KEY POINTS:
With the price of food continuing to rise, along with other essentials such as motor fuel and electricity, those of us on fixed and limited incomes need to watch what we eat.
And with winter coming on it is important that we eat properly, especially those of us who are getting on in years, because it helps us to cope with the cold.
I read from time to time in newspapers and magazines all sorts of menus designed to make eating affordable and nourishing, but they leave me cold.
I'm a meat and veg man and always have been and some of the stuff that appears in these economic menus I wouldn't have in the house.
So let's look at some good tucker for winter which we can prepare ourselves from fresh ingredients without it costing too much.
Soup is one of my favourites and the soup I make, eaten with bread and butter or toast, is a meal in itself. One brew can provide my wife and me with a week's inexpensive lunches.
From the Mad Butcher I obtain the meatiest beef (or bacon) bones I've ever seen (one pack makes three lots of stock) and simmer them gently for a couple of hours in about four litres of water.
Then I remove the bones, put the stockpot outside to cool, then in the fridge overnight. The next morning I skim off all the fat and begin to construct a brew.
The base is a packet of one of several types of King soup mix, then a couple of heaped teaspoons of beef stock and a cupful or so of green or yellow split peas.
Then into the food processor go a big onion, a big carrot, a big parsnip and a decent chunk of swede turnip which, chopped up together to the consistency I prefer, get tipped into the soup pot.
If I'm using the pea and ham soup mix I boil up bacon bones and use bacon stock, and sometimes I add other chopped up veges, including diced potato.
Bits of meat sliced off the soup bones can go back into the pot, too.
The aromatic soup simmers for a couple of hours and there's our lunch for at least four days.
Winter, too, is a time for stews and these can provide dinners for several days. My favourite is steak and kidney and every time I make it we have it three different ways.
It consists of a slab or two of topside steak and a pack of six kidneys, a spoon or two of beef stock, an onion, some frozen peas and a couple of cut-up carrots, cooked in a heavy metal casserole dish.
There are cheaper cuts than topside and I've tried them all. But I buy topside because it is lean. My wife and I are Jack Spratt and his wife in reverse, and there is far too much wastage in trimming the cheaper cuts.
The same applies to grilling steak and pork. The wastage in fat and gristle off sirloin, for instance, makes fillet steak worth the price because every gram is edible, and the same goes for pork fillets.
But back to steak and kidney stew. I cook it at 120C for at least four hours, which makes the meat melt-in-the mouth.
We have some with mashed spuds, then a few days later some more in a pie, and the rest we have with rice on a day when we want something quick and easy.
I'm a big meat eater and thus a connoisseur and I have come late to the Mad Butcher, simply because none of his shops were close to where I lived in Auckland.
But now I have a Mad Butcher shop just round the corner and in recent months have been sampling many of his wares. What I have found is that his meat is not only invariably cheaper than elsewhere, it is also of equal or better quality.
Another thing I've discovered is that Countdown's ridiculously cheap Home Brand products, which once I would never have looked at, are in general of equal quality to brands that cost at least twice as much.
For instance, we make our own bread in a breadmaker and use a lot of flour.
A 5kg bag of Home Brand high grade flour costs just over half the price of other "recognised" brands, a saving of about $4 - and you wouldn't know the difference.
And these days I prefer frozen to fresh vegetables - cooked in a steamer - except for spuds and parsnips, once again because there's no waste and there's always one brand on special at the supermarket.
I used to talk about "cheap and nasty". I've discovered that cheap doesn't necessarily mean nasty.
GARTH'S RECIPE
The base is a packet of soup mix, then a couple of heaped teaspoons of beef stock and a cupful or so of green or yellow split peas.
Then into the food processor go a big onion, a big carrot, a big parsnip and a decent chunk of swede.
