Unsurprisingly, Yorkshire puddings are taken very seriously up here. Not long after I moved up here, I invested in a lightweight Yorkshire pudding pan or tray or whatever you want to call it: like a fairy cake tray, but with four large dips instead of lots of little ones. I’ve never used it though, because I found that the key to making a great Yorkshire pudding – one that rises nice and high in the oven, and is cooked through without being too dry – is as much about the pan as it is about the recipe.

1) Use the thickest, heaviest pan or pot you own.

The blue pan in the picture is a cast iron “Indian wok”, whatever that may be. Not very thrifty in that it’s Le Creuset; thrifty in that it was a gift about 10 years ago . It goes on the hob or in the oven and, despite being the size of a small cereal bowl, is pretty frickin heavy.

2) Heat it in the oven beforehand, with a dash of dripping or cooking oil, for as long as you dare….

I drizzle a little olive oil into the bottom of the empty pan and stick it in with the roast potatoes et al for half an hour before whipping it out, pouring in the batter and returning it to the oven ASAP.

Today’s Yorkshire pudding spent about 25 minutes in the oven. To be honest it could have risen a lot more if I had left it in for another 5-10 minutes – I’ve had them nudging the oven ceiling before – but it was cooked through and the brussels sprouts I was roasting today (an experiment) were beginning to char, so the whole lot came out.

The recipe I use comes from a Chinese cook called Tin Sung Yang, via the cookery writer Jane Grigson, via Nigella Lawson. From How To Eat:

“For years it was held to have a mystery ingredient – tai luk sauce – until, Jane Grigson reports, a niece of hers found that this was a Chinese joke. Nevertheless, the recipe is different from normal: it works backwards. That’s to say, you mix the eggs and milk and then stir in the flour, rather than making a well in the flour and adding the eggs and milk: and it works triumphantly; it billows up into a gloriously copper crown of a cushion.”

Yorkshire pudding recipe:

1. Beat the milk, eggs and salt together.
2. Leave to stand for 15 minutes.
3. Whisk in the flour.
4. Add mixture to super-hot pan.
5. Cook for 25-35 minutes. No need to whack the oven temperature up high, unless you want to: 220′C, or whatever you’re cooking the rest of the roast at, should be fine.

This quantity requires a large pan and serves 4-6. I halve the ingredients and cook this in a small pan, for 2-3.

I love Yorkshire pudding but I’m sure I don’t have the monopoly on Yorkshire pudding secrets – especially since I’m an Essex transplant! – so if you have any good Yorkshire pudding tips, please share them!

“American craze for ‘extreme couponing’ hits Britain… and it could slash the cost of your weekly shop by a third” – Daily Mail.

The calls I get from journalists and TV researchers tend to come in waves that coincide, roughly, with the level of hysteria about the UK economic outlook. When it’s your common-or-garden, everyday hysteria about our financial crisis, the level of calls is fairly low. When it’s wet-your-pants hysteria, as it has been over the past couple of weeks, the phone begins to ring and ring…

I don’t want to come across as a total grumblebum – although I probably will – but I’m beginning to get the impression that now we have spent a few years teetering on the financial brink etc., fresh hooks and angles for stories about money-saving are running low. Last week I was contacted by a Sunday Times reporter who was writing a story about how American-style extreme couponing was taking off in the UK. I explained the reasons why, um, it wasn’t. (Worst. Interviewee. Ever.)

Needless to say, my comments didn’t make it into print; however the story did. Since then it’s been picked up by the Mail and others, and I’ve been taking various calls about it, so I’m beginning to think that a debunk is in order.

