Food Riot

Serve this with a nice, fresh salad. Health, health, health, sweetie!

Having had a splendid weekend of guzzling expensive food with a pair of deeply delicious steaks on Saturday and a Topside Roast on Sunday, it is now time to realise that I am poor.  With this in mind, I have been looking at several Samsung-branded cardboard boxes as I’m told that these make excellent beds when sleeping in the streets. Apparently the fridge boxes are the pick of the bunch.

So here I am, the very fortunate recipient of way too much undeserved, ill-afforded, good food. Time to come back to earth and live within my tragically meagre means. Yes, if you’re a client of mine, you may, with great pleasure, ring me at 2.30am with a new brief, if that is your wont. I’ll be all ears, promise.

So, parsimony it is.  Dinner tonight will feed three, possibly four of us and it will cost less than a fiver. It has to! Because we are once again po’ folk, we need to feed our wasting-away bodies with bulk. Bulk is either rice, pasta or potatoes. One of those three will form the basic body of the meal, with other ingredients added to make it more exciting and tasty. I’ll be doing a variant on this meal.

Tonight’s bulk will be pasta. More particularly, it will be Amori. 64p for 500g – and I won’t use the whole lot.

Ingredients:

• Pasta – I’m using Amori, but any of the short tubular ones will be fine
• Sliced Frankfurters
• A rough chopped onion
• A chopped leek
• Some rough chopped mushroom (or tinned sliced ones)
• A rough chopped pepper – red or green – whatever you can find in the fridge
• A tin of Cream of Mushroom Soup
• Some frozen peas
• Rosemary
• Basil
• Garlic
• Salt
• Pepper

Method:

• Boil the pasta according to the instructions on the packet
• In a hot pan add some olive oil. Just a little
• Add your sliced franks
• Add the ’shrooms
• Add the peppers
• Add your rough chopped onions.
• Add the leeks
• Let it all sweat down a bit and allow the franks to gain some colour.

Fry the ingredients until the onions and leeks have gone soft. Note the sprig of rosemary, which gets thrown away after cooking

• Pour in your cream of Mushroom soup
• Add your frozen peas
• Bring it up to the boil and as son as it starts boiling, turn the heat way down low, simmer for 5 minutes
• When the pasta is ready, drain it and return it to its pot
• Empty the sauce into the pasta pot with the pasta
• Stir

The sauce just prior to mixing with the pasta.

• Serve
• Taste
• Season with salt and pepper
• Taste. Is the seasoning right? Did you add too much? Idiot. Did you not add enough? Add more.
• Eat.