Christmas bargain hunting at T K Maxx

As well as a weakness for food I have a fondness for kitchen kit so it probably wasn't a good idea to head off yesterday for T K Maxx. Actually it was sheer frustration at the prices in John Lewis which is supposed, as they oddly put it, to be 'never knowingly undersold' but which always seems pretty expensive to me. We were after a large cast iron casserole and most of the ones we were looking at were £80 even after a 20% discount, sparked by reductions at one of their competitors.

TKM didn't have cast iron casseroles but it had huge beautiful baking dishes for a song. The red one above, part of the Typhoon Vintage Kitchen range cost £6.99 for a dish which will easily serve eight (yes, it is upside down in the picture but I couldn't think of a better way of showing what a fabulous colour it was!).

I also snapped up four dinky red ramekins from the same range for £2.99 a pack of two instead of £8 a pack and a couple of really nice retro mixing bowls for £3.99 each. Oh, and a couple of James Martin knives reduced from £10 to £3.99 and £16 to £7.99. I generally mistrust celebrity chef-endorsed products but these were beautifully balanced with good non-slip rubber handles.

I justified all this extravagance at the time on the basis that they would make great Christmas presents but will be sorely tempted to keep them for myself . . .

Slicing skills

A sharp knife, I’ve realised, is one of the most useful tools for the frugal cook. Being able to slice foods wafer thin not only makes them look more voluminous but often improves their texture and taste.

Take cheese. If you cut yourself a 50g chunk of cheddar - a reasonable sized portion - it looks pretty mean. But if you sliced off 50g of cheese in fine slices with a sharp knife or Scandinavian-style cheese slicer you’d immediately feel you’d got more on your plate.

Same with a tomato. Cut it into four and it looks small. Slice it thinly and you feel you’ve got twice as much.

The Italians are past masters at stretching a joint by cutting meat wafer-thin and arranging it on a platter with some simple meat juices or sauce spooned over. You need to rest a joint to be able to do this so don’t take your roast straight from the oven to the table.


I’ve also recently bought a mandolin (above) a razor-sharp slicer which cuts even finer slices than I can manage with a knife (with a little added finger if you're not careful). Below is a fennel salad I made from a small fennel bulb which was easily enough for two. It’s based on a salad they make in our local fish restaurant Fishworks. You dress the fennel with oil and lemon juice and season it with finely chopped chilli and mint. It’s a great salad to serve with tinned tuna, those tubs of crayfish or thawed frozen prawns (the small North Sea ones are much better value than king prawns)


The authentic Japanese mandolins are not cheap but I found this one in my local kitchen shop for £7.95 - about the price of a decent knife.

Why I don't like pressure cookers

I forgot to tell you - I acquired a pressure cooker. A reasonable deal on Amazon - 50% off - but . . .

It's just as bad as they always used to be, except marginally less scary.

Now you may well have a pressure cooker and love it to bits but here's why I don't like them.

I've made two things with it, a chicken stock and some cannelini beans and both would have been better if I'd made them the conventional way.

The handbook advised me to cook my chicken carcasses for 40 (yes, forty) minutes which seemed an incredibly long time but as I hadn't used it before I took their word for it. Of course it came out cloudy and slightly bitter-tasting. Better when it was skimmed but I ended up - most unfrugally - throwing it away.

The beans, I was told, didn't have to be pre-soaked, simply submerged in boiling water for an hour which seemed like a good time-saving notion but it was far from clear how long they needed to be cooked.

The handbook didn't mention them. It recommended 5 minutes for haricot beans, 10 minutes for small butter beans and 15 for kidney beans to which cannelini beans are related. I decided to give them 12 and found they'd started to fall apart when I opened the cooker.

I also thought they were less digestible than usual though that may be my imagination or general grumpiness about the whole enterprise.

I'll give it another go but if all else fails at least I've got a large saucepan for cooking pasta.

Unless you're pulse-mad and cook them a couple times a week from scratch I wouldn't bother.

Who buys a pressure cooker these days?

The world and his wife, it seems. And I'm wondering whether I should too.

Will I actually use it, however? I don't normally ask this kind of question where gadgets are concerned, just plunge in, use them every day for a month or so, leave them lying around for the rest of the year then pack them away. But in new frugal mode this sort of profligacy is out of order.

My food writer colleagues on the forum I belong to are loud in their praises. Some of them have had their pressure cookers for 30 years. I probably would too if I hadn't taken against them as a child when the smell of cooking dog meat (yes, that's what my mother used hers for) drove me gagging from the kitchen.

They're also really expensive these days. Probably due to the Jamie Oliver effect (he endorsed one for Tefal) but most are available at half price on Amazon. Customers who bought the Tower 2824, which looks spookily like the one my mum cooked the dog meat in, apparently also bought the Official Strictly Come Dancing Annual 2008. Worrying, that.

Is there an Unofficial Strictly Come Dancing Annual, I wonder . . .