Eating well for little cost!

Do you all have empty freezers, that you're able to make all this stuff and freeze it? My freezers (two) are jam packed already....

(Not all gone - obviously!)

Another blast from the past thread. Names gone but not forgotten.

I wish my DH Wot Cooks would be more imaginative with left overs. It's always me that uses them up - soups, omelettes etc - he'd chuck them out!

Having lived in Asia, we've always eaten a lot of rice dishes and for many years I've bought basmati rice. However I've recently rediscovered lojg grain rice

I noticed that Lidl's long grain white rice was 40p per kg as opposed to £1.89 for a kg of white basmati rice and decided to give it a try

I boiled it for 8 mins, rinsed it with cold water in a sieve, then just before serving microwaved it for 2 mins. Result - lovely fluffy perfect rice, not sticky or mushy but each grain separate.

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We always had bread and butter with fruit and custard when we visited my GP, I thought it was a mining tradition.

It was the jam sandwiches which we fought over which had been down the pit and brought back up, best bread and jam I have ever tasted.

JessM soulmates! That is my usual lunch -only with 1 slice of bread. Discovered it when I'd assembled the wee sandwich and had to answer the phone..

Er what are you thinking of calling it?

I invented something yesterday. At least it was new to me.
Toast 2 slices of bread. Put some slices of cheese between. Bung in the microwave for 1 min, until cheese melted. Almost instant toasted cheese sandwich!

phoenix We've just eaten your 'chowder thingy' it was lovely and very tasty, I added some chopped bacon too and a little low fat crème fraiche.
Delicious...thank you for the recipe. (DH also enjoyed it especially as he's recovering from his jaw operation and can't chew yet.

bagitha my Gran used to do the yorkshire pudding first and then the full meal to follow. Her mother was from Yorkshire and she carried on the tradition, funnily enough my mother didn't. my mother liked to do things as she had seen them done when she lived in Surrey. She was a maid in a Judge's house and got a taste for fine food. My mother never once drank out of a mug, she always had beautiful china teasets.

Yes to both of those em and Mamie I used to have tinned peaches with carnation milk and bread and butter especially at my grandmother's house. I wondered if it was a northern thing.

My dad always ate the custard skin, for which the rest of us were thankful. My youngest brother had to get the custard jug last because he would always finish it off.

Tinned fruit and cream-off-the-top?

I have never heard of tinned fruit served with bread and butter. My treat as a child, when I had lunch at Gran's, was thick Bird's Custard and tinned fruit - loved the mixed fruit cocktail (and also enjoyed the skin which formed on the custard - much to my sister's disgust!)

I am still amazed by how people stick rigidly to the main meal at lunchtime here in France; always three courses and always at 12.30 sharp. Nearly all the small shops close and some of the big ones as well. We live about 15 minutes from the nearest town and people say they would never buy a house out this far because they couldn't get home for lunch. When I taught in schools I was amazed by the fact that although the classroom resources were nowhere near as good as the UK, there was always a sit down three course meal for the staff, complete with cheese board.
Just so I don't do too much thread creep, the evening meal round here is always soup.
We are having a winter favourite tonight - sausage chilli (or should that me chilli con sausage.)

My nana served bread & butter with tinned fruit. This was in Harrow, but she came from Wales. A large uncut loaf would have the cut end buttered, then holding it up to her chest, she would slice towards herself with a wicked bread knife and make perfectly equal thin slices every time.

Yes greenmossgiel the bread and butter was cut very thinly, granny used to butter the bread first and then cut it and she always used the bone china Maybe its a westcountry thing

Here speaks a Yorkshire lass.

Traditionally Yorkshire pudding was eaten on its own before the meat. Preferably a plate-sized piece each with lots of gravy made from the meat juices. That's how we used to eat it. My mum had her gran's proper Yorshire Pudding tins, which are a bit like sandwich cake tins but deeper and usually of slightly smaller diameter.

Then you have your meat and two veg, and more gravy. Then apple pie and custard.

I think the idea was that the meat would go further (enough left for Monday?) if you filled up on the cheaper but still nourishing (eggs, mik, flour) pudding. People were more concerned about getting enough calories then!

The wee itsy bitsy Yorkshire puds that seem popular now and which are served with the meat seem weird to me.

No - we never had bread and butter with the tinned fruit. The bread and butter always came first, followed probably by scones and jam. Fruit, if any, came last.

Libradi - yes, I do remember that! It was a Sunday tea thing, wasn't it? This was in England at my Grandma's - though my Scottish mother always offered this, too. Diagonally-cut bread (posher, my mother thought) with the butter already spread on it, and laid out nicely on a flowered china bread-and-butter plate (which I have to this day)!

We never had bread and butter with our tinned fruit in southern England, but in Edinburgh my Fife-raised in-laws usually did.

Yorkshire pudding before the meat? I prefer the Yorkshire!

Does anyone else remember having tinned fruit accompanied by slices of bread and butter? Seems very odd but that's what we used to have at my gran's if we went for tea and if we were having something savoury we had the tinned fruit and bread and butter first

When I started grammar school, I was thrilled to find we got a pudding every day - at home it was just tinned peaches and Carnation milk on a Sunday, or rice pudding after Sunday lunch. I loved my school meals - my mother was a good plain cook but there was little variety in our menu.
When I started work as a secretarial trainee at the CWS in Balloon St., Manchester, the canteen offered free bread and gravy. We used to just get a big bowl of gravy and dip in the bread, so we could spend our money on a rock and roll session at the Ritz ballroom - I think it was 3d. It was some time before the canteen staff cottoned on to the fact that we were not paying for anything!

It is interesting that the main meal of the day, usually called dinner, has been taken at different times in different ages. In some Jane Austen books, it is taken at 5 p.m. but of course the coming of the industrial revolution meant that workers could only have a 'snap' for lunch and had their main meal, such as it was, after work.