Puffed wheat squares cross the great divide!

As well as cooking with Swiss chard, another cookery first for me on this side of the Atlantic was using a ‘cup’ as a measure. In the UK, we measure in weight and use ounces and pounds, or grams nowadays I suppose. However, over here, as in the US, the measure in recipes is by volume. One US cup equals 8 UK ounces (apparently, there’s also a British cup which is 10 ounces but I’ve never used a cup as a measure when cooking or baking in England.)

This conversion of US cup to UK ounces would seem pretty straightforward until you realise that the volume of an ingredient isn’t always the same as its weight. For example, a cup of brown sugar may weigh 8 oz, but a cup of plain flour may only weigh 4 oz. I worked this out when I made puffed wheat squares a few years ago. A friend gave me the recipe with the measures in cups. I converted those measures to ounces and off I set. However, when it came to the puffed wheat, the recipe called for something like 6 cups. Six cups converts to 2 lbs. There’s only around 4 oz of puffed wheat in a giant-sized packet! I realised when the puffed wheat started flowing over the sides of the saucepan that something was amiss.

Fast-forward two years and I am the proud owner of not one but two sets of measuring cups. (And I realise now why I had a bit of difficulty trying to buy a set of scales when I first moved to Canada.)

The following is my friend’s recipe for puffed wheat squares (thanks, Ann!). I don’t even know exactly how many cups of puffed wheat goes into this recipe. My advice is to pour slowly, stirring and coating the puffed wheat with the sticky cocoa mix as you go and stop when it looks as though you're out of mix.

I’ve used both sets of measurements for this recipe and they both work fine.

Puffed Wheat Squares

¾ cup (6 oz) brown sugar
½ cup (4 oz) margarine or butter
½ cup (4 oz) corn syrup
3 tbsp cocoa powder
1 tsp vanilla extract
Puffed wheat

Place the top four ingredients in a big saucepan and heat gently until the margarine has melted and the ingredients have all combined. Stir on heat for about three minutes. Take off heat, stir in the vanilla extract. Slowly pour in the puffed wheat, stirring so that all the wheat gets covered. When it looks as though there’s no cocoa mixture left to coat any more wheat, stop! Spoon into a large rectangular cake tin (or similar). Leave to cool and then cut into squares.

You can also add mini marshmallows as well as the wheat. I’ll leave it to you to work out how many of those you’ll need!

Off my trolley with delight!

Sometimes you just know you’ve made a great purchase. Not immediately, perhaps, but after using/wearing something a few times, you know then. This is the feeling I have about my new shopping trolley. It’s absolutely fab!

When I lived my solitary life in the UK, I used to transport my shopping in a variety of ways. Some days I’d cycle it home (packed in my panniers); other days I’d walk it back packed into bags which I’d carry (and/or in a pack strapped to my back).

It’s rare that I carry groceries on the back of my bike nowadays. For one, I’m shopping for two; and for two, I’m only on the bike for about seven months of the year. I still tend to do the one big shop each week. Up until I moved a few months ago, my local supermarket was only a few minutes away so I was fairly content to take my bags over and walk back with the groceries. However, my new supermarket’s now a good twenty minutes’ walk from home. At first I was walking back with the bags and backpack but then decided that my quality of life would be much improved if I were to get a shopping trolley. And so I did and it has. Actually it was my lovely boyfriend (aka my husband) who bought me the trolley (one reason being that he doesn’t now have to come and meet me after a particularly big shop to help transport the stuff back).

The shopping trolley was a steal at about $22 CAD (which is about £14 – I still can’t believe that!, especially as it’s still in one piece). It’s by Canadian company Kitchen Stuff Plus (although I can’t see any trolleys on their website). I opted for the classic black as I didn’t want to draw too much attention to myself (just walking along the streets with a carrier bag around these parts is enough to elicit a few strange looks from people: “That woman’s walking – carrying something.” But I have to say that I feel really quite modern, edgy, and alternative when I’m out with my new shopping trolley. The whole reduce reuse recycle concept is just about making a dent nowadays in the community of Edmonton and I’m probably being seen as some sort of trailblazer no doubt. Maybe I should have got the red one after all.

A one-of-a-kind bargain

I love thrift stores. In the UK we call them charity shops. I have inherited this love from my mum. When I was growing up, most Saturdays I'd accompany my mum to the local jumble sale. Jumble sales are pretty rare nowadays, having been superceded by charity shops and eBay. But when I was a kid, jumble sales were everywhere. Looking back, there's a tendency to romanticise about such things, but I remember the jumble sales I went to as being great things. They were often held in old church halls, run by volunteers, the items having been donated by members of the local community in order to raise funds for the church so they could send a bunch of kids on some or other trip.

