Cooking on a budget

If you are on a budget, try to cook dishes with ingredients that you commonly have in your kitchen.  Following are the most common stocked ingredients in any household whether Western or Asian dishes are often cook: 

-eggs
-salt
-pepper
-butter
-cheese
-bread

So let us work on making egg sandwiches without adding any fish or meat in it to make it budget friendly.

1st variation:

-Boil 2 eggs

-Mashed it up with the seasonings to taste.

-Spread butter on 2 slices of bread.

-Top 1 slice of bread with the mashed eggs.

-Place second slice of bread over it to eat.

2nd variation:

-Beat 2 eggs with seasonings.

-Heat butter in pan till it melts.

-Pour eggs in to scramble and cook it to your liking, ie, still runny or well cooked.

-Spread butter on 2 slices of bread.

-Top 1 slice of bread with the scramble eggs.

-Place second slice of bread over it to eat.

3rd variation:

-Heat butter in pan till it melts.

-Break an egg in to fry with seasonings.

-Cook it to your liking, ie, well cooked with crispy edges or sunny side up.

-Spread butter on a slice of bread.

-Top it with the egg.

-Fold to eat.

4th variation:

-cook based on variation 1 or 2 or 3.

-toast bread before adding eggs.

-add a slice of cheese.

5th variation:

You can change the flavour of your sandwich by adding what you have in your kitchen. If you often cook, the most common ingredients you are likely to stock is cucumber and tomato. Other greens you can add to your sandwiches without first cooking them are:

-Lettuce

-Onions (I prefer them fried till soft)

-Peppers

-Sprouts

You can also add fruits like these:

-Bananas

-Apples

-Pears

-Strawberries

-Peaches

-Avocado

-Pickles like olives

Check out this link to Fruits and Veggies to see if there are any fruits or vegetables that you can experiment with to make your sandwiches creatively.  

I shared a very good example in an earlier posting of a deep fried sandwich creatively made with commonly used ingredients in Asian and Western dishes:

-Mashed potato

-Mashed eggs

-Mixed veggies (carrots, corn, green peas)

-Minced onion

-Relish

It is actually a popular Korean street food. If I make it on a budget, I will not include sasame seeds and relish since they are not common ingredients in my kitchen. The sausage or other meat of my choice can be added as an option. Since cornstarch and flour are used in making the batter, it will turn out crispy even without coating the sandwich with panko bread crumbs to deep fry.

Also check out the kind of condiments that you can add to your sandwiches to make them tastier too.  Some of them may already be in your kitchen:

-Yellow mustard

-Relish

-Vinegar

-Wasabi

-Hot sauce

-Dijon mustard

-Mayonnaise

-Ketchup

-Barbecue sauce

-Soy sauce

You can watch this video for ideas on how some of the above condiments can be used to make your egg sandwiches more flavourful.

These are the ingredients and steps used for making them:

1st variation:

2 Boiled Eggs (mashed with fork)

Season eggs with:

2 Tbsp Mayonnaise

Pinch of Salt

1/4 Tsp Pepper

1 Tsp White Vinegar

To serve:

Spread mashed eggs on 1 slice of white bread before topping with the other.

2nd variation:

2 Eggs (Scrambled with 1 1/2 Tsp butter)

Season eggs with:

Pinch of Salt

1 Tsp Butter

To serve:

Toast 2 slices of bread.

Spread mayonnaise on both slices of bread before adding scrambled eggs on 1 slice.

Add Pepper to scrambled eggs.

Top that with a few slices of cucumber.

Spread hot sauce on second slice of bread before topping it over first slice of bread.

3rd variation:

2 Eggs (boiled and mashed)

Season eggs with:

2 Tbsp Mayonnaise

1 Tbsp Onion (chopped)

2 Tbsp Coriander (minced)

1/4 Tsp Pepper

1 Tsp Lemon Juice

1/4 Tsp Garlic

To serve:

Spread butter on 2 slices of bread and top 1 slice with eggs.

Sprinkle chili flakes over eggs.

Top with second slice of bread.

Toast one side of bread on pan and spread butter on the other side.

Turn over to toast buttered side.

When you have a budget to meet, always find ways to make use of ingredients before they reach their expiry date.  This bread and eggs topped with cheese breakfast should be an easy meal to cook if you have bread that you have kept in the fridge because it is going stale.  It is also a great way to get rid of overripe tomatoes.

Deep Frying Chicken with Cream Crackers

Would you like to cut down visits to KFC with your children?  Stock some cream crackers at home.  I used to buy them when my children were younger.  I can crushed them up to coat marinated sliced meat to deep fry.

I was taught by a former colleague to marinate the chicken with MSG but I think this recipe from Heavenly Rice is better.  

Check out how I make it for my children.  For a start, I do not use wine in my dishes as it can cause my skin to itch.  You can replace chicken with thinly sliced pork.  I usually cook with pork loin.

You can save on oil when the meat is sliced thinly because you can just pan fry it.

I was taught to marinate the meat with MSG only but you can skip the marinating process because the cream crackers will make the meat taste salty enough after deep frying.  I often add this pan fried meat to my sweet and sour dish.

I usually marinate my pork in advance with the following ingredients:

1) Garlic Oil

2) Soya Sauce and/or Oyster Sauce

3) Sugar

4) Cornstarch

If you like your meat crispier, you can dip the meat in egg, then cornflour (as I was taught), egg again before coating it with the crushed cream crackers.  Since I have already marinated my meat with cornflour, I just dip it in egg followed by cream crackers.  The deep fried chicken or pork will taste just as good, in the way I was taught, without shaoxing wine or sesame oil.  If you run out of cream crackers you can dip the meat in egg, then cornflour and repeat with egg then cornflour before you deep frying it.  

Other than the cream crakers, I have also tried coating the meat with:

-breadcrumbs (my son bought a pack and used it only once)
-potato chips (I like onion flavored chips)
-cornflakes (because what we have in stock have gone soft)

You can discover other coating ingredients you can use from this article:

The Best 30 Breadcrumbs Substitutes 

You can use the measurements provided for ingredients by Heavenly Rice as follows: 

Fried Toast Sandwich

Do you know that sandwiches can be deepfried?  See how it is made in Korea.  It is a popular street food that you can find at traditional markets there.

These are the ingredients and steps to make nine sandwiches.

Can pick up some tricks on how to make the work easier if you watch how it is made at a stall in high quantity.

Cooking with Sengkuang

 Sengkuang (yam bean) is also a weekly buy because my girl loves eating it.

I can only cook it when my bike shop is closed as it takes time to prepare. As sengkuang can also be used to sweeten soup, I usually cut out a few pieces to store in the freezer. 

This is how it looks like cooked with
-garlic oil
-salt
-soya sauce
-pepper

As you cook it, the sengkuang will soften and its juice will drip into the sauce. Turn the fire down low to simmer still the sengkuang is tender enough to eat. Add water if the sauce dries up. Leftover sengkuang can be made into popiah by rolling the ingredient in spring roll pastry. 

I do not discard the leftover sauce from this dish as it can be used to flavour rice or porridge. The spring rolls can be deep fried but I prefer to use the air fryer.

If you have the time, you can even make your own wraps.

I will also share with you the traditional way for cooking this yam bean dish which I found on Huang Kitchen.  This is also the way my mother-in-law taught me to cook it.  She also added dried shredded squid, which she soaked in water to clean and soften.  This is then added to the fried dried prawns to fry before the yam bean is added.  I started cooking it without the seafood products when my husband was down with Graves disease and should avoid eating them. You can see the adaptations I have made to it from this chart.