For the uninitiated, extreme couponing is the preserve of a few, single-minded Americans who are dedicated to collecting as many store coupons and saving as much on your shopping as possible. Think this is about clipping a Kellogg’s voucher out of Family Circle magazine? Think again. Here’s a taster, from the awesome (and terrifying) show Extreme Couponing, which I wrote about earlier in the year:

Having lived in the USA for a time, I have first-hand experience of this kind of shopping. Sadly, I wasn’t a participant – if only! – but after moving there, I spent plenty of time standing in checkout queues, trying to work out what on earth was going on as women in front of me proceeded to whip out ring binders stuffed to bursting with coupons for various products and from various sources, and shoved sheaves of them in the cashier’s direction.

So, even though I don’t doubt that more of us are clipping coupons and looking for other ways to save at the supermarket, here are five reasons why extreme couponing doesn’t happen in the UK:

1. For starters, there are fewer coupons available over here. Those glossy, junk mail leaflets from supermarkets can be a treasure trove of bargains and BOGOFs, but in America there are coupon clubs, subscription-only coupon websites, coupon magazines… you get the idea.

2. In America it isn’t unusual for stores to honour their competitors’ coupons. Can you imagine doing that over here? Taking your Tesco vouchers to ASDA and expecting ASDA to accept them? They’d look at you like you were daft.

3. As in the clip above, some stores will also “double up” your coupons if you belong to their loyalty scheme or membership club.

4. Fewer restrictions on how many coupons you can use per purchase. Stores will also honour the full discounts on goods, even if those goods have since been discounted below the initial discounted price. So, for example, if you go to buy a $3 product with a $2 coupon, but the product has since been reduced to $1, you’ll still get the full $2 credited to your receipt.

5. Average living space! A lot of the people featured in the Extreme Couponing have been able to devote entire rooms – and, in many cases, basements – to stashing their spoils. Like this chap, who needs somewhere to stash his 1,500 sticks of deodorant:

Unlike in America, where there is more space to go around, those of us in Britain who have this amount of room to spare don’t generally need to go extreme couponing…

It beats a BOGOF on Ben & Jerry’s, doesn’t it? But if you’re feeling even a little jealous of our coupon-craving American cousins, don’t feel hard done by. The absence of an extreme couponing culture in the UK isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Here are the reasons why, even once I had got my head around extreme couponing in America, I couldn’t wait to set foot in a UK supermarket once again. Please note that these were my experiences in one state (Arizona) and I don’t know how representative they are of American supermarkets in general, but here goes:

1. RUBBISH CHEESE. Big slabs of that lurid orange, squeaky Kraft stuff that comes in processed slices here in the UK. Balls of shrink-wrapped, hyper-pasteurised “mozzarella” that were so hard and rubbery, they bounced like tennis balls. Proper cheddar came in sliver-sized packets and cost the Earth. After my first visit to an American supermarket cheese counter, I cried. (Admittedly this was something of an over-reaction and I was also jetlagged at the time, but still…)

2. Surprisingly pricey fresh produce. Sprinkler systems in the fruit and veg aisles that were activated every few minutes (usually with a little “thunderclap”), dousing the fresh produce with water. This was supposed to keep the fruit and veg fresher for longer, but in my experience, it didn’t last as long post-purchase as fruit and veg does over here. Conversely, the milk would stay “fresh” for a month after opening – nothing wrong with that, per se, but it was slightly disconcerting!

3. I found that in general, UK supermarkets offer a lot more buy-one-get-one-free deals, and also offer more frequent discounts and deals on “core” products from the meat, freezer and dairy sections. Whereas a lot of the American deals were for more obscure, niche-focused products that I had never heard of before. (Again though, this may have been just me with my old-fashioned English ways…)

4. As I have mentioned before, certain American supermarket chains have “members’ clubs” and have two prices for every product: a “members’ price” (i.e. normal price) and a non-members’ price, which is a little more. I much prefer the simpler pricing system in the UK, with one price per product for all customers. Equal pricing for all!

5. In UK supermarkets, I don’t get stopped every other visit by random people asking me to join their random churches. Charming at first, but after a while it grates…

Image credit: Cindy Funk.

