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.

Peanut Butter French Toast

As we continue to wind things down here in preparation of a change in location, I am finding less incentive to buy groceries, including Basics items to make the stuff that go on this blog. Of particular bother is the bread I have bought and frozen a few weeks back, and the peanut butter from even longer ago. There are only so many peanut butter sandwiches that I would be willing to eat before I grow tired of them, so I thought of a way of jazzing it up.

I have come across a few bloggers on the Internet who have made peanut butter French toast by coating peanut butter sandwiches in beaten eggs before pan-frying. I am curious about how much oil I can extract from the Basics peanut butter for cooking purposes, so this would be a particularly interesting context to find out.

Oddly enough, the name used in France and other places for French toast is pain perdu, which translates to stale (lit. lost) bread.

An attempt to fry the peanut butter in an attempt to extract oil from it resulted in the butter being slightly caramelised. This explains the slight oil discolouration you might see in the photos.

Defrost two slices of Basics bread per person and spread with Basics peanut butter. Make a sandwich, and cut into four triangles, as shown.

Beat an egg until frothy, and soak the triangles in them. Pan fry until slightly golden-brown. Serve warm.

The blend of flavours from the peanut butter with the egg reminded me of min chiang kueh, a pancake-like snack served by the slice stuffed with a peanut paste. It was a pleasant surprise to discover this, and would be useful to know should I need to bring some sort of dessert for a group event or pot-luck. Unfortunately, I still have plenty of bread and peanut butter to go.

Peanut Butter Cups

A regular reader of mine sent in this link, asking if I could try doing this with Basics ingredients. Oddly enough, I do miss eating peanut butter cups, which are readily available in the States and back where I come from, but are difficult to find in the UK. And I'm not alone. My housemates and their friends are all pretty fond of the confectionery, and I have to keep that in mind when I buy some to take back with me. Indeed, once when a group of Americans asked me why I was buying a sizable supply of Reese's Mini Peanut Butter Cups in New York, I simply pointed out the lack of availability where I was based. They nodded understandingly and approvingly.

I would need some form of paper cups to put my chocolate in though. Luckily, my local Sainsbury's stocks Petit Four cases, available in packs of 100, for under a pound. It's unlikely I would be needing this very often, so I'm glad that I didn't have to pay too much for this.

The recipe was originally sourced from Epicurious, which in turn cited it from the December 1990 issue of American food magazine Bon Appetit. While following the recipe I made some improvisations and mistakes, detailed below.

Make the peanut butter blend according to the recipe instructions. The recipe called for sour cream and whipping cream to be blended into the peanut butter, but not wanting to buy a tub of each for the express purpose of making confectionery, I improvised and made the blend from one tablespoon of peanut butter and a splash of semi-skimmed milk. The effect achieved was similar, a smooth peanut butter filling.

Leave the peanut butter filling to cool for a few hours in the fridge.

 A couple of hours later, start up a steam bath and proceed to melt some chocolate.

Use a teaspoon to pick up a dollop of melted chocolate and drop it into the centre of a paper case. Use the back of the teaspoon to then line the walls of the paper case with chocolate, as shown above. Leave to cool in fridge for 20 minutes, and do not do as I did, which was to proceed to the next step without the fridging.

Drop a dollop of the peanut butter filling into each case, and seal off with chocolate. Leave to cool at room temperature before packing into a box for further cooling in the fridge.

It was good being able to bite into something that I have started to miss when my supply of Reese's ran out. I'm guessing that this would probably be most useful to the sizable population of Americans, particularly the youth, who are currently based in the UK for one reason or another, and miss peanut butter cups but are unwilling to pay the price charged by some places here for the privilege of eating them. In the meantime, I suppose this experience may come in handy when entertaining guests in future.

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.

Peanut Butter Jelly Bread

I am going for a trip to the States over the Easter break, so to mark the occasion I decided to make something for the charity bake sale at work. I happened to have Linda Larsen's Everything Meals on a Budget Cookbook handy, so I decided to leaf through it to find something cost-effective to make and yet distinctly American.

Sure enough, there was something which fit the bill. The book had a recipe for peanut butter bread, described as a good and cheap source of protein and carbohydrayes, lending itself to a cost-effective breakfast. To make things even more American, I made use of the Basics strawberry jam I had remaining in the fridge as the jelly part of today's post; what they refer to as "jelly" is actually fruit preserve without seeds. I made a few tweaks to the recipe to simplify the ingredidnts list. I started with a jar of Basics peanut butter, combined with brown sugar (250g, though I used half of that), and three eggs.

In another bowl, combine about 500g Basics plain flour with bicarbonate of soda and half a teaspoon of salt. Mix this into the peanut butter mixture alternately with 250ml of milk.

Pour the resulting mixture into a tray lined with greaseproof paper. Dribble Basics strawberry jam onto surface, and use a knife to work through it, creating a marble effect.

Bake at 180 degrees Celsius until you can dip a toothpick in and out of it cleanly.

The initial impression left on the bake sale organisers was very good: I suppose it was due to the visual appeal of the final product. A colleague of mine also had the chance to try it, and while the taste wasn't memorable due to my messing up the proportions, at least she didn't fall ill.

