Insanely tight budget cooking with someone who cannot cook, Part 2

1. Potato and pea soup, during cooking

2. Potato and pea soup, after cooking

This soup is pretty straightforward. The leek is fried in olive oil first and then the various ingredients – peas, potato, celery, thyme, vegetable stock – are added, it’s all boiled to a mashable state, then puréed. Served with garlic bread (the garlic bread is made with olive oil and crushed garlic).

[Edited 29 August 2012 to correct a spelling error.]

Insanely tight budget cooking with someone who cannot cook, Part 1

Cooking and I simply don’t mix. I’m more than happy to eat (within my fussy boundaries as someone with some weird food allergies and a preference for dairy-free vegetarian meals); it’s just that creating the food in the first place doesn’t come naturally.

However, the necessity and burden of cooking has been circumstantially placed upon me for the duration of a three week period in which I have to feed three people on an absurdly tight budget.

To help me juggle the insanity of suddenly cooking for the household, I have been following some basic rules: choosing recipes for the week in advance; only shopping with a shopping list; trying to only go to the shops twice a week (to save on petrol and to reduce spending). It hasn’t been easy. To be honest, it’s been downright difficult. But it’s a chance to grow and there isn’t really another option.

To make things simpler, less expensive and satisfy my environmentalist-animal-loving-health conscious self, I decided I would cook vegan food. It’s just better. And, with the combined forces of three vegetarians, two of whom are already allergic to dairy, veganism covers all bases (as long as I don’t include any allergenic fruits in the meals – because two of us have different fruit allergies, meaning bananas, paw paws and kiwi fruits are out of the question).

So, in order to prove to people that I have, in fact, lived up to the challenge, I started taking photos of some of the meals I made.

Here are photos of some of the meals thus far.

1. Roasted potato, red onion, and red capsicum served on salad.

2. The salad – baby rocket, red kidney beans, and chopped flat parsley with a dash of fresh-squeezed orange juice.

3. A week’s worth of dinner ingredients.

4. Noodles with soy sauce-marinated organic firm tofu, red and green capsicum, bok choy, celery, all tossed together in a wok with cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil.

5. Tofu and vegetable salad with peanut satay sauce.

6. Enough vegetables to provide three people with at least four meals.