Beef & Potato Slowcooker

A friend recently asked me for some budget-friendly meal ideas. Here's one of our regulars (sorry no photos as yet) - it's tasty, cheap, healthy, easy to prepare and is perfect for the day before our next fruit and vegetable shop. The beef on the bone gives it great flavour, potatoes and lentils make it filling and the last minute peas give fresh colour and texture. This costs under $10 to fill a 5.5L slow cooker and easily gives us 6 large serves.

Beef & Potato Slowcooker

• 1 beef stewing steak or similar beef on the bone (250g)
• 1 cup dry green/brown lentils (200g), rinsed
• 4 - 6 potatoes, chopped into large chunks
• 4 - 6 carrots, chopped into large chunks
• 3 - 4 celery stalks, chopped
• frozen peas (500g)
• 2 - 3 large bay leaves
• salt, 1 - 2 teaspoons
• water

Add everything except the peas and water into the slowcooker; then fill water to a couple of centimetres from the top of the crock. Cook for 8-10 hours on low (can use high setting for less time if you don't remember to put it on until later in the day). When ready to serve, add frozen peas and mix in. Use a fork to help separate meat off the bone into the soup and fish out any bones. Serve with bread if you like :)

Cheap Tuesdays - DIY Laundry Powder

 

I have had this recipe to make my own laundry powder for years now but have never gotten around to it until last month when I got my Thermomix. The ingredients to make four batches of this laundry powder should be available at your supermarket for about $10. If you have more work ethic than me you can easily just zest grate the soap or use your food processor (it will just take longer than a Thermomix and you might not get as fine a grain, but its going in your washing not your mouth!).

½ cup borax (or 1 cup bicarb for garden friendly use)
1 cup of washing soda
125g bar laundry soap
Chop laundry soap... I ended up kind of slicing it into large crumbles... and put into Thermomix bowl on speed 9 for 6 seconds. Add washing soda & borax (or bicarb) into Thermomix bowl on speed 9-10 for 8 seconds. Put into a labelled airtight container and use 2 level teaspoons per load.

I made a batch of the borax one for my sister in law and the bicarb one for us (because our laundry water ends up in our garden) and they both work well, especially at removing feral smells. From my limited observations the borax one seems a tiny bit better for stain removal. With some vague maths calculations (i.e. I didn't calculate at all and am just guessing!) you should get about 50 loads out of each batch of laundry powder. I'm also loving not sneezing every time I do the washing :)

Cheap Tuesdays - Fruit Muffins

This fruit muffin recipe is quick, easy and perfect for using up old fruit that would otherwise go to waste. Usually apple or pear end up in these at our house, but we have used apricots, nectarines, peaches or combinations before and they are all delicious hot or cold. They also freeze well, so great for having in the freezer for school snacks.


Quick Fruit Muffins
2-3 medium sized fruit, chopped into 1-2cm chunks (skin still on)
4 tablespoons butter, chopped into small pieces
3 cups self raising flour
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg, lightly beaten
1 cup milk


Put flour and sugar in mixing bowl. Stir in apple and butter pieces. Make a well in centre. Add combined egg and milk. Stir with a wooden spoon until just mixed. Spoon mix into greased muffin tins. Bake 210C for 15 minutes. Makes about 18 muffins.

Cheap Tuesdays - Chickpea Enchiladas

As we have been converting to mainly vegetarian meals over the past months, I have been adapting many of the recipes we used to cook. Chickpea Enchiladas is one of the boys favourites and cheap too, especially if you look out for cheap wraps. The original Chicken Enchilada recipe came from our good friend Jenny, who is likely to be disgusted by the lack of chilli in our version!

Chickpea Enchiladas
500mL jar pasta sauce
1/3 tsp chilli powder
2 tsp dried basil
2 tsp minced garlic
1/3 cup milk powder mixed with 1 1/4 cups chicken stock (or use a tin cream of chicken soup)
chickpeas (we use a container of our slowcooked chickpeas from our freezer) 
1 medium zucchini, grated
1 large carrot, grated
cheese, grated
corn kernels – 1 can, drained or equivalent frozen
12-16 flour tortillas (I've never actually used tortillas - so far I have used wraps, lebanese bread or large pita breads bought on special instead)

Combine the pasta sauce, chilli, basil and garlic in a large jug and reserve half this mixture in a separate jug or bowl (for topping). Mix milk powder and stock, chickpeas, corn, zucchini, carrot and some cheese into remainder of sauce. Pour or spoon out mixture into each tortilla, roll and place in baking dish. When all tortillas are complete, pour reserved sauce over top and sprinkle with grated cheese. Bake at 180C for 30-40 minutes.

