(no subject)
As some people know, I've started baking again as a way of taking my mind of my troubles, and a cheap way of eating Nice Things. Much use of the internet to find recipes of stuff I can remember cooking when I was young, and use of the lovely baking book I was bought.
But I may have seen a gap in the market - decent baking, or any cooking for that matter, on a budget. I don't mean cheaper cuts of meat & in season vegetables type of thing, but the other ingredients.
An example the other day was watching someone making a lemon curd to go on a meringue dessert, and talking about using the juice of 3 lemons. Now leaving aside the question of what size lemons as they can vary by a very large amount, a quick google suggests that you get about 2-3 tablespoons of juice from a lemon which is about 15ml per lemon (or 17ml, depending on whether you're looking at UK or US tbsps). Typical (Tesco) price of a lemon is about 30p so you're looking at around 90p worth in the curd, whereas Jif lemon juice (again taken from Tesco) is 50p per 250 ml which is around 15 lemon's worth for that 50p. But this took an enquiring mind & use of a search engine to find out, whereas of course it would have been much easier if she's just said "45-50ml lemon juice, preferable freshly squeezed"
This isn't the only example of high quality ingredients being defined in a recipe, just an example that struck me as I was watching the TV, so how useful would it be for recipes to give alternate ingredients that may not be quite as great but do the job OK and save significant amounts of money? I do understand that saving 90p here & there may not seem like a lot but repeat that one saving over say 6-8 meals a week & suddenly the amount looks significant to someone living on the breadline. Use of these stock cupboard ingredients also means that cooking can be done on a whim, rather than having to either plan every meal exactly for the week, or making an additional trip to the shops to buy the additional fresh ingredients.
From a purely personal viewpoint, I also quite like baking but I'm not a fanatic. So while I do measure my ingredients & mix them myself rather than open a pack of ready-mix I'd rather not spend 15 minutes of my life carefully grating the rind off a citrus fruit, or grate my own nutmeg or cinnamon rather than use ready-grated (and much cheaper) out of a jar. Sort of a middle range person when it comes to cooking - I can cook, but it isn't a consuming passion.
Of course there may well be a number of excellent books out there that do exactly this, cater for people like me who want quick & easy cooking without using packet mixes, and if anyone knows of these please tell me!
But I may have seen a gap in the market - decent baking, or any cooking for that matter, on a budget. I don't mean cheaper cuts of meat & in season vegetables type of thing, but the other ingredients.
An example the other day was watching someone making a lemon curd to go on a meringue dessert, and talking about using the juice of 3 lemons. Now leaving aside the question of what size lemons as they can vary by a very large amount, a quick google suggests that you get about 2-3 tablespoons of juice from a lemon which is about 15ml per lemon (or 17ml, depending on whether you're looking at UK or US tbsps). Typical (Tesco) price of a lemon is about 30p so you're looking at around 90p worth in the curd, whereas Jif lemon juice (again taken from Tesco) is 50p per 250 ml which is around 15 lemon's worth for that 50p. But this took an enquiring mind & use of a search engine to find out, whereas of course it would have been much easier if she's just said "45-50ml lemon juice, preferable freshly squeezed"
This isn't the only example of high quality ingredients being defined in a recipe, just an example that struck me as I was watching the TV, so how useful would it be for recipes to give alternate ingredients that may not be quite as great but do the job OK and save significant amounts of money? I do understand that saving 90p here & there may not seem like a lot but repeat that one saving over say 6-8 meals a week & suddenly the amount looks significant to someone living on the breadline. Use of these stock cupboard ingredients also means that cooking can be done on a whim, rather than having to either plan every meal exactly for the week, or making an additional trip to the shops to buy the additional fresh ingredients.
From a purely personal viewpoint, I also quite like baking but I'm not a fanatic. So while I do measure my ingredients & mix them myself rather than open a pack of ready-mix I'd rather not spend 15 minutes of my life carefully grating the rind off a citrus fruit, or grate my own nutmeg or cinnamon rather than use ready-grated (and much cheaper) out of a jar. Sort of a middle range person when it comes to cooking - I can cook, but it isn't a consuming passion.
Of course there may well be a number of excellent books out there that do exactly this, cater for people like me who want quick & easy cooking without using packet mixes, and if anyone knows of these please tell me!