Eggs, cheese, potatoes and chicken, these are a few things you’ll find in my kitchen… apples, rice and grapefruit too, I’m such a foodie but a saver at that too.
As much as I enjoy eating out and trying new dishes, there’s also something rewarding about impersonating a dish that you like and it turning out quite well, especially when you can save money.
As I’ve mentioned, rice is one of the ingredients that can be found in my kitchen as this staple food is used for a variety of dishes including rice and peas on a Sunday to fried rice during the week. Whether I am cooking for myself or for other people in my house, there are two useful tips/ resources that I found are good that can help with portion control.
- Rice measuring cup (mine was given to me by NLWA but can be brought online if you don’t have one/ while NLWA are not doing physical events.)
- Love Food Hate Waste (LFHW) Portion Calculator
According to LFHW, 75g (one portion of rice for one adult) is the equivalent of 2-3 tablespoons of rice so I usually use half a cup or slightly more depending on how hungry I am, if I am cooking for myself. Both tips/ resources help with minimising waste because even if some is left over in the pot after serving, I know it can be used the next day.
Recently I made a garlic and egg fried rice.
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I am a big fan of Chinese food, especially fried rice and I like to make this dish as it is a quick and easy way to save money on the shop brought dish (which would usually cost around £4 from my local takeaway), treat myself and take advantage of using up other foods that I am never short of such as eggs, in an alternative way to having them fried or scrambled.
Garlic is also a staple ingredient in my house as it is used to add flavour to many of the dishes that we have, so finding the ingredients around the kitchen that was needed for the recipe was pretty easy. I used the recipe from the Chinese Unchopped Jeremy Pang School of Wok book which has some useful tips, but I know this can be found easily online.
I also use a magnetic food planner on my fridge that’s useful for planning other lunch, dinner and snack meals throughout the week.
If I fancy a certain dish one day, as well as planning the ingredients for it, I can also plan other things to make the next day too if I know it’s likely there’ll be some leftover and this can be done with so many other savoury and sweet things! For example, I have brought apples to make an apple crumble for dessert and as there was some small pieces left over, I used this to make an apple smoothie. I have also done this recently with chicken – using left over chicken drumstick pieces (that didn’t have the source coated on it) to put into a Pad Thai, instead of going to the supermarket again to buy chicken breast pieces. Of course, you could always freeze left-over ingredients that you have for another day and use websites such as Which as a guide if needed.
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