Live For Food

We all keep a variety of items in our store cupboards that last quite a long time and get replenished on a regular basis so that they are always available.  If you are not sure what you should keep in your store cupboard it can be useful to see someone else’s list to give you an idea of what you want, but don’t forget, this is not a generic list of must haves.  Every one will have an individual store cupboard that reflects their cooking style.

In my suggestions below I’m also going to include items that keep for a couple of months in the fridge.

For me the basic list is mainly items I would expect to see in a student’s store cupboard, or items I would take on a self catering holiday.

The quick and easy list includes items I use when I want to do a quick weeknight dinner that’s still mostly home cooked but might involve a couple of “cheats”.

The home cooking list includes items I use when I do home cooking from scratch or some baking.

Basic store cupboard staples
Bottle of olive oil
Ready made pasta sauce
Mixed dried herbs
Garlic granules
Dried wholemeal pasta
Easy cook long grain rice
Plain white flour
Cornflour (cornstarch)
Tinned tomatoes
Tinned tuna
Beef gravy granules
Chicken gravy granules
Beef stock cubes
Chicken stock cubes
Tomato puree
Salt
Pepper
Medium dried curry powder
Butter or olive oil spread
Caster sugar
Eggs
Peanut butter
Marmite

Additional quick and easy store cupboard staples 
Curry paste – indian
Thai curry paste
Ready made stirfry sauce
Dried noodles
Dried lentils
Passata
Dried basil
Dried oregano
Chilli powder
Soy sauce
Worcestershire sauce
Mango chutney
Lime juice
Lemon juice
Wholegrain mustard
Coriander – in a suspension or gel (cilantro)
Cider
Beer
Red and white wine
Ready made custard
Ready made puff pastry
Tinned fruit

Additional home cooking store cupboard staples
Capers
Olives
Fish sauce (nam pla)
Strong white flour
Cocoa powder
Sesame oil
Root ginger
Garlic cloves
Dried tarragon
Dried dill
Dried thyme
Dried sage
Dried rosemary
Bay leaves
Vegetable stock cubes
Fish stock cubes
Orange juice
Ground cumin
Ground coriander
Cardamom pods
Garam masala
Onion granules
Dijon mustard
English mustard
Dark cooking chocolate
Icing sugar
Self raising flour
Wholemeal flour
Jam
Sunflower seeds
Sesame seeds
Balsamic vinegar
White wine vinegar
Packet breadcrumbs
 

What other suggestions do you have for useful store cupboard staples?

I don’t buy that many items from the budget range in the supermarket these days.  I will often give them a go, but generally prefer the own brand or specific brand items.  In the past I have enjoyed budget fruit juice and budget chocolate chip cookies both of which I used to buy but don’t any more.  These days the main budget item I buy is budget tinned chopped tomatoes.  So I thought it was time I gave some more budget items a go, in particular, fruit and vegetables.  Below are my reviews of the four items I picked.

Budget Mushrooms

When you buy budget mushrooms they tend to be of varying size, dirtier than regular mushrooms, and you can get funny shaped ones such as two mushrooms that have grown together, or extra long muddy stalks.

Once you have wiped off the dirt and chopped off any excess stalk you don’t want, these are exactly like normal white mushrooms.  So if you are planning any recipe where you chop up the mushrooms and put them in, including a fried breakfast, I would recommend budget mushrooms 100%.

Budget Bell Peppers

With budget peppers, especially if you do online shopping, its hit and miss what colors you end up with.  The bags normally contain 5 or 6 peppers, and can be any color out of red, green, yellow and orange.  As you can see I ended up with 5 or 6 green ones and a yellow one in this bag.  Green unfortunately is my least favorite color of pepper but hey ho.

Budget peppers also come in a variety of shapes and sizes.  They are absolutely fine if all you are going to do is chop them up and cook them or use them in a salad.  They taste exactly the same as normal brand peppers.  However if you are going to do a recipe that involves keeping the peppers whole, such as stuffed peppers then these probably wouldn’t be suitable.

Budget Salad Bag

This bag states that it contains a mixture of red cabbage and any of three types of lettuce leaves.  The bag I had contained only iceberg lettuce and red cabbage as far as I could make out.  I’ve had a similar budget bag from a different supermarket which contained about three types of fairly basic lettuce leaves.

Basically, this does what it says on the tin.  It’s not a very exciting salad selection, but it’s perfectly nice, and at 44p a bag compared to anywhere between £1 and £2 for a standard bag, well worth the price if you want something that’s not all iceberg lettuce and ready chopped into the bargain.  Let’s face it – lettuce never gets that exciting anyway.

Budget Grapes

This is where I was less impressed.  A lot of the grapes seemed to be on the verge of turning brown and I had to throw some away.  Now I don’t know if that was typical of budget grapes, but it didn’t impress me much.  In all fairness, I could have emailed the supermarket and got a refund, but I couldn’t be bothered.

The other thing with grapes, is that whilst budget produce in different shapes and sizes is generally fine, the grapes tended to be on the small side, and thus lacked in sweetness compared to normal sized grapes.

I won’t be buying budget grapes again.

Verdict

Budget produce is worth a look, especially if you buy items that you use to cook with and mix in with other items where the shape doesn’t matter.  I shall be sticking to budget mushrooms and peppers, and I shall probably get the salad bags from time to time.  I will definitely try out some other budget produce.

