve like this:

The version pictured here doesn't contain any mushrooms or kidney beans, so I suppose these are both "optional" (though the mushrooms less so).  It's a pretty liberal, adaptable meal, so it's almost impossible to fuck up, but it really is delicious.  Give it a go.

Related posts

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Experimental High Protein Vegan Breakfast Energy Bars

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£1.00 a Day Eating Challenge: Round Two, Day One

Strawberry Garden in Bury is currently selling massive baking potatoes for 39p a pop.  So I bought two.  78p, lunch sorted.

Breakfast was two mugs of thick, hot broccoli soup, straight from the slow cooker.  I nabbed three heads of broccoli on Tuesday for 42p each, and liquified them over the following two days, in my tried and tested never-ending soup style.

Broccoli soup is as easy to make as any soup could ever possibly be.  Ingredients: broccoli, water, oil, salt and pepper.  That's it.  Works as well in a saucepan as in a slow cooker.  Just chop up the broccoli, stalks and all, add to a pan with water and a splash of oil, salt and pepper to taste, boil and simmer for 15-20 minutes until soft enough to blend, then blend.  Done.  How thick you make it is up to you, and just a matter or the water-broccoli proportion.  It's magnificent that something so simple can be so delicious.  Well-stuffed on potatoes for lunch, I'll be having more soup for tea as well.   I'm seriously beginning to wonder if I can subsist, even flourish on nothing but broccoli, potatoes, and porridge.

Tomorrow's budget: £1.22.  Feeling pleased with myself. 

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More Wine!

Guess what I've been doing today?

That's correct: brewing some more wine.  The apple wine has settled in for the winter now, and the urge to brew another batch has taken me.  From a charming wine making book loaned to me by Sarah, the recipe for "Clove and ginger wine" jumped straight of the page and into my world.  The ingredients are simple: unlike with most others, you don't need to gather a load of fruit extract the juice.  Aside from the usual yeast, sugar and water, all that's needed is three lemons, an orange, cloves, and a chunk of ginger.

Straight from the book, here's the recipe:

I played a little with the proportions, using closer to 40g of ginger and 20g of cloves, though the quantity of liquid and sugar is as advised here.  Likewise for the citrus fruits.  I'm hoping whatever I end up with approximates to my favourite tipple, Stone's Ginger Wine, which I drink because I like it, and because it's a way of collecting bottles to transfer my own brews into when they're ready.  The size of the necks just happens to fit the reusable cork stops I have, perfectly.  Which can't possibly be a coincidence.

For a muslin "bag", I used a muslin cloth, tied with an elastic band.  Needless to say, everything was sterilised at every stage and with that and the hour of simmering, everything was ready to go in well under two hours.

An excellent afternoon.  Oh, and I only spent £0.78 on food today.  All is well.

A man who knows what he's doing.

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£1.00 a Day Eating Challenge Update

Last week and out of the blue, I set myself a challenge to spend no more than £1.00 a day on food for as long as I could.  The rules were simple: £1.00 is the absolutely daily maximum, any less than that spent can be carried over into the next day, no advances allowed.  So spending 50p on day one allows for a maximum spend of £1.50 on day two, and so on.  Eating food already in stock, or otherwise acquired, is permissible.  It was to be an exercise in restraint, frugality, and non-wastefulness.

Discussing it online received some interest, and some criticism, all welcome, but more interesting was the feeling that challenging myself in this simple way re-awakened in me.  Pretentious though it undoubtedly is, you could call it "the joy of doing without".  The pleasure of poverty?  And, yes yes, I am of course very well aware that conventional "poverty" is not, and should not be described as, a pleasure, but I'm talking about something else here.  "Voluntary poverty" is one term, apparently Roman Catholic in origin.  "Aestheticism", similarly religious and therefore maybe off-putting for many, is another.  Neither is quite what I'm on about.  Nothing so all-encompassing.

"Anti-consumption" is another term we might use.  Eating is the most literal form of consumption humans practice, but of course "consume" is a verb used more readily in different context.  We consume stuff.  We are consumers. There are so, so many reasons to rebel against and resist this identification, that I won't go into here (maybe later) but suffice to say if you're not already of a similar mindset, you're not going to find much on this blog to sympathise with.  

