Feeding the Horde

Because I spend a lot of my time trying to stay sane and entertain sproglets, I try to batch cook once a month to make sure there's always something in the freezer to make a decent meal from.

This is my standard recipe for batch cooking.

Soak approx 500g of beans overnight. I use haricot, black eye, black turtle and pinto.

Chop 5 large onions.

Brown 1500g mince with the onion.

Whilst this is browning, peel and chop some carrots and sweet potato

Steam these together until softened.

Chop roughly 500g of mushrooms.

Peel and press several cloves of garlic.

I only added a small amount of garlic to the childrens saucepan.

Now the mince is nicely browned

Deglaze the bottom of the pan with a little red wine. I didn't add any of this to the children's saucepan as it would be too rich for them.

The lovely soya mince.

Stir this through with the mushrooms so it soaks up all the red wine and browning.

Add lots and lots of chopped tomatoes.

Stir thoroughly.

Add some fresh basil and oregano

I add frozen spinach to my bolognaise, as I suffer with low iron levels and it's a really easy way to boost the iron in my diet.

Looks delightful as it cooks ;)

Leave the bolognaise to simmer and blend the carrot and sweet potato

and then add to the children's bolognaise. Leave to simmer for 20 minutes.

I then cook some baby spaghetti using the water collected in the bottom of the steamer.

Whilst this is cooking I pulse the children's bolognaise to make the lumps a little smaller.

Then pot it all up ready for the freezer

Then empty the large stockpot of bolognaise and bag this up ready for the freezer.

The large saucepan of bolognaise is then divided up into the 3 saucepans to make the base for the chilli.

Add the remaining 5 pots of chopped tomatoes.

Add some sweetcorn.

Add some roughly chopped bell peppers.

Chop up some chillies. This is a mixture of three fresh ones picked from the plant at hubby's work, and some from the freezer that are looking a litle past their best.

I leave the seeds in as we like our food pretty spicy.

Add the soaked beans

Stir throughly and leave to simmer for at least an hour to give the chilli time to develop.

We didn't think this batch was spicy enough so we added a 3/4 teaspoon of green chilli powder (made from the last of the chilli harvest last year) to each pan.

Stir through, divide up and bag it ready for the freezer.

Apart from a small portion each placed on tortilla chips with some jalapenos and grated cheese with a little home made yoghurt by the side for dipping. Nom

Costings added :)



I pay £1 a 1lb for my mince from the butchers, and using Sainsburys as a guideline for the rest of the ingredients

So

1500g mince = approx £3.50
500g beans (500g Haricot = £1.20,Black Eye = £0.84, Pinto = £0.93, Black Beans = £1.29 = £4.26 / 5 ) = £0.86
5 x red onions = £1.00
3 x sweet potato (half 1kg bag @ £1.58) = £0.79
5 x carrots (half 1kg bag @ £0.80) = £0.40
400g Basic mushrooms = £0.89
50cl First Cape Shiraz = £2.50
300g soya mince = £1.98
20x 400g chopped tomatoes @33p each = £6.60
Frozen spinach -1/3 rd of bag @ £1.00 = £0.33
1 bulb of garlic = £0.25
Herbs, mine are fresh. You can buy them as plants for £1.50ish each which will give you many many servings. All they need is a warm sunny kitchen windowsill. Or you can use dry if you really want to. - cost teeny tiny, approx 10p maybe .
Baby Spaghetti - 1/2 bag @75p = £0.37
Frozen sweetcorn 1/3 bag @ £1.27 = £0.43
Bell pepper - Basic pack = £1.27
Chillies (ours are homegrown) Sainsburys sell them fresh in bags too @ £0.57
Chilli powder - again homemade, but can buy from any shop approx £0.77. A teaspoon and a half of this would cost approx 5p maximum.

Grand Total for the whole batch is £21.89

This made 6 double portions of bolognaise, 8 double portions of chilli, 6 toddler portions of bolognaise, 7 large baby pots of bologniase, plus 30 small baby pots of bolognaise.

6 toddler portions = 2 adult portions
37 baby portions = 4 adult portions.
28 adult portions for grown ups

Alltogether = 34 adult servings.

Cost per serving = £0.65 Ish.

Oh look, more blumming snow...

We woke up to another few inches of snow that had fallen overnight so the idea of putting together a new compost bin and doing some pruning was set aside for some other essential garden work.

Snowman building!

I've also put some extra birdfeed out, with some of the boiled chopped rind from a gammon joint that I made into honey roast ham today. Partly to give them something to eat while it's so very cold out there, and partly to start distracting them from all the seedlings that are soon to go in the ground ;)

All Hail the Spring ;)

We decided to do some gardening this afternoon, and just as we were about to go outside the clouds opened and we had a lovely 10 minute hailstorm. Not that it stopped us for long, hehe

Getting ready to get some seeds sown. You can see the remnants of this weeks snow still on the lawn but we gotta get growing :)

Planting on the onion seedlings into toilet roll pots

Putting potatoes into seed trays to chit, this was Abi's job. Mostly to stop her trying to plant as much seed in each hole as possible, hehe

Lots and lots of seed potatoes :)

The greenhouse starting to be stocked with seed trays. This is lettuce, onion seedlings, peas, beans and a tray of more red baron onion seeds. We eat a lot of onions, and make a lot of chutney ;) You can kinda see from the photo that we've cleared the chilli bed, we've saved two of the chilli plants that looked like they may want to give this year a go but the rest were as dead as a dodo.

Propagators full of moneymaker tomatos, tumbling tomatoes (to go into hanging baskets) and several types of chillies. I've planted Peri Peri, Jalapeno, Aurora and Funky. I'm holding off planting Habaneros until I see how well the overwintered plants have survived.