Baked Feta

I love halloumi, both grilled and pan-fried. I was introduced to this some time in my third year at university, at a Greek restaurant, and I would fondly remember the crisp outside of each slice of cheese slowly giving way to a soft and warm centre. Being a recent addition to the list of EU food products of Protected Designation of Origin though, it is rather expensive.

The cheese is also quite a niche product, so it does not have an equivalent in the Sainsbury's Basics product line. As it turns out, it is also quite difficult to find halloumi in the United States. However, smitten kitchen, a blog that has been recently popping up on my Google Reader quite frequently, found a recipe for baked feta cheese, which apparently will give rise to something very similar to halloumi when grilled, albeit softer. Sainsbury's Basics does have a Greek Salad Cheese, and even though the last time I bought it I never got to finish before it went bad, I decided to give this a go, if only to satisfy my Greek cheese cravings on the cheap.

The recipe can be found here. I have greatly simplified it to just baking feta cheese with some Basics olives, sprinkled with some mixed herbs. This is so that I can avoid using standard-sized tomatoes instead of the cherry ones that smitten kitchen gets to use.

This tasted a lot like halloumi cheese, although I should have left it in the oven for longer than then 15 minutes prescribed for a crispier outside. My only regret is that I did not leave any behind to experiment with pan-frying, as it looks like it can probably retain its structure, perhaps since it's made from cow's milk rather than sheep's milk needed for proper Feta.

Courgette Rice with Feta & Olives

While searching for ways to use up my courgettes, I came across the BBC Good Food magazine. I tend to associate it with the well-heeled, having found it prominently in Waitrose and the like. They had a recipe that got my attention, since it only needed ingredients that the Sainsbury's Basics range can cover adequately.

The recipe calls for Feta Cheese though, something available only in the form of Greek-style Salad Cheese. PDO labelling regulations stipulate that real Feta cheese has to be made in Greece using at least a mixture of sheep's and goat's milk. As cow's milk is cheaper, the Sainsbury's Basics Greek-style Salad Cheese is not entitled to the shorter label enjoyed by its more upmarket cousins.

It's not going to stop me from enjoying this though.

So roughly chop up the courgette and finely chop some onion. Put the cheese into a bowl of Basics sliced olives and some Basics herb mix. In the meantime, soften the onion in a pan, before adding the courgettes. When the courgettes are slightly brown, add Basics long grain rice and stir until the rice is well coated in oil.

Prepare some vegetable stock from Basics stock cubes, about 1 litre to 250g of rice. Stir in a small amount of stock into the rice until completely absorbed. Repeat this until all the stock has been used. Simmer until rice is tender. Combine with the feta-olive preparation and serve.

This was pretty simple to whip up. The only drawback is the time spent waiting for the rice to cook in the wok. The cheese tasted like most feta cheese I have come across, so no complaints there. Considering how cheap it is, I wouldn't mind exploring other recipes involving feta.

[Special thanks to my flatmate who kindly provided photography for today's blog post.]

Description	Price per Unit	No. of servings	Trade-up Premium	Trade-up Benefits
Courgettes	£1.64	1kg	+£0.11 for 500g	None. Buy loose for £1.80/kg.
Greek Style Salad Cheese	£0.77	200g	+£0.72	Proper feta, from sheep's and goat's milk.

Tuna, Pesto, Pasta

I came across Student Recipes, a website which caters to students and their unique requirements, such as providing recipes for one, as well as recipes for party food, snacks and quick meals. All contributors appear to be students. One recipe which caught my eye was for a tuna pesto pasta dish. Since I had some pesto already made from last time, I thought this would be an opportunity for me to use it. The recipe called for a pepper though, and since I was not keen on buying a whole bag of Basics peppers given that I am due to go skiing this weekend, I decided to buy this instead.

I believe this is a relatively new product, not having come across this before in my previous visits. It is pretty much similar to the Basics Olives in Sunflower Oil that I have reviewed earlier, but includes both green and black olives. I do not see any fresh alternatives to this, not even from the brand names. In my mind, tuna and olives really go well together, and mixing in the homemade pesto would give a nice mix of flavours; the slightly salty tuna, the fruity olives, and the general intensity of the pesto coming together.

Preparation was a simple matter of mixing in the can of tuna and packet of olives into the bowl of pesto that I had prepared in the previous post. The result was a cheap and nutritious base to which I can add pasta or rice, or use as a sandwich filling. The total estimated cost came up to about £2 to last for 3 meals, half of which can be attributed to the olives. Your initial outlay may be a bit high however, having to get the Italian Hard Cheese for £2 first.

When used with pasta, I got something that looked fairly fancy, which tasted good as well. I certainly would not mind doing this again in future, if only to save time preparing food when I come back from work.

Description	Price per Unit	No. of servings	Trade-up Premium	Trade-up Benefits
Roasted Salted Cashews	£1.32	200g	+£0.39 for 100g	More consistent sizes, whole nuts instead of halves.
Italian Hard Cheese	£2.00	200g	+£0.50	Actual proper Italian cheese, stronger taste.
Sliced Mixed Olives	£1.09	90g	+£N/A	N/A, no direct alternative.

Beef in a Bag

So it appears that another item in the Sainsbury's range has been demoted from the regular in-house range to Sainsbury's Basics. After the Grated Hard Cheese, the other product I have spotted to have had the chop is the pitted olives (both black and green). When the recession hit hardest, Sainsbury's actually reported a spike in sales of its Basics range, so one could speculate that they are rebranding several of their own-brand products in a bid to get customers who identify with Sainsbury's Basics to purchase them.

For today, I decided to grab the olives and some Basics Diced Beef. I would then add some mushrooms to the mix, and then use a method I learnt from Jamie Oliver to cook it in the oven. It basically involves making a foil bag to put the ingredients in, before popping the lot in the oven. It also makes for convenient meals as well as the bags can be prepared in advance and frozen for future meals.

So we start by slicing up some garlic, the olives and mushrooms.

On a 30cm by 30cm sheet of foil, place the ingredients in the centre and season with black pepper. Fold the sheet in half, and then fold each side twice towards the centre, creating a bag. See the second picture down from this sentence to have a rough idea of how it should be done.

Pop into the oven and bake at 225 degrees Celsius until done.

This was a very effective way of cooking the Basics Diced Beef, well known for its toughness and hence the need to resort to slow cooking methods. The mushrooms also provided the liquid which could be used to further stew the beef. I suppose I am now looking forward to baking the second bag of beef that I also prepared in the same session, some time in the future.

Description	Price per Unit	No. of servings	Trade-up Premium	Trade-up Benefits
Black Pitted Olives in Oil	£0.99	90g	+£1.20 for 180g	Different methods of dressing and styles.