What budget produce would you recommend?

img class=”aligncenter size-medium wp-image-775″ title=”budget grapes” src=”http://liveforfood.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/budget-grapes-214×300.jpg” alt=”” width=”214″ height=”300″ /

First, ensure your avocado is ripe.  Hold it in your hand and gently press the skin.  If it gives a little, it’s ripe.

Remember that the avocado has a large stone in the middle.  Take a sharp knife and cut the avocado in half, going round the edge of the stone.  Twist it to separate the two halves.

To remove the stone, hold the half with the stone in one hand, and with the sharp knife, give the stone a smart tap, so that the knife is stuck in the stone.

Twist the knife, and the stone will come out.

You could stop at this point and serve your filling on top of the avocado half.

To remove the skin, first cut each half into two.

You should then be able to gently peel away the skin from each quarter.

Use the knife to cut the avocado into slices or chunks as required.

Voila!

All the major supermarkets in the UK offer an online shopping service.  I’ve been using online shopping myself for probably about 8 years now so I’ve had plenty of opportunity to weigh up the pros and cons.

Advantages of online shopping:

It saves time – it used to take me and my husband an entire evening to do a shop – about three hours from getting in the car to having cupboards full of food.  Online shopping takes anywhere between twenty minutes and an hour to order, and say half an hour to put away.

It’s less effort.  You only have to carry heavy items from your front door to your kitchen.

The customer service at the supermarket I use is excellent.  I only have to drop them a quick email or make a phone call about anything I’m not happy with in my shopping and I get an immediate refund onto my credit card with no quibbles.

Price match – if your chosen item is not available and a substitute is sent, you get the substitute for the same price as the original item.  Sometimes you can get unintentional bargains this way!

Disadvantages of online shopping: 

You don’t get to choose your own produce or meat.  In all fairness I’ve had very little problem with this myself but it’s still not quite the same as choosing your own.

The range of food may be slightly smaller than your own supermarket because it’s a central website dealing with all the stores that participate in the online service, and not all stores are big enough to carry a full product range.

Substitutes and items that are not available – every shop I do has on average 4 substitutes and 1 item unavailable.  I probably keep half the substitutes and send the others back for a refund.  It’s only really annoying when I needed a specific item for that day, as it’s easy for me to stop by another smaller supermarket near to my workplace.  This could be a concern if you needed the item immediately and can’t get to another shop.

On occasions I have ended up with a bag of someone else’s shopping or with one of my bags missing.  You are a winner if you get someone else’s as it’s never worth their while coming to take it back if you didn’t spot it at the time.  It’s pretty annoying if yours is missing as then you have to check the lot and sort it out with them.  My supermarket never redeliver the bag – only give refunds.

There is always a delivery charge – normally between £2 and £5.

Verdict: 

I would recommend online shopping if like me you work full time and resent wasting an entire evening doing the food shopping.

Likewise if you have health problems and can’t physically get round a supermarket I would recommend it.

I wouldn’t recommend it if you are extremely picky about the specific items you want.  There will definitely be substitutes from time to time, probably not what you would have chosen yourself, and you may not like the cuts of meat, vegetables or use by dates chosen for you.

I also wouldn’t recommend it if you don’t have an option for picking up items that don’t turn up.  If you plan to cook with say whipping  cream and end up with single cream and then have to waste an hour going to get the whipping cream – you may as well have gone to the shop in the first place.  It’s difficult to place 100% reliance on the online shop.

So my personal verdict is an out and out yes because the time and effort saved in my opinion outweigh any disadvantages – but this may not be the case for everybody all of the time.  I also have a store credit card which gives me free delivery which is another positive for me.

What are your experiences with online food shopping?

This is a recipe for oven-baked salmon.  I prefer oven baking salmon to frying it, as it seems to come out softer, and the coating in this recipe looked like it would stop the fish from drying up.  Normally I would bake it in foil, but I don’t think that would have worked with the breadcrumbs.

Plus I had all the breadcrumbs left from doing the lamb escalopes recipe the other week.  Not only that, after buying those breadcrumbs, I found I already had some in the cupboard which I’d forgotten about!

View the original recipe on allrecipes.com.  I was just cooking for myself and so have adapted the recipe for one serving.

Ingredients (serves 1):

1 frozen fillet salmon
1 tablespoon prepared Dijon-style mustard
salt and pepper to taste
dry bread crumbs (probably 3 heaped tablespoons is enough to cover one fillet – I didn’t measure exactly, just sprinkled until covered)
1 heaped tablespoon butter, melted

Method:

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C). Line a shallow baking pan with aluminum foil.

Place salmon skin-side down on foil. Spread a thin layer of mustard on the top of the fillet, and season with salt and pepper.

Top with bread crumbs, then drizzle with melted butter.

Bake in a preheated oven for 25 minutes, or until salmon flakes easily with a fork. 

Verdict:

I enjoyed this recipe although I wasn’t 100% convinced that the mustard went with the salmon – it was quite a strong flavour and got up my nose whilst eating it!  I was wondering if something like soft cheese would have been a better choice, or tomato puree and herbs. 

The topping however did keep the fish from drying out in the oven, and the breadcrumbs were far less messy than trying to fry something in breadcrumbs.

It was quite quick and easy and I would recommend it as a mid-week meal.

So overall I would do this recipe again but would try and find an alternative to the mustard.