Jumble sales always had that sense of wonderment about them. You never knew what you might unearth at a jumble sale. When you shopped in the high street you always had a pretty good idea as to what each shop held, but not a jumble sale. Admittedly, a lot of the stuff I saw at jumble sales I didn't want - and couldn't imagine anyone else wanting either. But every so often, I'd come away with a treasure. For example, the tin of gorgeous smelling tanning butter I bought when I was in my early teens (this was when subathing was still fashionable).

I've never been a great believer in a bargain, and so shopping in charity shops and thrift stores has never been so much about saving money ('getting a bargain') as it has about other things. Similarly, the word recycle wasn't heard that often back in the 1970s. And while I do recycle now and am committed to the whole reduce, reuse, recycle way of living, shopping in thrift stores is about more than just saving money and recycling (as important as these are): although buying something I really like that's recycled does add to the satisfaction I derive from the purchase.

Apart from the hope that I will find something truly wonderful, I just find the whole experience of shopping in thrift stores way more enjoyable than shopping in the mall. I like the idea that there's a story behind everything that's sold in a thrift store. I like the idea that I may find an item of clothing that no one else, or very few other women are going to be wearing (yes, I know there are two ways of looking at that!). But sometimes when shopping in thrift stores you do find a one-of-a-kind. And that's what I did today. I found this lovely cushion cover. There was another smaller one in a similar design, but it was spoiled with paint, not a lot of paint but enough for me to leave it on the rail (something I'm regretting a little now I have to say).

I have a feeling that this cushion cover is hand made. There's no label in it and no sign of there having been one. It's amazing to think that it found its way into the thrift store after someone has obviously put so much effort into it. My husband likes it so much that he's asked me not to put it in the basement, which I'm in the process of kitting out having recently moved into our new house, but to leave it upstairs. "It's cheerful," he says, and he's right.

This cushion cover cost $1.99, and the cushion I found - also in the thrift store - to put inside it also cost $1.99. Maybe there is such a thing as a bargain.

The real thing

Given that the province of Alberta is nowhere near the sea, I was quite surprised at how good the fish and chips I had here in Edmonton a few months ago tasted. The fish was obviously frozen but it was tasty, and the batter was cooked just right. In fact, there wasn’t much in it between this fish and chips and the fish and chips I had at my local chippie when I went back home at Christmas time; although on the batter front, I’d have to say that Brits, which is the chip shop here in Edmonton, was actually better.

I’m not too sure why Brits serves its fish and chips in a plastic basket although I’m guessing that it’s got something to do with the whole ‘chicken in a basket’ concept of food (although there’s no dimmed lighting or dodgy cabaret singer in sight in the restaurant). And the black and white chequered paper is obviously an attempt to replicate the newspaper in which people may (although probably may not) believe fish and chips is served in the UK. Maybe it is in some parts, but I haven’t had fish and chips served in newspaper in England for decades (and my memory of fish and chips served in newspaper may just be some sort of romanticised, rose-tinted spectacles one).

I can’t help thinking, though, that it would be a much better experience all round if Brits ditched the plastic and the paper and the Styrofoam saucer for the mushy peas, and just served it all on the one plate. But they do use real knives and forks so at least that’s something!

Bread and poses

As this blog is about thrifty living, it has to include an entry about baking bread. Obviously. I started baking bread last year and was surprised that I actually managed to create something that was edible. This spurred me on to try different types of breads and very soon I was pulling out fruit loaves from the oven like there was no tomorrow (in the sense that there was no tomorrow so I didn’t have to worry about fitting into any of my clothes). One disadvantage to making bread is that you end up eating it. That’s why when the summer came, I moved on to vegetable kebabs.

But making bread has got to be one of the most satisfying things you’ll do in the kitchen. And it’s so simple, which is especially gratifying as this technological age marches on. No gadgets, no wizardry, nothing's needed but a few simple ingredients, and a little time and patience (patience, of course, being one of the things that's perhaps too often missing living in today's modern world). And that's the beauty of making bread: producing a healthy and nutritious staple of the average westerner's diet at very little cost and with such a simple process. It makes you feel completely self-sufficient, as though you wouldn't have any problem surviving come Armageddon (provided the supermarkets are still open and you can get a bag of flour and some instant yeast).

