Food Hack #98: Get that Salad Dressed!

Cheat's salad dressing

Do you ever have an urge to eat salad when you get in from work? You do? Crazy child. But who am I to judge? In fact I am here to help. If you have any leftover honey or Dijon mustard in a jar, here is how to create your own vinaigrette dressing cheaply and quickly.

Let's face it, paying £3 for an upmarket, home-style dressing is just nonsense when you can do it yourself for free!

Ingredients
Honey
Dijon or other grainy mustard
Vinegar
Olive Oil

How-To
If you have a smattering of runny honey left in a jar, add a few teaspoonfuls of Dijon mustard. Likewise if you have some Dijon mustard left in a jar, add a few teaspoonfuls of clear runny honey.

Then add a few ml of olive oil - about two teaspoonfuls, and a few dashes of red wine or white wine vinegar, replace the lid and shake what your mother gave you, and well.

Once it has all mixed together, et voila! You have a delicious salad dressing made up of leftovers.

Cheat Treat!

Blackberry Tart. On a Budget, innit! Credit: Simoney Sunday

I wouldn't normally advocate buying prefabricated pastry cases, but not everyone has the time or the energy to be a domestic goddess - not to mention the fact that getting the pastry case absolutely perfect is a beggar. And it's always good to get something in your store cupboard, just in case.

Many big supermarkets stock pastry cases of various sizes and, when I happened to find a batch in a 'sin bin' - with a 'Use By' date of that very day, I could not help but consider 4 small cases at 89p a bargain.

The thing is, these can be frozen. And frozen they were, until I needed to use them to try to impress the female parental unit with a posh-looking dessert that didn't take me any time to prepare.

This was very, very simple although it looks fantastic. Or would have, if I could take pictures properly

Ingredients
Ice-cream (home made is best - see the recipe here - but this occasion Sainsbury's helped out)
Whipping cream
Blackberries (I normally get these for free by harvesting and freezing but these were from my friend's garden)
Cocoa Powder (I have a feeling this might have been WeightWatchers!)

How To
Whip up the cream (some people put a little icing sugar into it to sweeten it but we don't like things too sweet in our house)
Spoon it into pastry cases
Decorate with some washed and dried blackberries

Waft some cocoa powder over the side of the plate and scoop a ball of icecream
Decorate with some home-grown mint leaves if you're feeling extra (which I was. You should see mum's garden when the mint took over. That was a three-year battle)

And whoop! A professionally presented dessert that takes all of say, 5 minutes (depending on how quickly you can whip that cream).

Champagne tastes, cola budget. What can I say?

Of Dating and Dicing: the United Dairies' Delectable Chicken

UD three-wheel float, c.1954. Photo posted to the Milko group by Don Reid

This is the first ever recipe I tried out of the first recipe book that I ever owned and it has become a staple in the Mermaid household.

Until 1995, I had learned from my mother, along with some stalwart cookery books from 1940-1978. Fruit cake? No problem. Rissoles? Easy! Stuffed Sheep's hearts? Bugger off.

But here I was at university, and I was about to cook my first meal for a man. Not just any man, but a chap with whom I was hoping to become romantically involved. This called for some more modern cuisine. But it also called for dining on a budget. I was a student, after all.

There was no proper internet to turn to, nor smart phones. I didn't even have a mobile phone back then. But then staring into the Spartan fridge in our painfully clean kitchen (we were three OCD neat freaks and still best friends, though not quite so tidy now), my gaze landed on a pint of milk and I had a brainwave.

Now during the 1980s and 1990s we used to support our local Milkman from the United
Dairies. He would come every Saturday with fresh eggs, milk in cool glass bottles, pats of golden, creamy butter in shimmering gold paper. And, once a year, my mother would buy me a diary for the year, which had recipes dotted throughout. I turned to this for help and there it was. For 1998, Pan-Fried Chicken in Mustard Sauce.

I cannot quite remember how UD told me to cook it but it was a doozy of a recipe. Here is my version, with love.

As an aside, I used to wash and clean the chicken before I cooked it. I used to wash off all the blood and fat, and then clean it with lemon juice and salt. All my friends' mothers did the same. Apparently this was not the right thing to do. Oh well I ain't dead yet. Anyway I do believe the lemon, salt and pepper gave something extra to the chicken. You decide.

I've built on the recipe by adding mushrooms and crushed garlic, but these are optional.

Ingredients (serves four)
1 pack of slender chicken breast fillets. I think at the time I used Sainsbury's budget label or Morrisons.
1 tub of 200g creme fraiche
2 medium brown onions
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
1 pack baby button mushrooms
6 teaspoonfuls of Dijon (grainy) mustard
Also
2-3 cups of basic white rice
1 bag of green beans (or mange tout if you want to be posh)

How to:
In one saucepan, start to boil the rice in a little water.

While this is doing, finely chop the onions and start to fry them in a little olive oil (or whatever you have) in a large frying pan. Add the crushed garlic.
Start dicing the chicken.
When the onions start to brown, turn down the heat.
Add the diced chicken to the pan and stir gently until it starts to turn white on the outside. Keep on a moderate heat for 10 minutes until the chicken is white in the middle.

Dice or slice the mushrooms. Clean and prepare the beans, and put to steam for five to eight minutes. If you do not (as I do not) have a steamer, put a small covering of water and butter over the beans in a saucepan and lightly cook with the lid on for about 8 minutes.

Add the diced mushrooms to the pan and season with a little butter, pepper, salt and/or garlic to taste.

Whack in the creme fraiche as soon as the meat starts to brown on the outside and stir in the mustard. Within two to three minutes, the sauce should look brown and the mustard worked through. As soon as the rice and beans are done, serve.

To look fancy
I grow my own chives so it's easy and cheap to put a lovely garnish on the meal. Also to create the bowl effect with the rice, put lots of rice into a small bowl - I have a small round plastic one left over from Uni days - and turn upside down on the plate.

It looks great, full of fresh flavour and zing, but all for less than £8:00 for four people. Now THAT is a champagne taste on a Cola budget!

Oh, and I ditched the romantic interest from University eventually, even though he loved the meal.