Never mind about all that.  What you're here to read is that the initial challenge lasted on 7 days.  On day 8, with a balanced budget for that day of £1.00 precisely, I caved and spent £1.70 at the chippy, on chips.  So that was that.  Game over.  I lapsed back into old habits, but with the alternative joy still at the back of mind.

I'm certain I could have kept it up for longer, and resolved to try again.  Here's a link to a far superior blogger who by coincidence just happens to be challenging themself in a similar way, that I've been looking to for inspiration and encouragement.  But enough words.  Round two begins tomorrow.

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Quick Update

A lot happened this weekend.  So for blogging purposes I'm going to divide my experiences into several posts over the next few days.  Apologies to anyone who may have been waiting for daily updates to my £1.00 a Day Eating Challenge: for now I'll just say that yes, the journey continues.  Sort of.  Watch this space.

On Saturday I attended Manchester's first Extinction Rebellion demonstration.  This involved a march, plenty of chanting, and some mostly police-approved civil disobedience, sitting down the middle of the street and reciting a "Declaration of Rebellion".  Things became more disobedient later on, I gather, with several arrests, although I must confess I'd moved on by this stage.  Anyway, for what it's worth I stand in solidarity with the rebellion and everything they hope to achieve.  Here's some unedited footage of the "Declaration of Rebellion".  Just to be a small part of this was a powerful experience.  Pay attention to the words here.  This matters.

On Sunday, I went to an afternoon of 'wild food' foraging, organised by the charming people of Cracking Good Food.  I learned a lot in a few hours; in summary, there's a lot more things just growing all around you that you can eat.  

Which brings us to a post I've been working on about the Beatles and Broccoli but just haven't had time to finish, what with all this fun.  Specifically, Ringo and Broccoli.  It should be ready this week.  Watch this space, like, subscribe and all of that.  

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£1.00 a Day Eating Challenge: Day Six (The Jeremy Corbyn Diet)

I wasn't feeling well yesterday.  Symptoms: cold, headache, vague aches and pains.  Diagnosis: November.  Time to go for a flu jab, I think.  Anyway, I mention this because I hope it's not an effect of my frugal eating this week, and just a coincidence, but who knows for sure?  In broccoli we trust.

That said, having left work early due to no longer being of any adult use to anyone paying me, I was in bed before 4pm.  Tea, as a result, was a hastily scoffed tin of cold baked beans, straight from the tin, Jeremy Corbyn style.  This tin came from the stockpile, so no extra cost there.  Breakfast was porridge - another Corbyn staple.  In Corbyn we trust.  Way back in 2016 when I had similar frugal plans and schemes, I got myself a 25kg of porridge oats, which I used a lot of at first, but gradually phased out.  I don't really know why.  Porridge is great: simple and quick to make, healthy as it gets and porridge oats, stored dry and cool, last more or less forever.  Two years in, the 25kg bag still only half empty, and they're fresh and useful as ever.  Here's where I got mine.

Lunch was, let's say, improvised.  Ingredients: one tin of kidney beans, half a head of broccoli, two small onions.  Onions fried with a few pinches of turmeric, broccoli steamed, beans boiled.  I shouldn't have gone to work in the first place, feeling as I did, but I was glad I had the energy to scrape a more or less edible lunch together at no extra cost (the beans, broccoli and onions were all bought earlier this week).

So that was that.  Not much else to say for today, except I'm still here, not dead.  Oh, almost forgot.  In and amongst, I also managed to bash together a passable tray of bread rolls, which with several generous sprinkles of dried sage into the day, turned out as lovely as you could hope.

Total spend: £0.00.  Tomorrow's budget: £3.03.




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£1.00 a Day Eating Challenge
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£1.00 a Day Eating Challenge: Day Three
£1.00 a Day Eating Challenge: Days Four and Five


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£1.00 a Day Eating Challenge: Days Four and Five

I've never tried Huel or Soylent or such concoctions marketed at those too hip to eat, but I'm also not averse to the idea of eating the same thing every day. To really do this healthily, I imagine you'd need several complicated meals with a lot of ingredients to ensure you didn't malnourish yourself, and obviously this would be quite expensive. Certainly outside the scope of my £1.00 a day challenge. Anyway, this post is about days four and five together since on two consecutive days I ate exactly the same breakfast, lunch and tea and lived to tell the tale.

