Eat Cheap, Eat Well, Eat Local.
by Emily
by Emily
Its been quite a hectic month and we can’t believe its been
so long since our first post! But over this time we’ve done plenty plenty of
eating - so here are the long overdue updates =D
Living on a budget has been a big
part of our life at University, luckily finding quality food doesn't have to come at a
hefty price. Both Tom and I have been lucky enough to live in Crookes
(Sheffield) during different points of our degrees. Here the high street is
littered with small, independent retailers bursting with local produce, ranging
from meat in the butchers to fruit, veg, cheese and yoghurt at the greengrocers. Its great to
find a variety of fresh and different ingredients often at a smidgen of the
price you’d find in the supermarket! Here are some of the shops available just
round the corner.
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| Urban Pantry Retails local meat, dairy and bakery products. Also great for new flavours and gifts |
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| Hayman's Family Butchers Great for meat to cook for dinners, or even a hot cob! |
Local Butchers and Bakers
If you want a bigger variety of inexpensive, quality cuts of meat, then look no further than your local butcher or deli shop. These stores will likely stock your favourite joints for your roast dinners as well as a wealth of new, home-made twists to try; see my recipe below for some 'tastier than your average' sausage rolls.
Not only this, but they also prepare other in produce in store, such as bread (rolls, cakes, cobs baps - whatever you want to call them), cakes and lunches to go.
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| Just Natural Greengrocer that also provides organic, free-from and alternative ingredients |
If you've ever paid a couple of pounds for a bag of carrot batons, you've been ripped off. Not only are you buying food that isn't fresh but you're paying well over the odds; carrots from your local grocers should cost around 80p per kilo. We're talking pennies for fresh, unprocessed, locally sourced food!
Greengrocers are by far the best places to get your fruit and veg for the week. Their only downside is that they may only stock seasonal foods and thus your favourites may not always be available.
A bonus at Just Natural (above), is that is also offers a range of dairy products, like freshly made yoghurts, cheeses and milk. On top of this it also sells a huge range of nuts, seeds, cereals granolas and MORE! We couldn't recommend this shop and others like it any more!
Home Made Pastry and a bit of Exotic Sausage
As we are now both studying for our PhDs at different Universities, we only get to see each other every fortnight, so this week I embarked on teaching my housemate, Daisy, how to make sausage rolls. For this, we first made some Rough Puff Pastry. The recipe for this was:
Ingredients
250g Plain
Flour (You can use normal or Strong/Bread Flour)
250g Butter,
chopped into cubes
large pinch of
salt
upto 150ml
cold Water (You may not need it all!)
Method
1)
First we placed the flour, salt and butter into a large
mixing bowl, and combined roughly so that small blobs of butter were still
visible. You can either do this either by using a pallette/blunt knife, or
using your hands to rub it together - just made sure your hands are fairly
cold, otherwise you’ll melt the butter.
2)
Next we added ~100ml Water, mixing together to form a
ball of dough, with more water gradually added depending on how dry and crumbly
the mix was.
3)
The dough then needed to be wrapped in cling film and
left in the fridge for about half an hour.
4)
Once chilled, we floured the work surface and sculpted
the ball into a rectangle. It was rolled out to an elongated rectangle, at
about 1cm thick with dimensions of ~20x50cm.
5)
To give the rough puff layers, the dough needs to be
folded. For this, we folded the bottom third up over the middle section, and
folded the top third over that. Rotate the dough 90*, roll out again and
re-fold. We did this three times, in the hope we would get some good layers!
6)
After the final fold, wrap in cling film and chill in
the fridge again for atleast 30mins. We left it overnight, which is also fine.
For the filling, we took a trip
to Urban Pantry, where they stock sausage meats from Moss Valley, and as they
had such a good range, we went for three different flavours: Chorizo-style, Pork and Caramelised Onion and Pork and Apple.
To make the Sausage Rolls:
1)
We took the chilled pastry from the fridge and rolled
out to a thickness of a pound coin (~½cm). If it is too much to work with, chop
the block in half and do it in two lots.
2)
Next we broke up the meat patties, cut strips of the
pastry and plonked the meat filling in. To make the rolls, place the meat in a
line down the pastry, making sure the pastry is wide enough to wrap around the
filling.
To make Pinwheels, spread the filling across almost the whole area of the pastry, roll it up from one side, then cut into sections. Also make sure you brush a bit of milk on the sealing edge of the pastry, and over the tops to help them brown nicely. You can also slash the top of the rolls.
3) Once we made the different shaped and sizes rolls, we placed them on a baking sheet and cooked at 200*C for 20-30minutes, until they were golden in colour.
We would have got a picture with
more of the pinwheels in, but they didnt stick around for long and were soon
gobbled up =P
This sorted two of us for lunches
for the week - winner! Another thing we might try next time is using extras
like pate, chutney or mushrooms to fill the rolls even more. Let us know in the comments below if you
beat us to it though =)
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