This does our family of 6 for dinner with leftovers for the kids lunches the next day too. Guess what we're having tonight :)

Cheap Tuesdays - Convenience Vegetarian

Beans, chickpeas and lentils are all nutritious and cheap but take too long to cook to be convenient! The amount of preparation and cooking time involved in vegetarian cooking was probably the biggest hurdle when we first transitioned from mostly meat-based meals. Tinned versions are readily available and cheap, but nowhere near as cheap (or nutritious) as the real thing and, using the brilliance of your slowcooker and freezer, can be just as little effort to use:

Wash them – I do this by pouring the beans, lentils or chickpeas into a strainer and, using a bowl of similar size, fill with water to wash them around in while picking out any dodgy ones so it’s easy to drain them a couple of times. I often leave them to soak in the last lot of water for a bit while I try and catch the wild natives who are supposed to be getting ready for school, but this certainly isn’t a necessary step J
Cook them – Chuck them into the slow cooker pot, add water until the legumes come up to 1/2-1/3 of the water line. If you’re not confident make it 1/3, because you can just drain any excess water when they’re done anyway. Guide to cooking times…
Green/Brown Lentils: Only take about 3 or so hours on low, but I mostly leave them on all day because I’m lazy.
Chickpeas: Low 6-8 hours, again I usually just leave them on all day.
Kidney Beans: Auto 8-12 hours. You could pre-soak them overnight so you don’t have to cook them for so long or to use the low setting but, as you may have guessed, I’m too lazy to do this!
Divide & Freeze them – Turn your cooker off, take the lid off to let it cool for a while (I often do this before I eat dinner and come back once the kid’s night time routine is done). Then I use this strainer-spoon-thing that probably has a real name (but we’re close friends so we use nicknames) to put them into individual containers. I use 1L ones, because that’s what I used to freeze our mince and chicken in, but usually only fill them 2/3 full.
Use them – You can now use them instead of tinned versions running them under some warm water (or getting them out to defrost in the morning), or just chuck them into a meal you are cooking like you would use frozen vegetables. I’ll be adding recipes as I can – the tricky bit is getting a photo of the meals before they’re eaten!

I usually do about 5 (uncooked) cups worth of lentils or chickpeas at a time, which will last us about 6 weeks. Kidney beans we don’t use as often so I only do 3 or 4 cups and that lasts us closer to 2 months.

Cheap Tuesdays - Weekly Menu Planning

Weekly meal planning is a great way for us to:

·        easily see if our menu is well-balanced & nutritious

·        spend less dollars on groceries

·        reduce bad snacking habits

·        reduce waste (from groceries that end up spoiling before we get around to using them)

·        prevent stress over last minute dinner decisions (especially when hungry & tired)

·        get rid of the What’s to eat? questions from the kids

·        help remind us to pull things out of the freezer beforehand ready to cook with

·        have more family time (as we eat together more often)

·        get around to trying some new recipes, and best of all

·        have more time to spend together as a family instead of spending it with food preparations!

We have used a monthly main meal plan in the past which worked fine, but not ideal for us as The Man and I both cook, we like to have variety in our meals and we often end up with grocery items that were on special to use that don’t necessarily fit into our standard set of recipes.  We’ve also just started assigning child helpers for dinner and are trying to get them involved in the planning too, which is why I have recently been doing a complete WEEKLY meal plan that includes breakfast, snacks, lunch and dinner (with snacks of fresh fruit allowed anytime outside of the plan).