Breakfast once again was bread and jam, and from this I learned that at this rate, baking my own bread I get through one load in 2-3 days. That's a fair bit of baking and preparation time week on week, but well worth it I'd say.  I've been trying to find a yeast-less bread recipe that's also vegan (some kind of flatbread?) to cut down on preparation time.  My yeast supply is also depleting, so that's another consideration.

Lunch was chilli. The slow cooker makes enough for 3-4 large portions, normally. This time around I was left with a fair bit of "sauce", the dregs, if you will - too much to discard but not enough to really constitute a meal, so tea on days five and six was pasta (bought on day three) to which I added some broccoli and cheap Co-op pasta sauce, bought on day four for £1.06, coming in £0.03 under budget. (By the way, a sheet where I'm tracking my spends and meals day on day, is here).

This cheapo pasta sauce is as runny and pathetic as you'd expect for 44p, so I mixed it with the dregs from the chilli, added the some of the broccoli, steamed, and came up with this. 

As with the chilli, there was enough for several meals, so that was dinner on day five sorted, too. 

Budget balance for day six: £2.03.

These Pringles aren't something I bought, obviously, I just took a picture of them.  Christmas dinner flavour crisps?  That's the kind of world we're living in.  Someone's taking the piss.






Related posts

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£1.00 a Day Eating Challenge: Day Three

Today I ran out of milk.*  Soy milk sells for £1.50 a carton, and with a budget ceiling today of £3 I don't think I'll be replacing that just yet.  So black coffee it is, for the next few days.  Just when I'd been trying to cut down on my coffee intake as well. So it goes.

Breakfast was bread and jam again, from the same loaf as I made yesterday, followed by tea and oranges.  Have you ever had tea and oranges?  What I'm referring to is, a bowl of hot water, with a tea bag or two in it, and in which you soak slices of an orange.  Then you eat the warm, tea-infused orange slices.  I imagine this is what they do in China, where all the tea is.

It's a soothing experience, and leaves you with some liquid which you can dilute with water to feed your plants; and some orange peels which despite what you may have heard, are fine to throw on the compost. Or just scatter them in the garden to deter cats.

Lunch was beans on toast, or beans on bread anyway, since I didn't bother to toast the bread. Homemade bread is best enjoyed as thick, bricky slices, which wouldn't fit in a toaster and also, I don't own a toaster. The baked beans stockpile is shrinking fast.

Food shopping could no longer be avoided. Tomorrow was a work day - I work three days a week as my contract requires and when I get my act together I like to "prep" three days of meals to take to work with me for the fridge-freezer. That means, this week, it's slow cooker vegan chilli time. Again.

At the Co-op, I boight:

• 2 tins of kidney beans (90p)
• 1 tin of peas (23p)
• 1 tub of mushrooms (reduced to 73p from £1.00)
• 500g wholewheat pasta (56p)
• 1 bag of "marvellous mishapes" onions (which aren't mishapes at all really, just small, 49p)

£2.91 well spent, I think.

For the slow cooker chilli, I used six onions (they're about golf ball sized), two tins of tomatoes from my stockpile, a slash of oil (I've nearly run out now), one tin of kidney beans, the tin of peas, and all of the mushrooms.

To this I added a generous scoop of cumin powder, a sprinkle of cayenne pepper, and a pinch of chilli powder. It was in the pot by 11am, and ready to eat by 6.  I also threw in these:

Pathetic. 

These are the last potatoes of the year. I sowed them in August on the allotment, assured they were  of a "late variety", and would be supplying me with a bounty well through until Christmas. This was not the case. Not at all. Still, it's handful, which is a portion, so into the pot they went.

Tomorrow's budget: £1.09. Plenty of chilli left for a good 2-3 more meals. All is going well.

*As a vegan, it's been a joy to see that it's now permissible for "alt milk" to advertise itself as the humane alternative to cow's milk, and even explicitly to call cow's milk inhumane, because that's what it is, and I like truth.  When I say "milk", I'm referring to soy (or sometimes almond, oat, etc) milk, since as far as I'm concerned that's the only milk there should be.  Language is part of the battle.

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