You can’t get much more thrifty than free food and, although it may take getting some used to, swapping the supermarket aisle for the hedgerow every now and then can provide some real bargains.

Few hungry diners would think twice about ordering wild mussels at a restaurant, yet how many of those same diners would feel confident plucking them from the shore themselves? Despite the epithet wild being sprinkled over menus in increasingly liberal portions, most people still approach foraging for food with some trepidation. And for good reason. The risk of accidentally picking poisonous berries or potentially fatal fungi when there is such an abundance of cheap pre-packaged convenience food around might seem a foolish waste of effort and an unnecessary gamble.

Strange then, that we still let our children pick and eat blackberries straight from the bramble. Ah… but that’s different. Or is it? Alongside hedgerow blackberries there may be very different blackberries which have a horribly destructive effect: deadly nightshade, for example. No, it is because we are so familiar with the blackberry’s shape, we know how they grow, where they grow and can point them out that puts us at ease. It’s the same with all wild foods: amateur foraging is just a case of getting your eye in.

I went for a run through the woods near my new house last weekend, giving my body a workout before a weekend of entertaining friends. The recipe for the fish pie I was to cook that night was also running through my mind, the sustainable coley and mussels expertly foraged from the supermarket reduced aisle in true thrifty spirit.

What to do for a starter though? Something cheap, warming, homely and ideally local… Then I saw them lying like a brown seam along a trunk of fallen elder: nature’s answer to my appetiser conundrum.

Jelly Ear fungus is possibly the most unpleasant fungus to stumble upon; yet like many wild foods, what it lacks in beauty, it more than makes up for in personality. The cold, soft, velvety texture is uncannily like an ear and is always a source of intrigue, passed around friends with exclamations of delight and disgust. Most abundant in summer and autumn, it can be found widespread around the UK during all seasons, only it is liable to be dried up and tougher in winter. A simple soaking in water for an hour will restore it to its supple, if ugly, form.

Strange looking it may be, but you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Jelly Ear is as valuable as it is unmistakable because when it comes to edible fungi, easy identification is probably the most redeeming quality. In the east, Jelly Ear (known as Wood Ear in China and Japan) is much prized for its medicinal benefits. Hailed as an anti-inflammatory, it is eaten to relieve tonsillitis, swelling, etc, but is also becoming regarded as a powerful anti-carcinogen, used to prevent, treat and stop tumours.

In the West, the influx of Eastern restaurants – Thai in particular – means that you have probably eaten it before, though you may not have recognised it. Chains like Wagamama and Busaba Eathai cook with the fungi in their Tom Yum and hot and sour soups, whereupon it takes on a black, glossy nature.

Jelly Ear grows predominantly at right angles on dead elder. It looks and feels almost exactly like a brown human ear, cold to the touch and fleshy. With no stem, the ‘ears’ will be different sizes, some small and firm; the older, larger, flatter specimens as large as a hand and flappy.

I set about picking along the trunk, choosing the medium and smaller examples for their firmer flesh. My hands became dirty as I picked amongst the mossy flank and filled my pockets, but the mud was a small price to pay. I soon felt a sense of closeness with the woodland around me, a place I had only just discovered.

Just by stopping and looking, myriad other sounds and sights revealed themselves: a woodpigeon and blue tit vying for the same airspace; from up a slope the shadow of a larger animal in the leaves, a fox perhaps or a rabbit, soft-padding down a run. These were things I would have missed if merely running through the trees. Just as with blackberry picking, there is a wider sense of oneness with the terrain when you forage for food. You can’t help but feel more rooted to the landscape.

That evening, with friends huddled round the stove and fish pie in the oven, I made up my starter. The Jelly Ear was washed, cut into thick strips and sitting in a bowl as I finely chopped a green chilli and garlic clove and turned them in a melted mix of butter and rapeseed oil. A few seconds later, the fungi was in the pan and I stirred it in the heat as it changed from dark brown and eventually into black. In went a half a litre of boiling water and a vegetable stock cube and I flaked in a quarter of a chicken stock cube, adding more chilli and black pepper to taste.

