Satay Pasta

Satay Bee Hoon is one of the lesser known features of the cuisine where I come from. A dish of rice vermicelli topped with peanut sauce, kangkong and seafood of various kinds, you would strangely find this served not at the same stalls selling satay, but stalls dedicated to selling only the one thing. Sad to say, the one stall that I frequented for is no longer there, its proprietor refusing to give out his recipe for fear of cultural dilution.

Strangely enough, at one point in time, the army's combat rations featured satay pasta, a vague analogue to the Satay Bee Hoon that my fellow citizens know and love. Amongst them, the males would have encountered the pasta through National Service; reactions vary wildly, from revulsion to fondness. It is through recollecting some of my moments wearing green, as well as a need to use up the ingredients in my kitchen in creative ways, that led me to doing this tonight.

Blend the Basics Peanut Butter and Cream Cheese together, while waiting for the pasta to be ready.

Shred the Basics Seafood Sticks and merge with the mixture. When the pasta is ready, tip some of the pasta water in to smooth it out, before

This was as awful as it looks. Do not cook for others. Do not cook even for yourself, unless absolutely necessary.

Cheese-crusted Crabstick

When I was back home for the holidays, I attended a friend's wedding. One of the items on the banquet menu was crab claws coated in a parmesan-crust. The contrast in flavours between the savoury parmesan and the sweet crab meat was also interesting, and certainly something I have not come across before. Fellow guests at the wedding were largely in praise of the parmesan-crusted crab claw, and it went down as one of the more memorable things during the wedding.

On the way back to the UK, thoughts of that particular dish kept returning, and on further contemplation I realised that we could possibly replicate it using Sainsbury's Basics ingredients, namely the seafood sticks and grated hard cheese. With this in mind, I decided to put in some extra effort for lunch to experiment and toy with the idea.

Prepare the cheese crust by mixing breadcrumbs with Sainsbury's Basics Grated Hard Cheese. Dip each Basics seafood stick in oil, before dipping into the breadcrumb mixture, ensuring even coating.

Bake or deep-fry the crabsticks and serve.

Lack of technique notwithstanding, this was pretty good. There was a nice contrast in texture, between the crispy cheese crust and the chewiness of the crabstick. The flavours were also similar to what I remembered from the wedding banquet. An extension to the idea would be cheese-flavoured crabstick tempura, which, together with the cheese-crusted crabstick, might serve as an interesting yet cheap form of finger food for parties.

Crabstick Baguette

While on holiday back home, a friend related his college experiences to me. Outside his university, there was a sandwich shop which was very popular amongst students. One of the sandwiches that they offered was the crabstick baguette, which, as the friend related, was the epitome of cheap food, being a combination of cheap protein (ie, the crabstick), cheap mayonnaise and bread made from cheap flour. For the price the quantity was substantial, but one quickly got sick of the sandwich halfway through.

Intrigued by the idea of having crabsticks in a sandwich, I decided to try to do a take on the crabstick baguette offered by that sandwich shop. The British happened to like fish fingers in a sandwich, so why not crabsticks? I replaced the mayonnaise in the sandwich with cream cheese as the Sainsbury's Basics offering is known to be awful, and comes in a big tub that I would have trouble finishing. Other items I used include the Basics Young Leaf Salad, Basics Seafood Sticks and Basics Part-Baked Baguette.

All in all, the resulting sandwich was tolerable, although the sweetness of the crabstick combined with the savouriness of the cream cheese got some getting used to. This would be another useful idea to have, as thus far, I have only seen crabsticks being used in instant noodles and pasta.

Roasted Stir-Fry Vegetables

For only one pound, the Sainsbury's Basics Vegetable Stir-Fry offers incredible value for money, providing for about 4-5 healthy-sized servings of vegetables per pack. Stir-frying takes considerable time to execute and clean-up after however, so unless your meal features another item involving use of a wok or frying pan, alternative methods of cooking the stir-fry vegetables should be sought.

Looking for a way to have my one of my 5-a-day with my instant noodles lunch, I thought of roasting them. Dressing lightly with olive oil and Basics Herb Mix, I left it in the oven for about 10 minutes at 175 degrees Celsius.

The gist of the concept works. Care should be taken to leave it in the oven for too long as the vegetables will dry out. Within the Basics range however I would find it rather difficult to flavour this without expending too much effort; garlic would require mincing, and Basics vinegar would not work here. Perhaps Basics products found in the deli aisle might lend some taste to it.

Diced Bacon

My current job has seen me working longer hours than I used to do, which means that I now have less time to do weekday dinners. As a result, I now look out for things that can save me preparation time when at Sainsbury's. The Basics Diced Cooking Bacon you see above caught my eye on my last visit.

It seems that Sainsbury's have been introducing a few new Basics products in the meat section, although on close inspection many of them do not appear to be cheap, or at least, cheap enough to warrant the Basics branding. Some of them are even more expensive than say, cheaper cuts of own-brand pork. The Basics diced bacon stands out however, since till now, the cheapest form of diced bacon was the diced lardons, which go for a cool £1.99 for a 250g pack. By contrast, the Basics equivalent is 99p for 200g.

