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?

Turkey Legs Coq au Vin

At most Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, the roast turkey takes centrestage. Often however, people favour the succulent breast of the bird and little else; this is also why there is a market for turkey crowns - breast meat joints. Most of the time, the other parts of the turkey - the legs and wings - end up mostly in post-Christmas/Thanksgiving sandwiches over the next few days.

I have come across two other interesting uses of turkey legs though. A significant feature of Disney theme parks are stalls selling turkey legs. Closer to the UK, the BBC has a recipe from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall for a coq au vin made using turkey legs. What intrigued me most about the recipe is the flambeing of the poultry. I have made coq au vin several times for my friends when we were all in university and had the time to prepare such food, so given the budget-themed nature of this blog, I thought this would be a fun recipe to relive those memories, using the Basics turkey drumstick.

I decided to make a few variations to the original recipe, using sliced onions instead of the small pickling ones, and using mushrooms and a packet of Sainsbury's Basics chopped tomatoes in place of all the other vegetables.

The Basics turkey drumstick, flanked by the alcohols it is to be doused in.

You would notice that the packaging for the Basics Red Wine has changed. The bottle is now plastic instead of glass.

So we start by frying the bacon in butter, along with the onions shortly after. These were then set aside in pan, and then put into an oven to keep warm at 150 degrees Celsius.

I then attempted to flambe the turkey as directed by the recipe, but I struggled to get the turkey to even cook, as it was unable to maintain contact with the pan. After a few attempts with the matches I got a brief blue flame which died out soon after, so I gave up and put the leg into the pan along with the other ingredients.

The pan was then deglazed using red wine, with the mushrooms and Basics chicken stock added soon after. This was then added to the pan, and left to cook at 150 degrees Celsius in the oven for about an hour.

The meat was surprisingly tender, and the sauce went well with it. It is however a lot of work having to carve all the meat from the turkey leg, so I am not sure if I want to do this again. I have enough to feed me for three meals though, and at £1.61 per turkey leg this works out very cheaply. This recipe would be most useful for people who already cook in bulk and have extra time on their hands.

Meatball Spaghetti

Every now and then at Sainsbury's I will pop by the canned food aisle, looking at the general availability of the Basics range in that area and coming up with ideas. After all, canned food is the epitome of cheap - in the aftermath of World War II it was canned food that most people subsisted on as they returned to economic normality. So far however, the only canned food that I could bother with is the Pork & Bacon Meatballs, being cheap at 38p per can and containing a fair amount of meat at that price. Having featured the Basics Tinned Tuna to death, curiosity got the better of me and so I bought myself a can.

Already the contents of the can do not look very encouraging, with the meatballs floating in a sauce of a rather familiar colour. So familiar in fact that I might just start terming it Sainsbury's Basics Tomato Red.

So for lunch, I chopped up a large mushroom and sauteed it with garlic, before throwing in the meatballs. After the spaghetti was done, I added that into the pan, before seasoning with Basics mixed herbs, black pepper and grated hard cheese.

The meatballs tasted as per expectations - somewhat like tinned sausages drenched in a sauce similar if not identical to Sainsbury's Basics pasta sauce. I find this very amusing. These will be very useful to have around, since they are cheap (38p for a can that can cater for two meals), and being canned they last for a long time. There has at to be a tastier alternative to stock your cupboards with though. On the other hand, if you are going on a short camping trip and don't mind the dent in your morale from eating mediocre food, then this is for you.

Description	Price per Unit	No. of servings	Trade-up Premium	Trade-up Benefits
Pork and Bacon Meatballs	£0.38	16 - 392g	+£0.38 for Fray Bentos	Better tomato sauce.

Tuna Pasta Bake

Sainsbury's recently ran a campaign where they offer plans for five meals that you can feed a family of four with. The second meal plan had for one of the meals a tuna pasta bake, that consisted largely of Basics ingredients. Aside from the ingredients you see above, and aside from the obvious pasta, the bake also contains mushrooms. I decided to give this recipe a little go this time as it involved something that I still have some doubts over - the Basics pasta sauce.

 While preparing the mushrooms for the bake I noticed that the caps of most of them were fully open, gills exposed. I remembered from the article about the white button mushroom and its brethren on Wikipedia that what are commonly marketed as white mushrooms (Sainsbury's included) are young mushrooms that have closed caps. Portobello mushrooms on the other hand are those who have been allowed to fully develop into giant caps of mushroom flavour. Those that go into the tubs of Basics mushrooms then are those that are neither here nor there. If you are not planning to go for presentation though, like slicing mushrooms for pizzas, and don't mind the extra effort to clean the dirt off the mushrooms, they make a good buy.

Most of the recipe can be found in the link above. For this particular one I left out the tomatoes as I didn't want to buy the fresh ones or the canned ones (too expensive, and too much liquid respectively)

The pasta sauce threatened to ruin everything, but ultimately it was the mozzarella and mushrooms which saved the day. I still don't think I can easily recommend the pasta sauce to people yet, until I can find a way to compensate for its sourish flavour. It also does not help that it does not have much actual tomato content, understandable given the relative high price of tomatoes.

Dan Dan Mian

Dan Dan Mian, or dan dan noodles, consists of noodles in a spicy soup consisting of minced pork and other tasty ingredients. Some variations would add a dollop of sesame paste, especially when eating in Taiwan or the United States. Since peanut butter bears some sort of resemblance to sesame paste, putting together a Sainsbury's Basics version using Basics Peanut Butter should work.