At first people were reticent, suspicious of the black strips of mushroom in their bowl. I explained it was the same fungi found in Wagamama’s and all recognised it with exclamations of “aaaah” and, “I knew I’d seen it before”. One spoonful was all it took to convert them and, as they slurped down the translucent broth rich with a thick mushroom flavour and warming chilli kick, I told them the tale of finding the Jelly Ear. Free food and a good story, a priceless reward for a morning run.

‘Skimming Stones and Other Ways of Being in the Wild’ by Rob Cowen and Leo Critchley (Coronet, February 2012 – available to pre-order from Amazon) is a book of simple skills that can help us to interact with nature, achieve a deeper connection with it and even step inside another dimension.

www.robandleo.com

Two other reasons why I like this winter warmer:

Firstly, it is relatively quick to make, as opposed to those soups that sound great when you are starving… until you look up the recipe and discover that the cooking time runs into hours.

Secondly, it’s a one-pot dish that produces minimal washing-up. I make it in a saucepan, but you could also make it in a slow cooker, chucking all the ingredients in (bar the parsley and cream) and leaving it to cook on low for a few hours.

This soup is featured in a couple of Nigella tomes (How To Cook and Nigella Bites – which I think is a bit of a cheat!) The original recipe calls for a teeny tin of Clement Faugier peeled chestnuts (“Their slightly candied taste adds a honeyed oomph to the soup”). Actually, if you want to remain faithful to the origial Nigella recipe, I’ve just spotted that at the time of writing, Sainsburys is doing two tins of Clement Faugier chestnuts for a fiver. However for this frugal version, I use a tin of bog standard pureed chestnuts (around £1.30, from the specialist food section of any supermarket).

I must admit, I don’t regard pureed chestnuts as a storecupboard staple. I made this recipe after twigging that the dented tin I’d found on the supermarket discount shelf for 90p had been sitting around gathering dust for quite long enough thank you. And I’ve discovered that if you want to make lentil and chestnut soup, there is a good chance that the tin of chestnuts is all you will need to buy. You’ll probably have the rest of the ingredients already.

Let’s face it, everyone has one of these stashed at the back of a kitchen cupboard: an unloved, half-used bag of lentils.

The original recipe calls for 225g of red lentils. Other types of lentils – the ones here are brown – are absolutely fine. The soup won’t look as pretty, of course, but it will still taste good.

You will also need:

1 small onion
1/2 leek (or a whole leek, if you have it)
1 carrot
1 stick celery
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 1/2 litres vegetable stock
Plenty of salt and pepper, for seasoning.

Parsley and a little cream, to serve.

If you have chopped a bunch of parsley for a previous meal (as here), you can always add a parcel of the stalks to the vegetable stock and pull off sufficient leaves to garnish.

Instructions:

Serves 4-6.

Mind you, the politicians’ approach to thrift and economy confuses me. I don’t often touch upon politics these days, because as it turned out, readers of this blog were less interested in bombast than they were in practical ways to save money and live well for less.

However it wasn’t all that long ago that David Cameron was waxing lyrical about how his would be a “Government of Thrift“. And now? From today’s Daily Telegraph:

“Our leaders are desperate for families to spend and kick-start the economy…not to read – and act on – Miss Thrifty’s blog.”

Here are some of the posts referenced in today’s article:

Shopping for fruit & veg: six money-saving tips – “Supermarkets always put the fruit & veg aisle by the entrance, but don’t begin your shop there. Pound for pound, it’s an expensive aisle. When I shop, I walk straight through and head for the freezer aisle in the store’s far corner…”

Seven good reasons to shop after 7 pm – “As I’ve mentioned before now, one of my most effective ploys is to do my frugal food shopping at the end of the day, in the hour before the store closes. Here are seven reasons why, courtesy of the bakery section at Morrisons yesterday…”

Using up vegetables: my top thrifty recipe – “Our household of two was about to travel south for the Christmas break, and we didn’t have time to eat all the vegetables before we went. The solution? It’s a favourite recipe of mine: Winter Vegetable Pie, a “frugalised” version of an old Delia Smith recipe (not one of Delia’s strange “frugal” recipes, I’d like to add).”