Crepes

A feature of BBC's Economy Gastronomy sees the featured family attempting to replicate something they would usually get from takeaways or eating out. The first episode had fried chicken, the second chocolate brownie biscuits, and the third, Indian curry. Typically, they save at least 50% of the money they would otherwise spend buying it ready-made.

We here at Ekonomi Gastronomi love crepes. There's an excellent creperie near where we study that has been visited by many a celebrity, and students with extra change. However, prices are expensive, anywhere between £3 to £8.50, so for today we shall demonstrate and attempt to make our own crepes.



The only problem was sourcing for ingredients. The team did not want to invest in 1.5kg of Basics flour that nobody would be using in future. So the 8p bag of pancake batter mix was a godsend. It consists of nothing more than plain flour, skimmed milk powder and a pinch of salt. All that had to be added was an egg, 250ml of water, and a tablespoon of oil, before whisking till smooth.


I decided on a savoury crepe and a sweet crepe. The sweet crepe would be honey and peanut butter, while the savoury one is ham and cheese, with added mixed herbs and black pepper.





The total cost for both crepes comes up to:
8p for the mix, 10p for 2 slices of ham, 10p for the cheese, 10p for an egg, and about 10p for both the honey and the peanut butter (although of course, the initial outlay for both jars would be much higher), bringing it to a total of 48p for the entire lunch. If memory serves, an equivalent sweet crepe costs £3.50-£4.00, while the ham and cheese crepe costs £6.50-£7.50. How's that for savings?

Description	Price per Unit	No. of servings	Trade-up Premium	Trade-up Benefits
Pancake Mix	£0.08	128g	+£0.26	Fewer calories. Make your own with flour, milk, salt, butter and egg.

Peanut Butter Truffles

Recently a family friend of mine was in town, and my old man back home wanted him to take a delivery of 5kg worth of orange-flavoured chocolates. While I was at it, I thought that I should pick up a bar of Basics dark chocolate to experiment with. I seem to remember this fondly from my school days, as it offered a cheap form of chocolate comfort from the pains of university life.

However, I'm no chocolatier, so those of you who want an expert opinion should check out ZOMG Candy's review on it. Bear in mind that the chocolate shown in the picture looks different from the one I found, so there definitely was a switch in manufacturer. Compared to the one in the review, this one has a higher cocoa content (52% compared to 41%). All other notes in the review seem consistent though. The chocolate is made in Germany, if you care where your chocolate comes from.

But on with the article. I decided to make truffles, and take advantage of the leftover peanut butter I had from an earlier review. I chanced upon a recipe on Cooking for Engineers, and decided to go with this. In the process however, I forgot to scale back the amount of cream required, and ended up with a chocolate-cream ratio of 1:1 instead of 2:1. To compensate, I had to increase the amount of peanut butter such that the ratio of peanut butter and chocolate to cream went back to 2:1. No severe problems though, other than the truffles tasting a little less chocolatey and a little more peanutty than desired. Half of the truffles were coated with a chocolate shell, since I didn't have enough melted chocolate to go around.

Since I pretty much followed the recipe and don't want to duplicate the information there, I'll just be posting photos.

From this point onwards, things didn't go to plan.

Tempering more chocolate for the truffle shell.

Before the shell coating. The two teaspoons and bowl were to be used to help with the coating process.

Post-coating. The result is not very pretty.

Description	Price per Unit	No. of servings	Trade-up Premium	Trade-up Benefits
Dark/Milk/White Chocolate	£0.27	100g	+£0.13 (£0.80 for 200g)	Richer, better tasting chocolate.

Crunchy Peanut Butter

Having a whole loaf of wholemeal bread leftover from the post on sandwiches, and acting on a tip-off from the MoneysavingExpert Forums, I bought a jar of Basics crunchy peanut butter. I was thinking that I could do with making sandwiches for breakfast instead of spending at the canteen at work, and I definitely wanted more variety than just cream cheese, also thanks to the post that I've linked above.

The nice thing about peanut butter is that it lasts and lasts. I remember that I bought a jar in my first year at university and I don't remember ever finishing it, and yet it didn't spoil during my time there. Indeed, the cap of the jar I just bought indicates that its expiry date is in Jun 2010, and there are no indications that one has to consume it within a certain number of days once it's opened.


The nasty thing about peanut butter however is also the thing that makes it nice. If it's bad, you will still feel obliged to keep it, because it lasts long anyway, so you wouldn't have to eat it that often, and still not let your money go to waste.

I regret to report that the ingredients that make up this peanut butter makes for a very bland peanut butter. It still tastes of peanuts, but is not near the more expensive brands which taste rather more luxurious, possibly from being more generous with the peanuts. This Basics item however would probably make you obliged to keep it well past its expiry date.

Then again, for £0.69, you would expect the peanut butter to contain rapeseed oil instead of the more expensive peanut oil. Those of you who prefer smooth peanut butter are out of luck; there isn't such an item in the Basics range. I suppose it costs more to finely crush the peanuts. That said, do you seriously want to skimp on the extra money it costs to get the regular peanut butter? I did mention that it lasts didn't I? Surely the cost would be borne out over a longer period of time?

Description	Price per Unit	No. of servings	Trade-up Premium	Trade-up Benefits
Crunchy Peanut Butter	£0.69	34	+£0.80	Fewer calories (59.4 vs 61 per serving), 4% higher peanut content, peanut oil instead of rapeseed oil. Recommended.