The Thrifty Cookbook: 476 Ways to Eat Well With Leftovers (74 page)

Baked custard
Place a couple of teacups of very ripe prepared fruit in an ovenproof dish. Replace the sponge mix entirely with Custard (see
page 33
) and pour this over the fruit. Put the dish in a roasting tin containing enough hot water to come half way up the sides of the dish. Bake at 160°C/Gas Mark 3 for 15–20 minutes, until the custard has set. You could make this in individual ramekins instead, in which case reduce the cooking time to around 12 minutes.

Packed with banana goodness, this is a failsafe sweet and sticky loaf cake made in a bowl with a fork and no sophistication whatsoever. The browner, mushier and generally more ‘over’ the bananas, the better. Don’t even consider using unripe fruit.

Warm slices of banana cake can be served as a pudding with Custard (see
page 33
). When I last made this cake, I found two small squares of leftover cooking chocolate, cut it up with a sharp knife and poked the chunks into the raw mixture. Childish, but absolutely fantastic. You could equally add a teaspoon of ground mixed spice, a good pinch of ground cinnamon or ½ teacup of chopped walnuts or pecans.

2 medium bananas, peeled and mashed with a fork

1 egg

130g self-raising flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

55g very soft butter

100g caster sugar

Preheat the oven to 180°C/Gas Mark 4. Butter a small loaf tin, about 22 x 12cm. I line mine with baking parchment, which makes the cake easier to remove.

Put all the ingredients in a bowl and mix together, combining well with a fork. Depending on how mushy the bananas are, you might need to add a dessertspoon of warm water or milk to give the mixture a thick dropping consistency. Put the whole lot into the loaf tin and bake for 35–40 minutes. If the cake gets too brown on top, you might need to cover it loosely with a piece of foil for the last 5 minutes or so. When a fine metal skewer or a piece of raw spaghetti poked into the centre comes out clean, the cake is done. Let it cool in the tin for 5 minutes, then run a knife around the edges to loosen them and turn the cake out on to a wire rack to cool.

Alternatively, you could spoon the mixture into a muffin tray lined with paper cases, in which case reduce the cooking time to 15–20 minutes.

If you have made Cottage Cheese or Paneer (see
page 206
) and, realising how easy it is, want to try your hand at more cheeses (it is an addictive habit once formed), you will need both good advice and starter cultures. I recommend you look at.

Rather than pour fat down the sink, check out
www.lessmess.co.uk
for more environmentally friendly ways of collecting and binning it.

I’m not going to suggest you get a chicken or pig to use up the last of your scraps – though anyone with a dog knows that they are useful for the bits left on plates. But I’ll admit it: composting makes me feel good and I’ve only got a basic little bin from a superstore and a postage-stamp-sized garden. It’s a fuss-free way to recycle organic waste and it (really) doesn’t smell. If you follow some simple rules, compost is a magic gift – feeding the plants, improving the soil, controlling weeds and helping to minimise watering. And, yes, it helps reduce landfill.

Everyone knows a gardener so, even if you aren’t tempted by hanging baskets or heritage seed catalogues, it’s not going to be hard to find a home for all that rotted vegetable matter. All the uncooked, organic bits that simply
can’t
be eaten up – the teabags, eggshells, soggy salad and banana skins – can be composted, reducing your household garbage quite substantially. Unlike landfill, well-composted food generates no methane or the nasty, polluting black slime that seeps into rivers and streams.

A good compost heap needs a pretty equal amount of ‘green’, or nitrogen-rich, and ‘brown’, or carbon-rich, matter, plus air and warmth. If the balance is out of kilter, it can turn to slime and start to smell.

Start out with a layer of twiggy material, which will help to aerate the pile. Experts then advise that you should layer ‘brown’ and ‘green’ matter in roughly equal amounts, throwing in a layer of earth or manure (from a garden-centre bag kept at the side) every so often to help with the good bacteria, and sprinkling water over the pile if it looks very dry.

In reality, few of us live quite like that, but if you ensure that what you put into the bin is in roughly equal proportions of ‘green’ to ‘brown’, you will not go far wrong.

Garden cuttings, lawn mowings, weeds