The VegHog’s Cheap Eats Cooking Challenge 2022 – Round up

 

Earlier in January I called for my Cheap Eats Cooking Challenge 2022 and now is the time to end it. It wasn’t a huge audience success for the participation (actually no other recipes shared than my own), but I got lot of nice comments on social media so I’m happy about it. It would’ve been nicer for this post to have some other contributions as well, but I will share some of my dishes instead.

I cooked loads of affordable dishes during the past four weeks and I have posted all of them on Instagram, so you might also want to have a look at #theveghogscheapeats to catch them all.

I selected my German Spätzle noodles with onions, white wine and cheese recipe as my main contribution for the challenge. It is a very comforting dish, where a basic dough for the noodles or mini dumplings really goes a long way. My Spätzle dough recipe is vegan, but many people also make them with eggs. You could veganise this whole dish by using vegan cheese. You can find my recipe here.

Pasta

Pasta is a true staple of cheap eats and student cuisine. I have made a lot of pasta myself recently as my homemade vegan pasta dough is very cheap and making pasta from scratch keeps you occupied for a while so that you have less time for snacking in between. Of course I also cooked many dishes with ready made pasta, it’s not just affordable, but also very convenient on busy weekdays.

Rice & couscous

Rice and couscous dishes also tend to be on the cheaper side and they can be a nice change from all that pasta. All you need to add is some veggies and maybe tofu and you’re good to go.

Soups

A good hearty soup is so lovely every now and again and even from the most basic ingredients you can make a nice soup or broth. I made these tomato-based soups and also my own vegetable broth. I added homemade dumplings into one of the soups making it even more filling.

Potatoes

The good old potatoes also make nice economical dishes, which can be very comforting and filling. They are best friends with onions and cheese, so only sky is the limit with what else to add!

Baking

If you bake bread yourself, you can save a bit of money and as a benefit have nice fresh bread at home. I usually just make some breakfast rolls and pizzas, because they are easy, but I would like to be a better bread baker.

Mexican food

I find that there are many good cheap recipe alternatives in the Mexican cooking. Once you have some basic spices and pulses at home, you can make a lot of different things like quesadillas, tacos and Mexican rice.

Indian food

Vegan curries with pulses are excellent Cheap Eats. You can make a huge dish with just some spices, pulses and veggies and don’t have to break the bank.

This was my small contribution towards cheap eating and the dishes were all very nice. I even saved some money and will now treat myself with something nice.

Have further a nice week!

Your VegHog

 

The VegHog’s Cheap Eats Cooking Challenge 2022

 

Isn’t money always a bit tight in the beginning of a new year? There are a lot of bills to pay and I at least usually spend a bit too much on Christmas and New Year, which means that I’ll have to be more economical in January. That is why I also want to eat a bit more basic foods and not overspend on fancy ingredients. On that note I’ve decided to have a vegan and vegetarian cheap eats cooking challenge for sharing economical recipes and I would like you to join me in this cheapskatedness.

I have held a couple of Cheap Eats weeks in the past, in 2016 and 2017. This time I just wanted to extend the timeframe slightly over one week so that any willing participants would have more time to contribute.

If you want to take part in this event, please follow these simple rules:

• Publish your economical vegan or vegetarian recipe on your blog or social media latest on 15^th February 2022.

• Share the public link to the post with the recipe with me in the comments field below this post.

• Use the hashtag #theveghogscheapeats when posting the recipe (voluntary).

• You are also welcome to use my Cheap Eats banner on top of this page in your posts.

I will write a round up with all contributions after mid February. Have fun cooking and saving some money!

Your VegHog

 

Koshari

Koshari or Kushari is an Egyptian dish containing rice, lentils, macaroni, tomato sauce, crispy fried onions and cumin. There are different variations of the dish, and sometimes also chickpeas or short spaghetti are added. It's a wholesome meal, often served as street food, and it's one of Egypt's national dishes.

I had koshari for the first time as street food in London, and I've been making my own ever since I tasted the goodness. Now we also have a koshari restaurant close to our home, which is very tempting.

I made this koshari with brown rice, green lentils, small macaroni, spicy chickpeas, crispy fried onions and spicy homemade tomato sauce. It was seasoned with ground cumin, smoked paprika, salt and black pepper. I also think that koshari is the ultimate cheap eats that you can make from stuff out of the dry cupboard. I'm trying to save some money for the summer holidays without compromising healthy eating, and that's when koshari comes to the picture.

Have a lovely Sunday everyone!

