Iscas

The bargain of the week has to be lambs liver in Tesco which is currently selling at £1 a pack. I'd been vaguely thinking in terms of cooking it with mash and onion gravy but my husband offered to make one of his specialities, a Portuguese dish called Iscas.

I can never pin him down to quantities but basically it involves coating the liver with flour flavoured with dried rosemary and sage, frying it lightly then deglazing the pan with port (no, not particularly frugal unless you have some, which we do), vinegar and squeezing in a good dollop of tomato paste. Oh, and 2 or 3 sliced up cloves of garlic are cooked in the oil first. We usually have it with spinach or broccoli then feel very virtuous and smug about the amount of iron we've taken on. Conveniently forgetting the port which will probably give us gout.

There are other rather more precise versions online of which this one from Cookipedia looks about the best.

Do you eat liver and if so, what's your favourite way of cooking it?

All-in-one roast veggies

What would you do with a kilo of pigs' liver? No, don't answer that - I'm not sure I'm up to it but it's so cheap in our local French supermarket at the moment - 2 euros (£1.50) a kilo - that I feel I should be.

As it was I wimped out and bought a coil of Toulouse sausage for just over 5 euros (£4) plus a whole load of veg to make one of my favourite recipes, a tray of roast veggies.

It's an infinitely flexible dish that you can vary depending on what you have available. The French, as I've noted before, don't do root veg in a big way so I had to make it with out of season Mediterranean veg which went slightly against the grain but still wasn't expensive.

I used an onion, a large red pepper (much sweeter here, don't know why), a large courgette, a bulb of fennel two plum tomatoes. You simply prepare and quarter or slice them put them into a large roasting tin, season (salt, pepper, thyme and 4 cloves of garlic, bashed and left whole), slosh over some olive oil, mix the whole thing together and roast in a moderate to hot oven (about 190°-200°C, depending on the veg) for about 45 minutes to an hour, tossing them again half way through. You know when they're done when the veggies are nicely caramelised.

We ate half with half the sausages and set aside the remainder for lunchtime sandwiches today. (We'll use the leftover sausages but those veg are also brilliant with goats' cheese.)

It's a really good dish to make from a veg box when they never seem to give you very much of anything or from end of day cheap veg from a market stall. I could eat it every week.

One up to 'im indoors!

Back from London to find my other half beaming smugly. "Our dinner tonight cost 73p" he said.

He'd been to the organic butcher down the road and found ox liver selling at a knock-down price. Only it wasn't ox liver, according to the girl behind the counter but vastly superior calves' liver which they couldn't call calves' liver because it came from an animal four days too old to be called a calf.

He found a cos lettuce (or rather Sweet Romaine, as they insist on calling them these days) in the fridge and made a green salad from it so that didn't cost anything out of today's budget.

It took 5 minutes to make and with no carbs was impeccably healthy too.

Thought this was supposed to be my blog. Men are so competitive . .