Or so the theory went anyway. Fortunately for me, there are some versions of the noodle dish in the States that indeed use peanut butter in the soup, so I should be in safe territory. In recent times I have been taking a look at peanut butter, intrigued about how something as cheap as that (Sainsbury's Basics' version costs 79p) can provide so many calories per unit weight (615 calories per 100g, to be precise), and wonder if it can be used for more than breakfast sandwiches and confectionery. If an university student can work out how to incorporate this into his meals, and does not mind a bit of monotony, he would be able to last that little bit longer on the same food budget.

I started off by dicing an onion and slicing up a few mushrooms. This is largely for flavouring, extra bulk and to add extra liquid to the soup I will create later.

Once that was done I heated a pan, and browned the Sainsbury's Basics mince. Because its fat content is pretty high and the pan is non-stick, there was no need to add any oil. As the fat is saturated though you might want to consider draining it off at some point. Add onions and mushrooms and continue to cook.

Add half a Sainsbury's Basics Beef Stock Cube and a healthy tablespoon of Basics Peanut Butter to the mix. Follow this up with as much chilli flakes or oil-based chilli sauce that you can willingly take.

Cook spaghetti according to instructions, but drain two minutes early. Add to the wok along with some hot water to make the peanut soup.

I was pleasantly surprised by the result. To be honest, I thought this was going to be another of those pre-planned failures involving a crazy idea for a recipe. The noodle soup was filling, and for good reason too, thanks to the carbs from the pasta and the peanut butter from the soup. Ingredient cost is also pretty low too, and could possibly go lower if you could bring yourself to use the Sainsbury's Basics Mince from the frozen section, but that's scope for another discussion. Authenticity would probably be off the mark, but it's good to know that some form of dan dan mian can be created using things from the Sainsbury's Basics line.

GUEST CHEF - Marcus "Pierre White" Lim

Dear readers, no doubt in recent days you may have heard that your regular, trusted blog author has been laid low from an acute case of salmonella poisoning, due in no small part to a rather misjudged attempt at making custard from some pigeon eggs he found on a ramble through Hyde Park.

In much the same way a trusted senior executive is often jetted in to rescue an embattled, and embezzling CEO, or how shadowy American forces are parachuted in to extricate a banana republic dictator, I am very glad to be invited by Señor Alwyn Tan to guest host this gleaming bastion of bargain banqueting, this towering mansion of marked-down mastication, this truly magnificent den of discount dégustation.

Today, we will be recreating an old classic, oven roast chicken breast stuffed with sage-infused mustard butter, wrapped in seared Serrano ham, over a bed of ravioli alla spagnuola.

As usual, apply to your nearest Sainsbury's for their cheapest choice products as follows:
1. Basics Chicken Breast (£4.27)
2. Basics Tomatoes (£0.67)
3. Basics Mushroom Tortellini (£1.12)
4. Basics Salted Butter (£0.54)
5. Basics Mushrooms (£0.85)
6. Basics Tomato and Herb Sauce (£1.67)

The other three products are not in the basics range, but as Alwyn is busy vomiting up his smaller intestines in the next room, I feel it safe to embark on a few value judgements the cheap bugger would otherwise nix.

Firstly, Taste the Difference Serrano Ham at £1.87 for five slices,

Fresh sage at £0.78, and

Sainsbury's French Dijon Mustard, at £0.57 - a whopping 12p more expensive than their basics tin of yellow goo.

Preparations - Meat course
To begin, chop the tomatoes in sixths, and then the mushrooms.

Layer fresh sage leaves seven deep, roll up lengthwise, and shred. Take a moment to breath in the smell, and think of the French countryside.

Combine shredded sage in a bowl with four tablespoons of French dijon mustard and three of butter. Mix well. Think of a French milkmaid churning butter.

Slice chicken breasts halfway through the fleshiest parts. Think of the French milkmaid's.....er.. cows....

Spoon a generous amount of sage butter into chicken breast. Then, carefully wrap with two slices of Serrano Ham for each breast.

Sear breasts in a hot oiled pan for 30 seconds on each side, until brown.

Transfer to a pan and roast in preheated 210 degree oven for 15 minutes.

Preparations - Tortellini

Sautée mushrooms in pan, when brown, add tomatoes.

Combine in saucepan with Tomato and Herb sauce. Bring to boil

In separate saucepan of boiling water, boil tortellini for no more than 7 minutes.

Spoon generous amount of sauce into bowl, then using a slotted spatula, spoon three heaps of tortellini into bowl.

Mix sauce and pasta, then transfer to plate.

Remove chicken from oven, let rest for 2 minutes.

Slice and serve.

Just d'alors! We are done, no? What is it you say? It looks too good to be just a Sainsbury Basics dinn-ah?

Mais oui! You are correct, a maintanente, it eees 'ow you say eet? A bluff...

You think a dinner pour deux like dees costs only £12.34?

Yoo are mistaken! eet was actually flown in from my restaurant on zee Amalfi Coast, and would 'ave cost yooo almost two 'a-hndred euros, plus service.

What you say? eet does not look like a two 'a-hndred euro meal, well zehn, Ah speet in your face, Ah have nev-ARH been soo insulted in mah lahfe.....

To contact our Guest Chef, you may write to:

Marcus "Pierre White" Lim

Ristorante The Le Tratteria

512 Rue le Fiffi, Via del Puttacesca

The Amalfi Coast, BRISTOL

BS1 2EL

[Editor's note: Today's post is brought to you by a good friend of mine from my secondary school days. If you haven't done so already, please peruse the oxygen masks that have deployed from the overhead compartments. We shall resume our normal programming shortly.]