Recipe Tuesday: Corn Pone (or what to do with leftover chilli)

Sunday, we had beef chilli for dinner.  When I cooked it, I followed the chilli variant of my recipe post from May 2007,  Minced Beef & Other Possibilities, adding grated carrots and a quarter cup of split red lentils to ensure we had leftovers.  There was enough chilli for dinner for two, two lunch boxes and to form the basis of dinner tonight.  

The idea behind this recipe comes from The Tightwad Gazette, where Amy Dacycyn talks about adding a tin of baked beans and a cornbread top to leftover chilli, in order to make Corn Pone.  Sadly, Amy doesn’t give more details. Maybe Americans are taught to make cornbread at school.  I certainly wasn’t.  The top is a Cornmeal Spoon Bread.  I haven’t priced up the leftover chilli but the additions come to 62p.

Corn Pone - Serves 4

Ingredients

2-4 portions of beef chilli

1x 420g can baked beans (22p)

150g/1 cup fine cornmeal (15p)

1 teaspoon baking powder (5p)

1 clove garlic, crushed (optional) (5p)

1 teaspoon lazy chilli (optional) (5p)

1 egg, beaten (10p)

250ml/1 cup water

Pinch of salt

5 grounds black pepper

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 220C.
2. Combine the chilli and the baked beans and pour into a deep ovenproof dish.  Smooth over the top.
3. In a bowl, combine the other ingredients and beat until smooth.  (This is the spoon bread top.)
4. Pour the spoon bread over the over the chilli, carefully covering the top of the chilli.  (It will be runny and won’t pour out smoothly.)
5. Bake in the preheated oven for 30-40 minutes, or until browned and crisp on top.

Try as I might, I couldn’t get it to look pretty on the plate, but it was yummy!

Enjoy.

- Pam

Five Frugal Things

We've had guests staying, who were a bit surprised by some of the things I do automatically - not taken aback or grossed out, but surprised in the "Oooohhhh! That's a good idea! I never thought of doing that!" sense. These aren't big, headline frugal activities; rather, they're the little, every day things that save a penny here or a penny there and only cost a few seconds of time.

Since the internet is full of these things anyway, I thought I'd create a new meme: Five Frugal Things.  Feel free to copy the idea in your own blog.

Five Frugal Things I do Automatically

1. Set Asides. When I'm serving up dinner, I'll dish up our lunch-boxes at the same time as I do our meals. That way, lunch is taken care of and I can ensure that there is sufficient food for lunch if someone wants seconds.
2. Batch soaking and cooking dried beans and chickpeas. I have a pressure cooker; it takes virtually no more time to cook 1kg of kidney beans than it takes to cook 200g. I'll then bag, tag and freeze the excess.
3. Decant shampoo, conditioner, body wash and body lotion into pump action soap dispensers, so that you get standardised quantities each time you wash. This extended the life of a bottle of shampoo by more than double.
4. Using the bread-maker to bake bread. It takes 5 minutes to weigh out all the ingredients and costs less than 25p for a loaf of wholemeal bread. When I set up the bread-maker before going to bed on Monday night, my guests were a little stunned at how quick, easy and cheap it is. The bread was ready when we got up in the morning.
5. Washing and re-using bread bags/freezer bags. It takes me less than 30 seconds to wash out a bread bag when I'm doing the dishes (turn inside out, give a quick swish through clean-ish washing up water - scrubbing any sticky bits - and position over the cutlery drainer to dry). Re-using a plastic bag only saves me a fraction of a penny a time but they all add up. For food safety's sake, I do not re-use bags that have held raw meat or fish, although I do put those into a previously recycled bag that's looking like it's seen better days (that way, I can bin the bag afterwards with a clean conscience).

 What about you? What are your Five Frugal Things?

- Pam

Hot and Sour Soup

It's been a while since I posted a new recipe and I've been promising this one to people left, right and centre. It is delicious, filling, full of nutrition, cheap, very easy to cook and only 2.5 WW points a portion! It is a good supper-in-a-bowl.

This recipe comes from a really badly organised Weight Watchers cookbook called "Menu Plan Eat Enjoy". I can't over-emphasise how badly indexed this book is; each page contains a full day's menu of dishes/recipes, but only the headline recipe is indexed.

Hot and Sour Soup

Ingredients

1.2 litres/2 pints chicken stock (I used 600ml of strong stock made from the Christmas turkey together with 600ml of boiling water)
350g/12oz skinless boneless chicken breasts sliced thinly (I used a 250g bag of cooked turkey chunks which I froze at Christmas)
75g/3oz shitake mushrooms (I used normal mushrooms, adding a small amount of dried shitake which I soaked for 10 minutes first)
I large red chilli, deseeded and chopped (or use a heaped teaspoon of lazy chilli)
1 red or yellow pepper, deseeded and diced
150g/5oz pak choi cut into quarters then separated into leaves
100g/3.5oz dried egg noodles
2 tablespoons Chinese cooking wine (or sherry)
3 tablespoons rice vinegar
2 tablespoons light soy sauce (I used regular soy sauce since that's what I have)
20 grinds of pepper, preferably white

Method

1. If using dried shitake mushrooms: place in a bowl, cover with hot water and allow to soak for 10 minutes.
   
2. In a large saucepan, bring the chicken stock to the boil. Add the chicken (or diced turkey if using). Bring back to the boil and simmer gently for 5 minutes.
3. Add the mushrooms, chilli and red/yellow pepper. Bring back to a simmer and cook for 3 minutes.
   
4. Break the noodles into smaller sections and stir into the saucepan together with the remaining ingredients. Grind over pepper. Simmer for a further 3-5 minutes or until everything is cooked.
5. Divide evenly between four deep bowls (the hardest part).
   

Yum!

- Pam