Your VegHog

The VegHog's Cheap Eats Week 2017 Round Up

This week was The VegHog's Cheap Eats Week 2017, which has now finally come to its end. I've been following my money spending more closely and trying to cook in a more economical way. I've been trying to utilise many things from my dry cupboard and using seasonal vegetables for cooking. I think that planning is key when you want to save money. I made a weekly cooking plan and stuck to it, used what I already had, used left-overs whenever possible etc. It wasn't difficult to do, so I'm wondering why I'm sometimes so lazy to plan properly, which often leads to food waste. I will try to be better now in any case, as I have a big project to save for, but I still don't want to blog less or let the quality slip. We will see how it goes, thankfully vegetarian cooking isn't too expensive in any case.

This week I also called for my fellow food bloggers to take part and share their money saving recipes, and here are the lovely entries I received.

Laura posted a recipe for Chickpeas & veggies soup with rainbow salad. She also told how her taste buds have changed with the time, as as a child she couldn't stand a vinegar addition to her soup, which her parents used to do, but now she really likes it. This soup contains a lot of veggies, carrots, parsnip, broccoli with chickpeas and pasta. Sounds like a really wholesome veggie soup and I wouldn't mind trying that vinegar addition either. The salad is also wonderfully colourful and healthy. Those root vegetables and cabbage are really economical and so versatile.

Shaheen shared a Cinnamon Spice Butternut Squash and Chickpea Curry. This dish is great for cheap eats, as you can make a bigger bowl and heat it up on several days and stretch by adding some rice on the side. That's always a very clever money and time saving way of cooking. Also the ingredients are on the economical side. I like to cook a lot with chickpeas and seasonal squashes, as that tends to be quite cheap. This is a mild curry with lots of warming spices, and I really like the look of that cinnamon quill in the bowl. A chickpea curry of some sort is already on my planner for next week.

Thank you so much for these entries Laura and Shaheen, I'm so happy about both of them. I currently have so many bags of dried chickpeas in the cupboard and needed a bit of inspiration for them, so these dishes are just perfect to try.

I hope you have enjoyed the Cheap Eats Week, which will probably return next year. Have a pleasant Sunday!

Your VegHog

Tomato alphabet soup

The VegHog's Cheap Eats Week 2017 ends today and I will be posting a round up later today. I just wanted to quickly squeeze this tomato alphabet soup recipe in, as it's cheap to make and very filling. I always like the look of the alphabet pasta and should be using it more. It's kind of a gloomy Sunday over here, as this weekend has been quite chilly. It's just the right weather for soups and stews, so that's very suitable for cheap eats. You can make this soup by adding alphabet pasta to any tomato soup, but I wrote the recipe down below, how I made my tomato soup this time. I used a bit more tomato purée than usual in order to be saving on the fresh tomatoes.

Tomato alphabet soup

Ingredients

1 cup alphabet pasta

300 g vine tomatoes

3 garlic cloves

1 tbsp olive oil

100 ml tomato purée

2 tbsp vegetable stock powder

1 tsp salt

½ tsp ground black pepper

Fresh basil leaves

Method

Cook the alphabet pasta separately in water until done.

Chop the tomatoes coarsely and the garlic finely. Cook the garlic in olive oil for a couple of minutes and add the tomatoes. Then also add the tomato purée, vegetable stock powder, the seasoning and some water and let the soup simmer under lid for at least 30 minutes.

Add the pasta to the soup and cook for a few minutes more. Mix the fresh basil in just before serving.

Enjoy!

Your VegHog

Large homemade pizza

Saving money is the theme of the week. We're on The VegHog's CheapEats Week 2017 and I'm keen to cook for little money. There is still time also for you to share your economical recipe until midnight on Saturday. Click on the link to find more info.

By occasionally making your own pizza, instead of ordering a pizza or eating out, you can save a lot of money. I am a sucker for a good pizza and am too often tempted to eat pizza out, but actually a homemade pizza is so much a tastier that I should make one more often. A pizza doesn't even take that long to make. When the dough is rising, there's time to prepare the filling.

The beauty of a vegetarian pizza is also that you can put any vegetables that you fancy as a filling. This time I just thought that a plain tomato pizza would be nice. I made it with a semi spelt-wheat crust, which was also slightly thicker than usually. I very much enjoyed it as a dinner and the rest of the slices as a work lunch.

I used a variation of tomatoes in this pizza and slow-baked some of the halved cherry tomatoes in order to make them a little bit like sundried tomatoes (kind of like in this Oven Tomatoes recipe, but I didn't quite bake them as long as in that recipe).

Tomato pizza

Dough:

200 g spelt flour

200 g wheat flour

1 tbsp dry yeast

1 tsp salt

300 ml lukewarm water

2 tbsp olive oil

Mix the dry ingredients. Then add the water and knead. Then also add the olive oil and knead a little more. Let rise under a teatowel for about an hour.

Filling:

200 g selected tomatoes

½ cup tomato sauce

200 g mozzarella

Slice the tomatoes thinly. Make the tomato sauce or use a ready made sauce. Grate the mozzarella.

Roll out the pizza dough and put the fillings on the top. Bake at 220 C for about 10 minutes.