Why I love debt – I don’t really love debt, of course. This post is the story of how I went from Spendy Queen to Frugal Freak, setting up this blog along the way.

I update my blog with all the latest frugal tips, competitions and must-have discounts. If you would like to subscribe for free, enter your email address up there on the right. You can also subscribe via RSS, join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter.

Thanks for stopping by!

Last year I had a grand plan to make marrow rum: you scoop out the pith and seeds, fill the hollow with demerara sugar and yeast, tape the marrow shut and leave it in the airing cupboard for a year. Brilliant! My husband, however, was less than keen. He pointed out that we didn’t have anywhere suitable to put it, far less an airing cupboard. He also reminded me that last time I experimented with a recipe that involved yeast, fruit and an extended period of fermentation, it ended with a hazmat suit and a bin bag. And what if the marrow EXPLODED…?

Hurrumph. The upside to being married to a gastronomically risk-adverse person is that if I had made the marrow rum, it would be ready for drinking around about now – and I’m currently (grumpily) teetotal.

Then, as fate would have it, someone brought two sacks of plums to his workshop. Plums, plums and cream, plum crumble – we couldn’t eat them fast enough. Thus we ended up with a giant marrow in the fridge and an unopened sack of plums that were beginning to go a bit soft.

So, starting last year, we began making plum and marrow jam. We adapted a version of this recipe from the Good Food Channel, which I like for two reasons. Firstly, it’s super-easy, and doesn’t require jam thermometers or anything like that. Secondly, there are only three ingredients, so it’s also a simple matter to size the recipe up or down as required.

Plum and marrow jam

To make 4 kg of jam, you will need:

1 kg marrow

2 kg plums

2 kg preserving sugar

Method:

1. Peel, seed and roughly chop the marrow. It’s going to end up as jammy goop, so don’t worry about chopping it nicely.

2. Halve, stone and roughly chop the plums.

3. Place the marrow in a large bowl, with a third of the sugar. Toss or stir to coat with the sugar, and leave for at least 15 minutes.

4. Add the rest of the sugar to a saucepan, along with the chopped plums. As with all jam recipes, the thicker-bottomed your saucepan is, the better. However on a purely practical level, because of the quantities involved in this recipe you’re probably looking at the largest saucepan you have. The one that resembles a cauldron!

5. Add the marrow. Bring to a boil and simmer for 1.5 hours. Stir occasionally, skimming off any scum with a spoon.

6. Get your jam jars sterilised and ready! Some people put them in the microwave to sterilise them; others put them in the dishwasher. We don’t have either, so I wash the jars in hot, soapy water and then pop them into a low oven for 10-15 minutes.

7. After the jam has simmered for 1.5 hours, begin testing the jam to see if it is ready. Spoon a little onto a plate, leave for two minutes and then run your little finger through it. If the parting stays, it’s ready. If the jam gloops back together, it needs to simmer for longer.

8. Spoon the jam into the jars, allow to cool, then screw the lids on tightly. Done!

Two words of warning:

One. Don’t make the mistake that we made the first time around, which was to use preserving sugar with plums that were going soft. Plums have a lot of natural pectin (gelling agent), but it turns out that when they begin going soft, that pectin begins breaking down. So I should have used jam sugar, which has higher pectin levels. As it was, the jam took forever to set and to be honest, I think we ended up reducing it by quite a lot. It still tasted ok though.

Two. This recipe makes a lot of jam – so before you begin, make sure that you have enough jars! To give you an idea: if you make the jam in the quantities specified above, you’ll fill around ten regular-sized jam jars.