What you need to make homemade bread is a good strong flour, yeast, water, and a little oil; and in terms of apparatus, apart from an oven and a baking tray, just a bowl for mixing (although Jamie Oliver encourages us all to do away with the bowl and just mix the ingredients together on a clean counter-top – still haven’t quite managed to pull that one off, Jamie…). In terms of effort, if you're going to bake bread the "old-fashioned" way (i.e. without the use of any wizardry such as a bread-making machine), you’ll need to knead the dough to a silky and elastic texture, although the Guardian’s master baker Dan Lepard’s recipe for the perfect white loaf calls for no more than three 10-second kneading stints, which means you won’t even work up a sweat (and yes, it does produce a perfectly acceptable loaf).

You do need a bit of patience though when making bread in order to let the dough rise (prove), but again, all it takes is a couple of hours at the most. And this is something that you can just leave and come back to at the appropriate time - you don't have to stand over it and baby it while it's doing its thing.

If you place a bowl of boiling water in the bottom of the oven when you put the loaf in, you will get a lovely golden, crispy crust.

I love the way that Dan Lepard nonchalantly says that if you throw in some olives and chopped herbs you’ll get one of those “wow” breads you see in magazines. How cool is he?! As if that isn’t the ultimate goal of anyone who’s ever taken to making bread!

Once you’ve pulled one or two basic white loaves out of the oven, it’s natural to want to move on to something a little more exotic, which is where Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s fig and walnut bread recipe comes in. I didn’t use figs when I made this, but instead used dates and walnuts. The bread was excellent. Again, I placed a baking tray of boiling water in the bottom of the oven when I put the loaves in to get a nice crust on them. I would advise only making this bread when you have the opportunity for hours and hours of exercise though!

Great digestive biscuit recipe No. 2

Nothing too taxing about this: digestive, cheese, butter, Marmite. A good cheese can make anything taste good. I'm convinced that if you put decent cheese on top of a plate of sawdust it will taste good. Not that digestive biscuits need anything added to them to make them taste better - they're pretty good tasting all by themselves. But there's something about cheese and Marmite and butter and a crumbly thick digestive that just works really well. The first time I tasted this combination was after a night out with my friend Caroline (I have her to thank for introducing me to eating digestives this way). And I was surprised that something with such basic ingredients could taste so good. But that's usually the way it is.

The only problem with eating biscuits this way is that you have double the guilt - treble the guilt if you add butter, which I always do. And because this is so quick and easy to prepare you could quite happly work your way through the biscuit tin as well as a packet of cheese. You'd be OK with the Marmite, though, because as everyone knows, that never runs out...

Quick and easy fried bread

One of the excuses people use for living on precooked convenience foods is that it takes too long to make a decent meal from scratch. Utter tosh. Granted, if you want to eat burgers and fries, then yes, it will take quite a bit of time to make that meal from scratch. But what’s the point of making burgers and fries when you can get them anywhere and everywhere. Surely one of the good things about making a meal from scratch is that it’s not food you’re going to see on every restaurant menu (including the fast-food ones).

When I lived in the UK, I rarely made Indian dishes because there are so many excellent Indian restaurants on almost every high street in the south east of the country – in a lot of other places in the country too. The food’s excellent and it’s reasonably priced. However, that’s not the case here in Edmonton. While there are Indian restaurants, they’re not that accessible for me (at least not without having to drive miles).

I sometimes try my hand at the odd curry but having tasted such good Indian food, it’s always just an OK dish. I find that it’s much easier to whip up a cracking pasta dish. And now we really are talking quick cooking! Jamie Oliver has a recipe in one of his cookbooks that uses no more than half a dozen ingredients and it’s excellent. I’m always amazed that something with so few ingredients in it can taste so good. It’s spaghetti, extra virgin olive oil, garlic, chilli, anchovies, and lemon. However, what really makes this dish so good, I suspect, is the pangritata that’s placed on top of the spaghetti after cooking. Pangritata is poor person’s parmesan cheese – what the pheasants in Italy used to use instead of parmesan. It’s basically fried bread so probably not that good for you, but at least it’s cooked in olive oil and not lard! In Jamie’s chilli spaghetti recipe, you cook breadcrumbs – and these have to be course breadcrumbs, it won’t work with fine ones – in olive oil with sliced garlic and thyme. Once they turn crispy and golden, drain on absorbent kitchen paper all ready for when the pasta’s finished.

To make the pasta dish, cook the spaghetti. While it’s cooking, soften a chopped garlic clove in three or four tablespoons of olive oil. Add the anchovies to the pan. Once they start to melt, crumble in a dried chilli or sprinkle in some chilli flakes, and squeeze in the juice of a lemon. Once the pasta’s cooked, add the chilli mix and give it a good stir so that all the pasta’s coated. Divide between two bowls and then sprinkle on the pangritata. It takes no longer than around 15 minutes to prepare – including all preparation. I would happily eat this every day if I could only convince myself that fried bread was good for my health!