Tag: cheap dinner

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.

3-5 ingredient meals Part.1

notyourusualmomma2 Comments

Hello beautiful people! The last time I wrote about “How to meal plan on a very small budget” and today I want to give you a few meal ideas as well. These meals are super simple, not fancy at all, just for pure survival but at the same time as interesting as possible to not to go crazy by eating always the same stuff! I said in my last post that you can mix your basics and toppings however you like, here are my favorites.

Rice salad

This photo is like from 3 years ago & was not meant for a blog so excuse the quality, actually excuse all the photos in this post.

Boil some rice, cut up tomatoes, cucumbers and mince a little bit of garlic. Mix the veggies in a bowl with some oil, salt, pepper and any other sspices you want. I also add lettuce sometimes. Mix it all up with rice and eat, if you want to or have put some mayo on tp. Or sour cream or even ketchup if that’s what you like, but in my opinion mayo is the best for this.

Breakfast rice

You can either cook it normally & add some milk later (or when you’re heating it up) or cook it directly in some milk. Add a tiny bit of salt and some sugar when it’s cooking and top it with some jam later. You could also use maple syrup, but it’s suuuuper expensive where I live, so if you can get it for a little price – I envy you!

Pasta salad

Here I just boiled some pasta and eggs, chopped the eggs, wurstel and fresh cucumber. Mixed it all up with salt, pepper, maybe some other spices. Then I mixed in some mayonnaise and yogurt. That’s more than 5 ingredients but you can mix in only mayo or yogurt, or sour cream. Use what you have.

Lazy lunch

Here I cut up some bread and wurstels, put it on an oven tray, poured on top some eggs, sprinkled some salt and pepper on top and cooked until the eggs were ready and then served it with lettuce. Again, any sauces are very welcome with this kind of food.

Black bread sandwitch

This photo is pretty self explanatory: black bread, margarine (or butter), cheese, bananas and milk for a drink for more calories. If you can find good and cheap black bread then definitely get some cause black bread is so much more filling and better for you than white bread :)

That’s it for today, I’ll definitely make more of these! Let me know what do you think of these and if you make these tell me how it went and how did you like them. Until next time.