I decided to give these a try, pairing them with whatever leftover Basics vegetables I happened to have with the fridge. Comparing the photos above and below, you can tell that the bacon will shrink significantly, so perhaps this might not be so good if bacon is meant to serve as the protein in your meal.

Overlooking that however, the richness of the bacon goes pretty well with the clean-tasting vegetables.

On sampling, the Sainsbury's Basics diced bacon is certainly flavourful, and would probably be a very viable alternative to using lardons in recipes like beef bourguignon and coq au vin. The bacon shrinks significantly, but if you're using it merely to flavour your food I doubt this would be a major issue. Given also that the alternative would be to buy and dice the big chunky forms of Sainsbury's Basics bacon (also 99p, for 670g, but you would have to spend the next few days eating chunky bacon), you might give the already-diced form serious consideration.

Description	Price per Unit	No. of servings	Trade-up Premium	Trade-up Benefits
Diced Cooking Bacon	£0.99	200g	+£1.00 for 250g	Less shrinkage, more regularly-shaped pieces

Beef in Tea

During the house move I chanced upon this. It was a recipe book left behind by one of my flatmates, most likely from my homeland. I remember these rather fondly, seeing them in local bookstores, with rather interesting recipes with a distinct Asian slant.

Most of the recipes in the book describe rather unusual, if not outright weird, cooking techniques. One that caught my attention in particular was for cooking beef in a strong brew of tea. The idea sounded very strange, but given that the British are known for being regular tea drinkers, I thought I would give this a try, and proceeded to buy Sainsbury's Basics tea bags.

A quick search on Google reveals that Basics tea is actually one of the better products in the line, and certainly one of the most value-for-money. The next brand up costs more than twice as much for half the amount of tea.

The pleasant, slightly sweet fragrance of tea wafts out when the box is opened. I brewed a cup for myself to see if it was good as it smelled. Sad to say, the tea was rather weak, perhaps because I was using a larger mug. This is more or less in line with reports made by others on various Internet forums, but most were happy to just use two bags per cup, which still works out to be slightly cheaper than the regular Sainsbury's own-brand tea.

The recipe book called for beef stewed with tomatoes and radishes, but I decided to go with Sainsbury's Basics green beans instead. These are unlike the string beans featured earlier in the blog, perhaps of a different variety. They retail for 99p for 200g, which make it similar in price to the Basics string beans. On hindsight, using these beans in a long-cooking stew may not have been for the best, and it might have been better to go for hard root vegetables.

I decided to go with mushrooms as well, since the glutamates they contain can add to the umami or meaty flavour of the beef.

Marinate the beef beforehand if desired. Brown the beef with garlic and onion, adding the chopped vegetables once the surface of the beef is no longer raw. In the meantime brew one cup of tea using 3-5 bags of Sainsbury's Basics tea bags.

Brew 1-2 more cups of tea using the same bags. Cover and simmer for one hour.

The stew has a long turnaround time, mostly the one-hour spent simmering. The resulting stew was very pleasant however, if a little bitter from the tea, and with some tweaks I'm sure it would be very welcome especially with the cold winter approaching.

Description	Price per Unit	No. of servings	Trade-up Premium	Trade-up Benefits
Tea Bags	£0.29	80/250g	+£0.41 for 40/125g (!)	Slightly stronger tea?

Herring Roe on Toast

A recent trip to my local Sainsbury's turned up an interesting find: there seemed to be a new Basics item in the tinned fish aisle, near the Basics Tuna. At £1.19 for 125g though it certainly was not cheap, compared to the sardines it was next to, or even the Basics Tuna itself. This was Herring Roe though, and if memory serves, the next best thing was caviar, certainly out of reach for most people. Curiosity got the better of me and I bought a tin home.

Further research on the Internet revealed that the Basics Herring Roe was merely a rebrand from their own-brand range, similar to what they did with the Grated Hard Cheese some time ago, with a price drop of 20p. Herring roe was traditionally enjoyed amongst the working classes but fell out of fashion over the last several years. There has been a recent surge however in interest in cheap fish like pollock and mackeral, perhaps driven by the recent economic crisis, and as part of this trend, last year Waitrose reported healthy sales of fresh herring roe. One could infer that the Sainsbury's rebrand is to encourage people with lower budgets to try it as an occasional treat, in other words, a poor man's caviar.

I bought Basics Part-Baked Baguettes along with the herring roe to try this. A common suggestion is to serve the herring roe fried with hot buttered toast with lemon squeezed over, so for lunch, while baking the baguette, I pan-fried the herring roe, and then topped the sliced baguette with it.

The taste was surprisingly familiar - I remember my mother deep-frying fish roe along with fish for dinner when I was younger. Overall, it was enjoyable, though I perhaps should have gone with the suggestion to butter the toast before laying the roe on. As noted, it's not cheap, but might be useful as an affordable starter when hosting visitors for dinner.

Description	Price per Unit	No. of servings	Trade-up Premium	Trade-up Benefits
Soft Herring Roe in Brine	£1.19	125g	N/A	Not applicable, next suitable alternative is caviar.