Enjoy!

Your VegHog

Red pea soup

And we're still on The VegHog's Cheap Eats Week 2017. Hopefully you are enjoying it and getting tips for cheaper eating. Actually homecooked vegetarian meals are always quite economical, if you have a basic larder of spices and a couple of sauces. Anyhow, I feel good if I can save a bit money sometimes.

Today's recipe is a Finnish style pea soup that requires quite a bit of patience. This particular soup I cooked for about seven hours before serving, so make sure you have a minimum of about four hours to spare. These red fox peas seemed to be a bit more sturdy than regular dried green peas. Many of these red peas stayed intact even after such a long cooking time. The target is to get many peas turn into full mash and become one with the vegetable stock forming a very thick soup. You don't need much of this soup to be full and this definitely is a very cheap soup to make.

Pea soup is traditionally eaten in Finland on Thursdays and on Shrove Tuesday, and it's also often served to the soldiers in the Finnish army.

Red pea soup

Ingredients

300 g dried red fox maple peas

2 large onions

3 garlic cloves

1 tsp vegetable stock extract

1 tbsp ground mustard seeds

Salt to taste

Ground white pepper to taste

Dash of liquid smoke

Sprinkle of smoked paprika

2 tbsp tomato purée

Method

Soak the dried peas overnight. Fill a large saucepan with water and boil the peas there heavily for the first 15 minutes.

Chop the onions and garlic and add the onions and the vegetable stock extract to the saucepan and let simmer under the lid for several hours.

Stir occasionally and add the seasoning towards the end.

Enjoy!

Your VegHog

Kalette and leek cakes

Clever usage of left-overs is key in an economical kitchen. Today's dish is made from the left-over leek and potato filling of yesterday's Twice-baked potatoes with leek and cheese. I just added kalettes to the potato and leek mix, made cakes from them and fried in butter. I served the cakes with lambs lettuce and they were absolutely tasty.

I wrote a recipe here, if you want to make these from scratch, in case you don't have the same left-overs like I did from the twice-baked potatoes.

Leek and kalette cakes

Ingredients

1 leek

1 onion

1 garlic clove

100 ml dry apple cider

Salt to taste

Ground black pepper to taste

2-3 cups potato mash

50 g grated Cheddar

100 g kalettes

50 g butter

Method

Cook the sliced leek, and chopped onion and garlic in the cider until soft. Season the mix with salt and pepper.

Mix them with the potato mash and cheese.

Cut the thick stems off the kalettes and also mix the leaves in.

Shape small cakes from the mix and fry them on both sides in butter until golden brown.

Enjoy!

This will be my this month's Eat Your Greens post. I'm hosting the challenge myself this month, taking turns with Shaheen from Allotment 2 Kitchen blog.

And of course this recipe is also part of The VegHog's Cheap Eats Week 2017.

Your VegHog

 

Twice-baked potatoes with leek and cheese

It's time to start The VegHog's Cheap Eats Week 2017! I'm going to be all stingy this week and cook with cheaper ingredients. However it doesn't mean that the food needs to be bland or boring, I'm just trying to be more clever with my shopping and cooking.

My first recipe of the week is actually a big favourite of mine, twice-baked potatoes with leek and cheese. This dish is so comforting and not many ingredients are needed. Potatoes and leeks are such basics that they aren't expensive. With this recipe you can make eight generously sized filled potato skins that both children and adults like.

I have posted this recipe before, but I always keep coming back to it, as these twice baked potatoes are so great especially in the winter. I can't think of a cosier way to spend a winter's evening than curling up in a warm flat and eating these potatoes.

Twice-baked potatoes with leek and cheese

Ingredients

4 large baking potatoes

1 tbsp vegetable oil

2 tsp sea salt

4 leeks

2 onions

4 garlic cloves

20 g butter

1 cup dry apple cider

1 tsp salt

½ tsp ground black pepper

200 g grated Cheddar

Method

Wash the potatoes and stab each of them several times with a fork so that some holes appear. Roll the potatoes in a bowl containing the vegetable oil and sea salt, place on a baking sheet and bake for about 1,5 hours until fully baked.

In the meanwhile prepare the leek mix. Slice the leeks and chop the onions and garlic finely. First cook the onion in the butter until soft, then add the leeks and garlic and cook for a while. Add the cider and let simmer under the lid. Season with salt and pepper. Remove from the heat once the leeks are fully soft and the cider has reduced. Mix in about 150 g of the cheese.

When the potatoes are baked, let them cool down slightly so that they are easier to handle. Cut them in halves and scoop out most of the insides leaving the potato skins with a little bit of potato attached.

Fill the potato skins with the leek mix and sprinkle the rest of the cheese on the top. Return to the oven and bake for further 30 minutes.

Enjoy!

Your VegHog