Making a quick weekly meal plan:

·        Draw up a chart for the week or print my weekly menu plan template

·        Have a look in the fridge, freezer and pantry to check what we’ve got & what needs using up

·        Have a look through recipes ideas or ask the rest of the family what they feel like

·        Write them down on the chart and stick it on the fridge or pantry door

It is a really quick process and saves a whole lot of pain during the week! P.S. often things don't go to plan, e.g. I don't end up baking snacks so we use crackers or dried fruit and nuts instead, or we unexpectedly need to do something late in the afternoon so we just switch dinner meals between days or save the idea for another week :) 

Our weekly plan for this week:

	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday	Sunday
Break fast	Cereal (use up wheat puffs)	Sardines on toast	Cereal	Weet-bix smoothies	Cereal	Rice pudding (slow cooker overnight)	Cereal
Snack	Fruit & Lerice $	Carrot sticks, crackers & cheese	Fruit & Lerice $	Fruit & apple muffins ^	Carrot sticks & UFOs ^	Frozen berries & natural yoghurt	Fruit & Lerice $
Lunch	potato bake *	Mini pizzas ^	Salad flatbread $ rolls	Tuna & mayonnaise sandwiches	Pasta *	Salad sandwiches	Jacket potatoes with toppings
Snack	popcorn	iceblock & sandwich	UFOs	Tomato & cheese on crackers	iceblock & sandwich	Bring a plate to Shave for a Cure event– cupcakes?	nothing cause we’re at church!
Dinner	Baked fish & vege (use up shake seasoning)	Refried beans & salad with pita chips (use up pita bread $)	Cous Cous & vegetables	Pasta (use up ricotta $)	Stir fry on rice (use up Hokkien noodles $)	Butter chickpeas experiment (slow cooker)	Thai curry (slow cooker)
Dinner helper	Chief	KaPow	Chief	KaPow	Sparky	Sparky	Beans

* leftovers

^ prepared earlier and frozen

$ were on special

Cheap Tuesday - Takeaway or Fast Food Alternatives

A couple of years ago we were regularly buying takeaway two times a week, and because of the expense of most takeaway we found ourselves often choosing takeaway with the poorest nutritional value like hot chips or fast food pizzas because they were cheapest. With our lives so full and busy it felt like that was the only way to manage, but we got to a point where we realised that the choice of money vs nutrition was not something we wanted to be making. We also found that ordering and picking up the food often took around 1/2 hour anyway so we often weren't really saving time through takeaway.

Our lives are just as full and busy (often more so) than before but because we now plan for all those super busy days where you are too tired to even think about caring what is put on the table, we don't have to resort to the money vs nutrition decision. We can have both through:

• Planning our meals ahead of time (I will be doing a post on this more thoroughly soon)
• Using the slowcooker to prepare meals for us (you will see lots more posts on this too)
• Deciding on takeaway limits - when we first started consciously working on this area we limited ourselves to 1 takeaway a fortnight and it had to have some kind of hope of providing our bodies with something good so we pretty much chose Subway or Subway! Now we have a limit of 1 per month but because it is occasional we don't stress too much about the nutrition thing any more.
• Freezing your own meals - do a double batch of something and put it in the freezer for another time. We rarely do this because our kids love to take leftovers for lunch the next day (yes, and eat it cold, bleh!) and we don't have pots or ovens big enough to do three times batches for our family :P
• Homemade takeaway - we've found buying frozen meals (e.g. nuggets or chips) on the way home to put in the oven while doing baths, homework etc often works out about the same time as buying it as takeaway, but we are much more likely to add a salad or some frozen vege if we've put it in the oven at home. Plus it costs 1/4 of the price. (If you are able to have these things in your freezer then that's even better, but we rarely do it because food is eaten as seen in our family :P)
• Have 'make do' meal ideas ready - the boys love scrambled eggs on toast, jaffles/toasted sandwiches or even salad sandwiches and then if we're really desperate we sometimes resort to cereal.

We found that after working takeaway out of our automatic thinking that now takeaway often seems like more effort than many of the alternatives!

Cheap TuesdaysThese are a few of my Favourite Things...

These Bazaar brand wholemeal lavash are my favourite flat breads - they are great to break up the monotony of school sandwiches, as wraps for dinners or as dipping chips. As much as the whole family love these at about $4.30 a pack it is out of our usual grocery budget.

Happily for us these breads are on special every couple of months 2 for $6. So we buy a few then and put some in the freezer to keep us going until next time. There are hundreds of items that are on a regular rotating special like this, particularly at the big chains. By knowing the schedule for the items we love it means we can stock up on our regulars for a lot cheaper or enjoy extras like this that we can't really afford at their standard retail price.

Knowing that it will come back on the same special again in a few weeks also reduces the effect of that On Special, Must Buy Now! supermarket black magic ;)