Plum and marrow jam.

Damsons! Not a damson to speak of in 2010, but 2011 is going to be a bumper year. Any ideas for what I can do with this lot will be very welcome. I’m thinking damson jam, damson cheese if I’m feeling really edgy, but after that I’m stuck…

Blueberries! Our soil in this part of North Yorkshire is very, very alkaline. Blueberries are supposed to prefer acidic soil. But our little blueberry bush, despite not growing very much, manages to put out a decent crop every year. I just have to get to the berries before the birds do.

Blackberries! I’ve written about our brambles before. When we moved here, the lawn didn’t have any grass and was instead overrun with waist-high brambles. Brambles are tough buggers to get rid off, but we managed to uproot and cut ours back to the furthest corners of the garden. We still have to work to keep them in check, but they produce lots of delicious blackberries every year, so who am I to complain?

So here’s Frugal Grandma’s no. 1 tip for keeping runner beans fresh in the midst of a surfeit. You need: the beans, a plastic bag, a fridge… and that’s it.

If your runner beans have suddenly gone into overdrive and are producing more than you can use and you don’t want to freeze them, this is a way to keep them fresh for some days.

The beauty of this is that you can add extra beans day by day (especially if your runner beans are not very prolific and you need more than one day’s pickings).

(Frugal Grandma sent over this tip in a moment of pique/grandmotherly concern because I haven’t posted so much recently. It’s rather good though, isn’t it? Perhaps I should go AWOL more often?)

Image credit: the hills are alive.

Anyway, whenever I see sharon fruit in the supermarket, they have usually been plonked in the heavily discounted, about-to-go-off section of the fruit and veg aisle. People don’t know what to do with them. They are funny-looking and the packaging is no help. In Morrisons, for example, the sharon fruit wrapper says:

Adds colour to fruit salads.

If that isn’t a cop-out, I don’t know what is.

On my latest trip to the supermarket, sharon fruit had been reduced to 9p for four and I came home with eight of them. Then I dithered until the sharon fruits’ leaves began turning brown and I HATE FOOD WASTE, even if it’s to the tune of 18p, so something had to be done.

I found a great sharon fruit recipe on All Recipes UK. It matched my criteria (quick, simple, tasty) perfectly. The original recipe is for sharon fruit slices. I don’t have a deep baking tray, so I baked my amended version in a round cake tin and have renamed it persimmon cake. Win!

My Favourite Sharon Fruit Recipe, AKA Persimmon Cake

6 sharon fruit, chopped into large chunks

5. Add the mixture to the cake tin, and bake for 20-25 minutes. Done.

I should have taken a picture of the finished cake, but I didn’t. To be honest it isn’t amazing to look at – it’s a brown cake – but you can always gussie it up with icing or a sugar and lemon glaze, should you be so minded.

You are supposed to wait for it to cool. However if, like me, you are impatient, I recommend eating it warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. The sharon fruit add colour and a distinctive taste to this cake. This isn’t a sweet or gooey concoction: with the raisins, sharon fruit and oil, it’s very Claudia Roden.

Right now I seem to be tossing bouquet garni bundles around left, right and centre: bechamel sauces, stews in the slow cooker, soups, you name it…

As you can see, this bouquet garni includes thyme, rosemary, parsley and bay leaf. I’ve seen bouquet garni recipes online that include squashing the sprigs of herbs into the hollow of a celery stalk or feeding them into a piece of leek, but life’s too short. I used to tie the bouquet garni herbs into a little muslin bag, but now I don’t do that either. Instead I put a bay leaf on the top, a bay leaf on the bottom, knot the bundle tightly and chuck it into the pot.

One cheat: my little bay tree is NOT happy at the moment, so I’m using bay leaves that I keep in an airtight container in the freezer. If anyone has any bay tree resuscitation tips, I am all ears! I know they don’t like lots of water; sadly, North Yorkshire isn’t known for its Mediterranean climate.