Firstly I need to apologise for my lengthy absence from the blogosphere. I’m certain if you are a fellow South African you would be well aware that the flu going around is particularly bad. This particularly bad flu decided to chew me up and spit me out into my bed with meds that knocked me out for most of the last while and my editor got married making it more difficult to get my posts back, love you Em. I am back now however and should be bugging you with posts at least once a week!
So all of us know that (okay maybe not all of us, just those of us who are financially challenged) know that a few weeks into the month the grocery cupboard starts to look a bit bleak.
This month ours look particularly bleak as we opted to not buy groceries but rather purchase ready cooked meals from a local chef. Really well priced and delicious! These meals however are only from Monday – Friday and only dinner. I don’t know if we forgot that weekends existed or that you’re supposed to have more than one meal a day but our cupboards only had the remnants of last month’s grocery shopping to show, which really wasn’t much.
Luckily I am always up for a challenge and absolutely love the opportunity to be creative, even in my cooking! I think some of the greatest combinations of food must have come out from people having hard times and trying anything to feed their families.
Similar to how I discovered that cheap two minute noodles tastes amazing with some melted butter mixed in! A meal I’ll have again even if my cupboards aren’t so bleak!
Also a very nice, affordable and non-fattening snack to have is popcorn! You don’t even need gas or oil if you have the right apparatus (which my sister conveniently forgot she had when we realised she had no oil and I really wanted popcorn, only to find the microwave popcorn maker the next morning…needless to say I still haven’t had my popcorn).
We are very privileged to have a large 4 burner gas stove with an oven which works amazing to cook some scrumptious things – it has one problem though. It runs out of gas! This isn’t a problem when you plan and budget for it, however when we forget that we’re supposed to eat on weekends we also forget to plan for the gas running out – after all, we’re getting ready cooked meals!
So my life without gas has been pretty interesting, and so has my bleak cupboards as the combination of the two really brought out my creative side.
I present to you condensed milk chicken! Yes, you read that correctly! There was a special on whole chicken last month at one of my favourite supermarkets so I decided to buy one. Saturday I decided that would be a decent Sunday lunch- throw it in the crock pot over night and ta-da- super soft delicious chicken. I had a problem though, I usually do this with cream and I didn’t have the cash flow to purchase cream at the time. I racked my brain as to what there was in my pretty bleak cupboards until I remembered the condensed milk I had purchased (actually for the melk kos recipe I still want to try) and decided this is perfect! Just to give it that creamy texture. I put the chicken, some baby potatoes, some frozen veg, a soup powder- minestrone I think- and braai relish into my crock pot. I rubbed some condensed milk onto the chicken, added water till it was just above the chicken closed the pot and put the setting on auto throughout the night. I forgot that the chicken had giblets so when I opened the pot the next morning (since I cooked the chicken from frozen) found the giblets floating in their packet on the top of the pot – I of course found this very amusing. The end result was absolutely delicious! It wasn’t sweet, but did have a sweeter taste than chicken would normally have. Not overbearing though and it had a soft smooth taste like that which I would usually accomplish through using cream. Definitely a recipe I would try again and add mushrooms!
My last few notes on life without gas is my absolute love for the random apparatuses that I have to cook with. From my electric frying pan with which I made egg and sausage for breakfast, to the microwave in which I made mash (although I should have left the potatoes in a bit longer as they were still a little bit hard here and there even after they were mashed), my crockpot in which I made the delicious condensed milk chicken and lastly my microwave omelette maker which works wonders!
Thankfully payday is around the corner and the bleak cupboard will soon be replenished, till then I’ll let my creative side run wild!
Love Jo xo
Jo’s Take Aways
- Be prepared to be creative
- Have apparatuses to help
- Don’t be discouraged when things look bleak, something good can still come from it
Jo's food experiences 