Ready, Steady Cook: What can you rustle up for 20 euros?

Can’t fault it - no washing up either!

This is cheating too…come and stay at our B&B and our table d’hôtes meal is 20€ a person!

I was reading about the lack of quality and variety in restaurants here on another thread. We live in the middle of the Limousin where there’s beautiful beef to be had and I’m sorry to say that at best our local eateries are only mediocre and rarely serve local meat. We too find ourselves in eating more often than not.

We have a young English catering student (just finished NVQ2) staying with us at the moment so chef husband is working to give him many more experiences than he’ll get in his part-time job in the UK. Yesterday they made hand raised pork pies - one variety open topped with an arrangement of apples on it rather like an apple tart. This was a practice for a meal we’ll be serving to regular French guests on Monday to stretch the sanglier joint we have in the freezer. We served some of this pie with a salad as an entry yesterday evening to French guests who arrived on spec and they loved it, saying they liked to try different regional products!

I think I’ve digressed here from the thread! Sorry.

Jan

Yes, I forgot to mention the garden. Like I said, using a 10 kilo turkey left in the freezer after Christmas is cheating.
Best of luck!

Can we use stuff from the garden as well as the larder? I’ll have a go at this next week when things have calmed down to a frenzy!

I am going to make a start next week. On a personal level, I am trying to move from a high ratio of fresh foods to rely more on dried and larder staples. My youngest is nigh on ready to fly the nest, OH works in London during the week, so too much fresh can be a waste of money. Usage of the larder is the way forward, at least for our family

This is funny because I remember when we first moved back to the Paris suburbs from Italy in 1998 my husband would take a 20 euro bill to the market and bring home a basketful of food. 5 years later just before we moved to nantes we would have to take 3 times that amount to get the same basketful. Sad. So this is quite an interesting challenge. I’ll see if I can get to it this week.

So, what can you rustle up?
We spend so much of our time rushing into the supermarket with no shopping list, no time and no ideas as to what we are going to cook with the ingredients we throw in the trolley as we whizz around the aisles.
I have just come back from the supermarket and spend a shade under 20 euros and the picture at the start of the discussion is what I had for my money.
I bought

A kilo of small apples
2 stalks of broccoli
10 large shallots - cuisse de poulet, as they’re sometimes called
A red and green pepper
A lettuce
A sourdough loaf
300g of button mushrooms
A kilo of tomatoes on the vine
2 large bulbs of new season purple garlic
A very large bunch of green asparagus
2 large goose eggs - 4 euros, but worth it!

The challenge is simple:
Using your 20 euro box and larder staples (there’s a fair bit of leeway here - tinned, frozen or dried), see what you can make from your box. I think it’s cheating if you still have a 6 kilo turkey in the freezer from Christmas, and you use that.
Don’t feel obliged to write down every recipe here, a list will be fine, and a photo or two will be even better.
Oh, and one last thing. You can take as long as you like, as long as your ingredients stay fresh. Twenty minutes is for the T.V. show, if you can believe what Ainsley says…