Category: Recipes

Italian Spinach Pie

notyourusualmomma2 Comments

Hello dear readers (or the only reader that reads this blog) :D Today I have another simple and cheap recipe for you. It’s great to have meat-less recipes, cause we all know that meat ain’t cheap. Or maybe you’re just trying to cut down on your meat consumption. Let’s get to it, shall we?

Ingredients:

DOUGH

  • ca 500g of flour
  • 235g of water
  • 25g of extra virgin olive oil

FILLING

  • 1kg of spinach (fresh or frozen)
  • 250g of ricotta
  • 80g of parmigian cheese (you can use any kind of cheese, I totally forgot to buy the parmigiano once and used a regular cheese and we didn’t even feel the difference – just don’t tell the Italians)
  • 1 big egg (more if you want to put in whole eggs, read about it under nr.5)
  • salt pepper

BRUSHING

  • 2 tbsp of water
  • 2 tbsp of olive oil

or

  • 1 beaten egg
  1. First you need to make the dough. Pour the water and oil in a bowl and start adding the flour. It might be a little less or a little more than 500 grams. The dough needs to be elastic and not too hard. Wrap it in a plastic wrap and let it sit for an hour in room temperature.
  2. In the meantime cook your spinach.Drain and let cool. If you’re using fresh ones, chop them up a little bit. Heat your oven to 180° C.
  3. In a bowl mix your spinach, egg, cheese, ricotta and add some salt and pepper to your taste.
  4. Now divide your dough in two pieces. Use starch instead of flour, it’s much more efficient on helping your dough not to stick to the surface. Roll it out to a thin layer (mine came to small this time, I promise I’ve done better, I just don’t have any photos – I’ll update it later on). Brush a 26cm oven dish/pan with butter or oil and cover with the dough. Stick it tightly on the sides.
  5. Now pour in your mix, roll out the other piece of dough, cover and brush with the oil-water mix or the egg. If you want to, before closing the pie, make a few holes in the mixture and pour in a whole egg, then sprinkle them with a bit of salt.
  6. Cook for about 40-45 minutes. Serve warm (not hot) or room temperature.

 There you go, I hope you liked this recipe. I often try to get things to as simple as possible, especially when I am trying a new recipe. I will search for the simplest version and then I’ll build from there. It’s a great technique when you’re just learning to cook. As always, if you try it – let me know how it went, did you like it and feel free to share them with me on my twitter.

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3-5 ingredient meals Part.2

notyourusualmomma1 Comment

Here I am with another post for simple, cheap and few ingredient meals. Here’s Part 1 if you missed it.

Rice with veggies

Again, old photos, not meant for a blog, just to give you an idea.

All I did here was to boil some rice and a frozen veggie mix, threw it all together with some spices and voilà. Feel free to add a sauce of any kind.

Homemade pizza

This one is tecnically more ingredients but if you count the dough as just one then you’ve got: dough, tomato sauce, cheese, wieners .Maybe you can find a good price on the dough, or you can just do it yourself – it’s super simple I promise (maybe I’ll do a post one day). I don’t know about the tomato sauces in ther countries but I always add a little bit of sugar to eliminate the acidity and salt for taste. During our hardest times we even made the pizza with just the tomato sauce, no cheese or other toppings. Use what you have! Once we used just onions as toppings too and it was great.

Semolino porridge breakfast

Prepare it with water or milk, add a little sugar and just a tiny bit off salt and serve it with jam. Or maple syrup, compote, cinnamon or fruit – as always whatever you have in hand.

Egg-butter sandwitch

Boil some eggs, smash them with a fork. Mix the eggs with butter, salt and pepper (you can add mayonnaise too). Spread it on your sandwitch and add lettuce. Boom, simple and tasty and cheap!

French toast casserole breakfast

For this take some old bread, make big pieces and put a first layer on your oven dish, take some jam and put it here and there on the bread. Then mix some milk, sugar and cinnamon, pour some over the first layer. Then repeat for the second layer. Do as many layers as you want, cook in the oven until the top is nice and crunchy. Serve it with some milk while it’s still warm. Add some fruit is you have some, the original recipe just goes with milk.

Hopefully these gave you some ideas and please let me know if you try these! See you next time.

Sweet curd balls

notyourusualmomma1 Comment

Hi there and welcome :) So this recipe is not anything new or special that I invented, it’s a largely used recipe from where I come from. But I want to share it with you, cause it’s very cheap & yummy and otherwise you wouldn’t know to search for it, I’m sure it wouldn’t come up in “cheap sweets” if you did a google or pinterest search.


Once again, not the best photos. I made those for my husband to show him what I was doing. I always send him photos of food while he’s at work :P

Ingredients:

250-300g of curd or ricotta

2 eggs

3 tbsp of sugar (depends on your preference)

Around 7 tbsp of flour (depends on the size on your eggs)

1 tsp of baking powder

just a pinch of salt

Optional: lemon zest or juice

Oil for cooking


  • Beat the eggs with sugar
  • Mix in the curd/ricotta, then salt and baking powder
  • Start mixing in the flour, until it’s a nice thick consistency
  • Heat up the oil (use an oil that doesn’t have a strong taste). To test the oil put in a tiny piece of dough and if it starts to form little bubbles right away then it’s ready
  • To form the balls, use two spoons. Take some dough on one spoon and scrape it into the oil with another one. You can definitely do a better job than me, cause I just don’t care as long as it tastes good :P
  • Prepare a plate with some paper towels to absorb the oil and remove the balls wih a slotted spoon/skimmer spoon.
  • Sprinkle on some powdered sugar before serving and there you go

Enjoy your creation – bon apetit! As always I hope this post was useful and definitely let me know if you try these out :) Until next time lovely people.