I'm still around..and news!

I feel slightly guilty that my blogging of late has been a little sporadic and not very exciting, as some of you will know I was made redundant back in April, without warning, and thus resulted in a rather large dent in the weekly shopping bill!

However, it has been a couple of weeks in the process but I am now *very* pleased to report that I have a new job, at last, which I will be starting hopefully in the next week or two!! I am in process of completely re-training and looking forward to a big change!! I also can't wait to get back to actually affording good ingredients again!!

By nature, whilst I love ingredients like expensive aged rib-eye steaks, I also am a bargain hunter and having a lot less money has resulted in a few good and interesting dishes, which will probably become regulars here!

A favourite was a gammon risotto, made using a small Basics unsmoked gammon joint which was about £1.80, also I had some romaine lettuce that needing eating so it got shredded and added at the end, a new one on me but it tasted great and gave the risotto a little crunch!



Also a good dinner was courgettes, fried and cooked with tinned tomatoes and a tin of mixed bean, along with chillis and garlic:



Whilst it needs a little tweaking, this good value bake made from tomato & oregano ravaoli, topped with a tomato and red onion sauce, slices of Basics pepperoni and basics mozzarella, grilled until golden, will be featuring again:



Unfortunately, amongst all the good I suppose there has to be some bad - these rather attractive looking Peach Melba cheesecakes, made to a Waitrose recipe, went swiftly into the bin! Please do not ever use light soft cheese to make cheesecake, unless of course you particuarly like the taste of fruit with soured cream flavouring...However the fruit topping part was good, so I will be making again - but with the full fat soft cheese!