The beginning of the school year, more particularly September, always marks the return to a faster pace, but above all, the return of expenses that smash your budget and do not really bring you great satisfaction. Housing tax, back-to-school purchases, and this year, the kind of Damocles sword increases on all sides: gas, electricity, fuel oil, pellets, wood.
If we are hot in the ass in a figurative way, we can still bet that we are going to freeze it in the literal sense, our ass.
Seeing the black cloud of this dull and frankly collective anguish (at the same time, it must be said that we are all the same a certain teeming mass not being able to take out the tickets infinitely), I wanted to approach the theme of the food budget.
The food budget: analyze it, understand it and find its weak points
For a long time I paid little attention to the food budget, because it seemed manageable to me, certainly also because at the time, we did a lot of small shopping and going out 4 * 25 euros is not like going out 100 at once. I imagine that being young and carefree also means saying to yourself that ending the month in the green is already good and that savings can wait.
Still, the more time passes, the more I try to rationalize this budget which obviously takes up space!
In this Légumiades, I therefore propose to return to this notion of budget, but without necessarily taking it solely from the angle of figures. A budget is always a human behind, a person with difficulties, brakes, expectations, preferences. And food is not an addition of food or calories.
Then, we focus on how to proceed to take stock simply, diligently, and without lying to ourselves or trying to achieve an impossible goal.
The idea is to ask the right questions and understand where our capacity and our will lie in this objective of reducing your food budget.
Low budget recipes and not small greediness
Because low-budget cooking often rhymes with a super austere vision, very starchy dishes, low in fantasy, with the impression that a low-budget recipe is necessarily a recipe with little nutritional value and pleasure.
When you think about it, apart from rare exceptions, I am happy having prepared this issue and worked on these recipes, to see that vegetable products are inexpensive and that we have the choice to vary the pleasures.
It is understood that all this is to be balanced: all finished products such as tofu, vegetable strips or other imitations are quite expensive. I also talk about it, the way I distribute their use in my menus. The idea is not to become 100% dependent on home cooking, but to find the best way to organize yourself and eat while controlling what you spend.
The 10 recipes are as follows:
- Pumpkin, potato and white bean soup
- Long buns for the soup: béchamel sauce and smoked tofu
- Scrambled tofu, potatoes and coleslaw
- Butternut and rösti-style potato patties and their mushrooms
- Spinach pasta, shallot sauce
- Braised fennel, lentils and lemon sauce
- Roasted Squash, White Beans with Onions and Funky Bulgur
- Roasted carrots, chickpeas and semolina with herbs
- Apple and caramel cookies
- Roasted pear with cinnamon and its granola
A selection of 10 recipes, all very seasonal, delicious, most of them easy to execute. The first recipe is obviously a tribute (oh my god, it’s a woke blog here) to my mom who made it regularly, and whose little secrets I share with you. She’s nice, she explained everything to me well over the phone, I’m happy to share with you some of my culinary memories over the recipes that I’m sharing with you: that’s the basis of my cooking.
A framework of menus and 10 other low-budget recipes to reproduce endlessly
As its name suggests, I made a menu inspiration board and two “type” menus that we practice at home.
To be adapted obviously to your constraints but it also allows you to understand how we put our menus in place and to perhaps find some clues on a simple and logical operation, which is there to make your life easier.
I also quite debunk the myth of the rigid menu, which forces us to cook more than necessary and which exhausts us. In short, the menu is just there to let you know what you are going to eat without questioning yourself every day. An excellent tool for eating better (we realize better that we put pasta on the menu 4 times and we naturally tend to try to better balance our dishes) and save money by buying what we need.
I also made a board of 10 low-budget recipes that I often make and which are mostly seasonal all year round (because they are mostly made up of jars or boxes) or very easy to adapt. It seems essential to me to get off to a good start and succeed in making tempting menus!
I also took the time to slip in a few words about the way in which poverty is perceived in France, and more generally what is expected of people who have reduced means.
It seemed important to me to take the keyboard on this subject, because speaking of low budget, one can quickly fall into the pitfall of guilt, and that is anything but my point in this issue.
We are here to have fun and do the best we can with what we have.
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