I think almost everyone is being thrifty with everything they do in life now, perhaps more so with food than anything else. So when it comes to Sunday dinner we generally look for seasonal veg the day before that have been ‘woopsied’ and cheap as chips (forgive the pun).
We do however go to the local butcher for our meat. I can hear people saying “the butchers are well expensive!” and I do agree, however I am a firm believer of keeping local shops busy and open. The other reason we use our very local butcher (100 metres away from Casa De Hyde) is the quality is loads better. Take a chicken for example, we strip the bird down to the very bare bone, making use of everything, giblets included. The amount of meat we get off a butcher bought chicken nearly doubles the meat from a supermarket, I promise. The meat does us about 3 or 4 different meals with a few bits that I use for the following meal.
After the chicken is stripped down, the carcass goes straight into a pan of boiling water and left to simmer for about an hour. Sieve the contents of the pan and you can freeze the stock for another day or use straight away.
I whacked the stock into a large pan and added boiling water. A half-used bag of egg noodles took the plunge at this point and some red pepper and spring onion from the freezer was added. I stole some of the prepped veg from the planned Sunday dinner and put in the pan. We picked some early wild garlic the day before so I chopped that up and threw that in too. A frozen green chili was chopped up into very small pieces and went in too. My other half is not partial to chicken leg meat (I know she’s a bit weird) so seeing as this pot is for me only, shredded everything but breast meat went in with seasoning to taste. Boiled until the noodles were cooked and the jobs a good ‘un!
As you see by the pictures I got 4 takeaway sized portions from this pot which I use for my baits at work. While most of my work mates are forking our £3-£4 a meal from the local eatery, I’ve spent about 70 pence on the noodles, plus the leftovers probably costing about 50 pence a tub. Plus, you know exactly where all the food is from as its been cooked from scratch.
Northern Hiker 